Boats - 5

After my father retired to Hastings he joined the local fishermen's association, I suppose justifying his membership by saying he came from a distinguished Norfolk fishing family. Through him, I was occasionally invited to join the crew on this fishing boat, RX134, the Stacey Marie, more for my benefit as I was pretty useless at helping with the work. She was a trammel netter, leaving out overnight a long net, like a curtain, with floats along the top and weights along the bottom. They caught a wide variety of fish, of which dover sole seemed to be the most sought-after, but it was hard, wet, cold and, at times, dispiriting work. The Stacey Marie is now a museum piece.

When my parents came out in 1970 to visit us at Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia the one expedition we made was a day trip from Salisbury, the then capital, to the Victoria Falls, where we took this pleasure boat on a trip above the falls. 

Over the years I've travelled on various ferries including Dover to Calais several times, and Harwich to Hook of Holland, but the ferries which I most used were....

....those on the west coast of Scotland where ferries are essential in connecting the Highlands and Islands. Where we lived on Ardnamurchan we depended on two ferries - this boat, the Raasay, was one of several small ferries which, over the years, plied between Kilchoan and Tobermory on Mull, and the Corran ferry which connected Ardnamurchan to the A82 and Fort William.

We also enjoyed trips out on pleasure craft such as this boat, on which we spent a day at the Treshnish Islands off western Mull, the highlight, for me, being the puffins.

In my time in Kilchoan I spent thirteen years as a member of Her Majesty's Coastguard, and this resulted in some interesting trips. This is the Tobermory lifeboat in which we enjoyed a 'jolly' around the Sound of Mull. I shall never forget the sheer power of this boat's engines.

In those years HM Coastguard maintained an emergency tug based at Stornoway. Her task was to prevent ships being smashed to pieces on the vicious rocks along the coastline, with the resulting pollution. Shipwrecks were not uncommon: in our twenty-one years there we saw three cargo ships ashore, including one, the Lysblink Seaways, immediately in front of Kilchoan.

I had a trip on one of these tugs when the Kilchoan team was invited to a Coastguard open day at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. What impressed me, not favourably, was the variety of nationalities amongst the crew, some of whom appeared to speak precious little English.

The Loch Lunndaidh Track

I walked today up the forestry track which, if you have the energy I no longer possess, leads to Loch Lunndaidh and its abandoned clachan. The track is badly eroded by the heavy rains of a fortnight ago but, in amongst the wreckage of gorse stems, there are a few....

....fungi, something we've not seen in a long time.

I often complain of the dark silence and restricted views of these conifer plantations but today they were filled with bird activity....

....mainly blue tits and great tits, along with one very welcome sighting of a small flock of long-tailed tits. This excitement is probably brought on by recent temperatures - it was 13C two days ago - which encourage the birds to think that spring is here and it's time to start establishing territories and finding a mate.

Just before the point where the track levels off there's a gate. Beyond used to be open moorland where we had a good chance of seeing red deer, but it is now fenced and the deer gone. That section of the track still has some appeal, with....

.....its views to the south across Loch Fleet, Embo and the Dornoch Firth to the distant Cairngorms but....

....the land the track passes through has been planted with conifer trees so those views will soon be lost.

Sunset & Sunrise

For sheer exuberant beauty there is nothing to beat an African sunset. It isn't just the colours in the sky, it's the sudden silence, as if the inhabitants of the daytime are standing down while the denizens of the night aren't yet fully active. It's also the most dangerous time, when the predators exploit the failing light. It's a breathless time, a time of anticipation of a long and watchful night.

Along the African east coast it's a time when the sun silhouettes the palms, a time to relax, to wander the beach as silence descends, silence broken only by the gentle wash of the waves.

There's nothing to beat an African sunset but, over the past few days, Golspie's sunrises have been providing some strong competition. This was sunrise this morning, looking out across the Dornoch and Moray Firths to the lighthouse at Tarbet Ness.

Redwings

We encountered a flock of redwings some twenty to thirty strong in the hedgerow near Rives Farm this morning, mixed in with several chaffinches and a couple of great tits. This is the first flock we've seen this winter, though we have seen several individuals.

Redwings are immigrants from Scandinavia which are usually most common when the food supply there is becoming scarce and they're looking for more gentle conditions. Sadly....

....at least one of their number hasn't survived, perhaps because it couldn't cope with our recent snow and low temperatures.

Hoar Frost

You know that Winter is getting serious when the day's only sighting of the sun is a brief one, a peep from behind a fine curtain of mist; when....

....there's not a breath of wind and the air temperature, instead of showing some increase with the day, continues to drop allowing....

....the mist to solidify as filigree crystals of ice on exposed surfaces.

With the temperature in the garden not rising above -2.5C all day, it's a miserable existence for the small birds. At the front of the house there were as many as ten chaffinches feeding on the mixed seed, while in the back garden....

....several variations on what looked a first glance like blackbirds were joined by....

....the first starlings we've seen for a very long time, a species which, given the chance....

....would quickly empty all the feeders.

So we chased the starlings away and put out plenty of food for the other birds, which included chaffinches, goldfinches, blackbirds, wood pigeons and coal tits, such a feast that our resident robin, usually a trencherman for his food, found himself quite outfaced by it.

Boats - 4

When I was born in 1945 my parents hadn't been 'on leave' to the UK since before the war so, like almost everyone in their position, they were anxious to get 'home' to see their relatives. They finally succeeded in 1946, when I had my first experience of travelling on an ocean-going ship. We sailed 'home' aboard the Collegian and returned on the BI boat Malda, above.

Three years later we travelled to the UK again, this time on the Llanstephan Castle. But something had changed. For the first time prices had fallen enough for us to return to East Africa by air, in a BOAC Solent flying boat. The journey from London to Dar-es-Salaam took three days.

I remember little of the three ocean voyages, all via the Red Sea, but I do recall events on my fourth voyage, in 1952, when we travelled to the UK on....

....the Durban Castle - this time the 'long way' via the Cape. The itinerary was Mombasa, Dar-es-Salaam, Beira, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, St Helena, Ascension, the Canary Islands and Southampton.

So as a small boy I was already quite accustomed to travelling in 'big ships', and this continued as soon as I left school, when in January 1963 I sailed from Tilbury to Cape Town aboard the Harrison Line's Arbitrator, on my way to a volunteer teaching job in what was then Southern Rhodesia. The difference in this trip was that I had to earn my passage, so I learned what life was really like on a cargo ship, experiencing enough - and being bored enough - to persuade me that, after all, I didn't want to go to sea as a career.

I returned from Rhodesia via Mombasa, where I joined the the BI passenger ship Uganda for a voyage to the UK via the Red Sea and Mediterranean, a journey in the company of several other young people of my age all, like me, heading for university. The ship is seen here in Barcelona, where we had time enough ashore to 'enjoy' a bullfight.

My next experience of travel in 'big ships' was when Mrs MW, our eldest daughter, then three, and I travelled out to Jamaica in 1973 aboard a Dutch ship, the Amersfoort, one of many cargo ships in those days which carried up to twelve passengers. Picture shows our ship tied up alongside in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands.

Since then, Mrs MW and I have had to content ourselves with cruise ships. We never set out to travel by cruise ship for the sake of the cruise, our first journey, from Dover to New York on the Norwegian Jewel, being a way getting across the Atlantic without having to fly. Since then we've had four more cruises, all for the sake of the cruise, and enjoyed them partly because we always find ways of doing things when everyone else isn't doing them.

Old Age Walking

After overnight frost and snow showers, today's walking conditions along tracks, roads and pavements were far from ideal for two senior citizens but the bright sunshine tempted us out. We are almost addicted to a daily walk, and I think we'd have gone mad had we stayed indoors all day but, had we had an accident, we'd have been justifiably blamed for not staying safely at home.

 

So, with this very much in mind, we teetered out but when we passed the entrance to the coniferous plantation we noticed that....

....the ground was devoid of snow. I assume that the snow had been caught by the leaves high above, and then melted in the sunshine.

So we followed the route which we use to get down to the village, and found that the only unpleasant sections were the few steep, snow-covered slopes along the track.

Places like Roe Corner were transformed by the snow and, living up to its name, it had plenty of....

....deer tracks; and it was interesting to walk through the woodland which....

....we'd named Speckled Wood, not for its dappled sunlight but for the speckled wood butterflies which flourished here last summer.

 

The forested areas were almost devoid of bird life - this bird, which I can't identify, being one of the exceptions - except along the sections of the path which backed on to gardens with feeders; and there was no sign of any squirrels.

So two eighty-year olds had a very pleasant walk, arriving home safely but very relieved that we'd had our daily exercise without being a nuisance to anyone.