Diary of a Deckhand

Watching the weather forecast in my pyjamas I call to Hazel to come and look at the charts.  For once, all the websites seem to agree - unexpectedly the weather window we have been waiting for seems to be creaking open.  A quick discussion about whether it is feasible to leave the next morning or not and we start gathering clothes, I empty the fridge of anything that can go off in the next two weeks and we load our bikes into the back of the pickup.
Arriving in Stromness at midnight we detach our stout winter ropes from the pier and play cats cradle with the ropes for a small creel boat who ties up outside of us.  Moving to the Ice Plant pier in the velvet stillness of the night, I am somewhat amused to see a starfish pinwheel off into the depths, it having been quietly minding its own business munching the fine green weed which has grown on our rudder.

Passing through the flow past the private constellations of the sleeping oil tankers, down gutter sound to Cantick head, we leave the shelter of the islands and begin to cross the Pentland Firth in the steel grey dawn light.  As predicted there is a small amount of swell from the west, but nothing enough to stop us on our way.  The tide slingshots us through, at one point we do 14 knots, which isn’t bad when you consider without the extra shove we would be doing around 7.5knots. 

Past Duncansby head and out into the grey of the low cloud and rain, soon land is a mere imaginary glimpse of something dark on the horizon.  The radar becomes our eyes, and no sooner had Hazel gone to her bunk for a sleep, than a huge block of flats seemed to appear as if from nowhere.  Heading towards us I peer out through the binoculars and rain spattered windows but it fails to emerge.  I make my turn to starboard and he passes around a mile to our port side, a fuzzy shape in the mist shows a container carrier, no doubt heading for the firth and the west.

The occasional Malliemak (fulmar) and Sulan Goose (gannet) soar past us, silently riding the air currents.  I always feel a bit of a fraud, they would normally head for a boat shooting or hauling their nets for the scraps of fish and dead fish being spilled into the sea.  The best I can offer them is a hobnob biscuit.

I spend the hours looking for whales, dolphins, hell anything that isn’t a wave, cloud or seagull.  Alas nothing is seen, just lots of waves doing cetacean impressions, getting my hopes up only to dash them by dissolving to sea foam.

Soon enough land appears, our journey across the Moray Firth being totally uneventful which is probably a good thing to be honest.  Lots of tea and good music keep us company.  Fraserburgh appears, the long stretch of yellow beach topped with the fuzzy green dunes, the stark harbour wall and the haunting wreck on the rocks around 3 miles away.  A fishing trawler still painted and totally recognisable sits high and dry on the black wave surrounded rocks.  A grim reminder of what can happen to those of us who work on the sea.

Mooring up inside the harbour, a set of nostrils like a 12-bore shotgun appear close by.  The seals who inhabit the harbour are to be disappointed by us in much the same way as the seabirds were.  Although we might look like a fishing boat, the only fish we catch are by the rod and with a bit of luck, rather than by the net and the thousand.

We lie in the harbour over the weekend, catching up on the sleep we missed because of our journey and we take a walk up to the lighthouse museum at Kinnaird Head. 

At around 9am we are moved into the ship lift cradle and it slowly lifts us out of the water.  I love it when they close the road to tow the boat to the shipyard!  It is such a clever and safe setup, its lovely to just sit back and let the boys do their jobs. They have even painted the loos and showers, changed the locks and we have the only key while we are here - what more could you ask for?

Monday, around 7.30am and all hell breaks loose.  A fleet of power washers are lined up and we are blasted clean, the fine film of algae on the hull revealing beautifully sound paint from last year - it looks like the 5 days of power washing the old paint off in the snow paid off as the hull is in excellent shape.  Tradesmen arrive to deal with so many jobs its easy to get mixed up who is doing what.  Glands are a way of having something come though the hull and not leak.  The propeller and the rudder are the two main types of gland.  The seal is a tube filled with what could be described as greasy rope which allows the prop shaft or the rudder to turn without water getting in.  Our stern glad is assessed and found to be fine, the rudder stock is re-packed, no more leaks from there.  And the most scary thing starts to happen….

One of our cabins is partly dismantled, the floorboards lifted and the concrete ballast below cut through with a jack hammer.  Once the loose concrete is removed by bucket chain an 8 inch hole is cut into the hull.  At this point we both get the ohmygodohmygodohmygod jitters about what we are planning, and the poor workmen are harassed at every turn as to what they are doing and why.  A huge steel plate is bolted to the hull and a thick steel tube is passed through and welded into place.  This will house our new directional bottom profiling sounder.  This is a very clever bit of kit, if you think of a submarines periscope - you can look wherever you want to above the water - well this uses sound waves to allow us to look wherever we want underwater. 
The enormous pipe soon has the sounder unit bolted in place and wires are run up through the engine room into the wheelhouse.  Here they are connected to the processing unit and the display screen so we can see what is going on.

While all of this is happening our paint is being sprayed, brushed and rollered on and pretty soon we are looking damn good. 

At the weekend we hire a car and go to Edinburgh to see family and raid Ikea, B&Q and M&S.  I’m surprised the car even moved with that much stuff packed in when we returned on Monday.

One of the most annoying problems we had last season was the paint peeling off around the sinks in the cabins below.  Water lying on it simply ate through and it all seemed to just disintegrate.  While in B&Q we found some beautiful mosaic tiles in pale blues and white, so bought enough of them to do the sinks and some of the shower room.  I spent a very messy day grouting them all in and losing my fingerprints.

Tomorrow we go back in the water for sea trials and to make sure nothing leaks (eek!)

Below - Stromness Lifeboat down for paint

Highlights of the trip so far:

Going to a pub near Fraser burgh and finding they had two cats unconscious in front of an open fire.  Good food and free cats - bargain.

Seeing places I had heard of but never seen - Montrose, Stonehaven, Glenrothes. 

Being a very nervous passenger while Hazel drove around in the city - my god I will never ever be able to do that in a million years.

Discovering real scampi.  Not deep fried bits of frozen lord knows what but genuine Fraserburgh prawns landed the day before less than 100 yards from the boat is and carefully dipped in batter.  Beautiful and so different to what you usually get.

Eating in Pizza Hut for the first time in about 10 years.

Seeing seagulls walk on a translucent roof above you - little orange feets.

I seem to have managed to forget to post anything here for ages, mainly because I am a dozy mare.

We are currently in Edinburgh, bright lights and all that.  Been to Ikea and filled our tiny hire car to the back windscreen with stuff.

The boat is out of the water getting her bottom painted red, her glands packed (oooerrr) and some new wheelhouse equipment installed - I actually have a huge blog being written which I will post when we are done.

Now I know I don’t get to watch telly for 8 months of the year, so I can hardly be an expert on this, but am I the only person who finds some adverts so awful they make me actually avoid the product or service they are selling?

Nothing is worse than having to sit through the same price comparison site advert 10 times an evening, or seeing the same cutesy pie perfect family in their perfect house and perfect car.  Women who declare they use XYZ hair colour but if you read the small print most of them have hair extensions, utter popular science for makeup or moisturisers to make you look 10 years younger.  I don’t want to look 19! 

Shampoo with more nutritional value “contains vitamin E” than some peoples daily diet.  Hair is dead!  It cannot be nourished, let alone with a product that is in contact with it for a maximum of 3 minutes!  Want healthy hair?  Eat well so the skin where the hair follicles sprout from is well looked after and you might be onto a winner.

Help.  I am turning into Victor Meldrew.

Finally!  We have snow!  As the rest of the country grinds to a halt under nearly a foot in some places, we have a couple of inches just now but it is still falling.  Hurrah!

Anyhoo, I bought a new camera (yet another one), and these are the results from it - I love it.

The wind tugs at the tiles on the roof, howls through the branches of the contorted trees in the garden and makes the little piles of last years lost leaves dance in the corner of the garden.  Sheep huddle in whatever shelter they can find and the deer poke their noses outside their shed and reverse back in to eat hay all day.

The sea is stirred to a foaming rage, crashing onto the rocks with such unbridled fury that boulders the size of a loaf of bread are hurled onto the road which crosses the top of the beach, sand tries to reclaim the tarmac, small dunes form and bump the tyres as we cross.  But we are on a mission - interesting things get washed ashore when the sea is wild.

Struggling to walk into the howling gale, we find lobster pots, separated from the rest of the string all alone.  Buoys, their garish flourescent colouring making them stand out for miles taunt us from their precarious positions at the edge of the surf.  Bottles from all over the world, their languages a mystery to me lie amongst the black dead seaweed.  Bits of rope, bits of net, cans and always shotgun shells.  Someday children will decorate their sandcastles with the detritus from a 12 bore not a limpit.

The viking head stands around 15 feet tall, built from a colossal timber washed ashore, the holes are an aquatic wood worm, not holes from a shotgun.

And I dread to think what this was for - it is something like a landrover, with a propeller, oil drums and a church pew…..

Well, it has started again.  I spent today squished into the shower tray downstairs on the boat stripping out the old silicone sealant and old paint ready to be made shiny and clean ready for the new season.  Our downstairs shower takes the brunt of the showers onboard as you don’t have to brave the cold air with nothing but a towel and your dignity.  The other shower and loo are on the port side and I have lovingly undercoated and topcoated them already, so once the floor is painted with its usual deckpaint (like gloss with sand in it), it will be ready for the season. 

Suddenly it seems so close, and yet it is two and a half months away.  But putting it as we only have a month until we go to Fraserburgh to get our bottom painted and some work done and then a month after that until we run again - oh no. 

If I am honest I am dreading the new season, but I shouldn’t be.  At the end of last year I was so utterly exhausted there was no way I could ever do another week after that.  Each night I was into bed at 8pm and up at 7 and still it was nowhere near enough to take the edge off my tiredness.  I don’t want to feel like that again, but this year it will be different - we dont have 4 months of mad refit before the start so I doubt I will feel like that again.

I find myself pondering what will happen, the people I will meet and the places we will go.  The dramas, the heartache, the arguments and the times when it is so quiet and calm and utterly beautiful I would never want to be anywhere else doing anything else with anyone else.

Many years ago I came across a book which gave me such hope and happiness while I was immersed in its pages, I can truthfully say I doubt I will ever get tired of reading it.  It is called “Somewhere a cat is waiting” and those of you who know me will understand from the title quite why it appeals so much to me.  It is the beautiful autobiography of a couple, Derek and Jeannie Tangye who both live and work in London, Derek a journalist and Jeannie the press officer at the Savoy hotel.  It begins during world war two, Derek dislikes cats to the extreme until Monty, a small ginger kitten is purchased for the cost of a weeks chocolate ration by Jeannie, much to his disapproval at the time.  Soon enough Monty is accepted into the family and he begins to accompany them to Cornwall where they eventually move - to a tiny derelict cottage and meadows called Minack to grow flowers and potatoes. 

Monty is described in such detail I can almost hear him purr, feel his weight on my lap as I read of his exploits in the flowers.  The end always makes me cry when eventually time takes its toll and at the grand age of 15 Monty dies surrounded by the animals which quite clearly are a central part of Derek and Jeannies life.  Following his passing Derek swore he would never have another cat unless a black cat arrived at their door in a storm and they could never trace where it came from.

Duly Lama arrived by some strange cat bush telegraph, black, wet through from the raging storm several months after the passing of Monty.  Lama, named after the Dalai Lama who had been in the news at the time, fitted into the pawprints left by Monty perfectly.  All too soon she seems to fade from the story and Ambrose and Oliver arrive to sleep in the flower packing shed and chase leaves. 

The very first time I completed the book I had the deep urge to jump on a train and go to Minack, to see where the story took place, to meet the now old Derek and Jeannie.  However, I was too late by one year to the day - Derek Tangye had died a year to the day of me completing the book. 

Maybe one day I will go to Minack and see Monty’s leap, the Lama Meadow where Fred the donkey used to chase her and the blue of the sea at the bottom of the cliffs.  I hope I do.

Well, people say you should share everything with your friends - and someone somewhere has given us both the flu.  Now I would be the first to admit I have a cold.  But this is the real deal, no cold and being a wimp.  I can quite honestly say I have not felt this ill in a very long time.  Too cold, fingers and toes of ice while the rest of me sweats, but I feel cold all over.  My back aches to the point that I cannot sleep or lie in bed and I cough like a 100 a day habit.  My joints ache, especially my elbows and ankles and getting the energy to do almost anything takes an age.  However, sometimes, just like now, I almost feel ok.  Right now I could go and do things - but in an hour I will pay for it as I found out.  Ho hum.  I guess I will just have to wait it out.

To keep me occupied I have been watching some videos on youtube.  This is my favourite so far as you cannot buy the song as an MP3

Sigur Ros

I did something I thought I would never do again last night.  I got in a kayak.  Not a life changing event you might think, but for me it was a big thing.

At the tender age of 14 I became hooked on kayaking, having fallen out of love with the equestrian world.  Kayaking became my world, Sunday my favourite day for it was when I got my fix, my two hours of utter ecstasy.  My time to be equal with all the other kids – the skinny ones.  Being rather rotund really seldom predisposes you to sport – I hated PE, I was no good at it.  But put me in a kayak and actually I wasn’t too bad.  I loved the freedom, the water, the sense of being so close to the half hidden world below, being influenced by its ever changing moods.  Seeing parts of the country people never usually saw.  I loved it. 

Working my way through the various awards eventually I became an instructor, logging so many sessions working with so many people they all become a blur.  And then suddenly, when I was 21 and was just about to leave university, it all changed.  I fell out of love with kayaking. 

I suspect it was because I was having to do it when I really didn’t want to.  A job working outside is great, but wait until its freezing cold and blowing a gale and its no fun at all.  You ruin your back, kids had gone from the fun loving trusting people to ones who hated you because you were trying to teach them and were looking for every opportunity to scream “I will sue you!” because they fell in and looked silly in front of their mates. 

So diving took over, my kayaking equipment was sold to fund the diving equipment and I slipped seamlessly from one to the other.  One obsession for another.

Don’t get me wrong, I did miss it.  But told myself not to do it again – it will only hurt when you probably find you shouldn’t have sold all that stuff you had.  So for years, eight of them to be precise, I never got into another kayak again.  Those days when the water is so clear and so flat and it calls to you promising delights and no harm.  So I gave in and went to the kayak club pool session to see if I could remember what to do.  I suspect there was some “oh my lord, will you look at the size of her!” and “this should be entertaining” when I got into a boat and into the pool.  However, I didn’t embarrass myself at all – pretty much everything still works to instructor standard other than my Eskimo roll which is probably hiding somewhere under the bed or between the cushions on the sofa or something.  Who knows if I will go back?  I don’t know, but I wouldn’t say no if I was suddenly the proud owner of a kayak again.