Esvagt Alba

We're not enjoying the best of days today. We're under a nasty north-northwesterly airstream gusting well over gale force bringing frequent, hard rain showers. Despite this, I walked north along the coast path, with the wind hurrying me and the rain holding off long enough for me to....

....managed a shot of this ship anchored out in the Moray Firth perhaps a kilometre offshore. The Marine Traffic website tells me that she's the Esvagt Alba offshore support vessel built for the Danish Esvagt group in a Norwegian yard in 2021. She seems to have spent much of her time since then working on the Moray East offshore wind farm which will, when complete, have a hundred turbines.

It's rarely that we see a ship off this coast, and frustrating that we tend to see them, as today, when they come in to shelter from foul weather. This is the Esvagt Alba in calmer waters.

Walking back along the coast would have been almost impossible in the wind so I worked my way home through the woods where even the fungi seemed to have taken shelter. Other than a couple of blackbirds, some jackdaws and a wren, most wildlife had done the same, with the exception....

....of two pairs of mallard which had found the perfect pond on which to spend the day.