Halton Ocean

So anyway, I have spent the last few days in a final flurry of preparation before the first of the divers arrive.

Easter is late this year and so is the start of the season. Been fine for me as I spent the start of the year underwater diving for clams which made a good change. Seem to do most of my diving in the winter these days and revert to spectating during the summer.

So anyway, the final flurry. The bank cylinders arrived back from testing ready for re-installation. Each cylinder is a heavy lift for two men (impossible alone). But there is just me, a small hatch, an endless chain and a mast.

It took almost 5 cups of tea to get them down the hatch. There was never a question that they were not going to go. Some things are just going to be and that’s the end of it.

All four went back from whence they had come, were re-plumbed and they didn’t leak. No annoying hiss. Perfect. Cup of tea no 6 was spent in quiet satisfaction of a job well done.

Now I just have to find a place for the new batch of 16 I have just bought.

A good vintage by all accounts.

Time on the slip is expensive: each day is charged so any delays swiftly dig into the budget. So it is douly frustrating when the weather hinders progres as it did this year. I think in total about 3 days were lost as the painters went home early when the water ran down the side of the boat.

The hours the yard boys turn in are fairly impressive: work starts with a bang at 8am sharp and there will usually still be someone banging about at 9pm that night. It is a good time to put some hours in myself: I usually stay on the boat so evenings are spent picking away at all those litte jobs that get left ’till a rainy day.

An hour spent doing emails and a bit of mucking around on the computer and then it’s usually time for bed.

I quite like the solitude of the evenings: the job by nature is generally gregarious so time spent alone and left to thoughts can be rare. However, a week is normally enough before cabin fever sets in!

When the small details start to appear on the hull it usually signals that time for the water is near.

This is now the home run and each evening sees a new routine added: the walk to the harbour mouth to see what the sea is doing in preperation for the run home. Will that swell die and give me a smooth run north, or will it build and give the boat a hammering…

The underside of the boat is painted with anti-fouling, a paint that stops creatures growing on the hull. On the whole it is surprisingly effective but even the growth over a year that still settles will lose the boat a knot of speed. With an average speed of 7kts, this soon becomes a significant loss of economy, speed etc.

The active ingredient used to be TBT, a harmful chemical that damaged the environment: friendlier active components are used these days.

Why is the anti-fouling red then? Don’t know really. You do get other colours but seeing as nobody has shown me the anti-fouling swatches, or rather I have never been asked, ever, what colour I want the bottom of the boat, I just think of it as one less decision to make.

Anodes corrode in preference to more important metal bits on the boat and also need to be replaced. Otherwise there is little else to do with the boat out of the water beside the obvious visual inspection and daily Halton love-in.

All boats want to be a rusty streak of brown and spent their lives aiming towards this goal. It is all a man can do to keep the palette of his choosing and unless a roller is waved in the general direction of the boat annually they will continue their headlong gallop to the colour of their choice.

Have not mastered the video side of things yet so thus file may be a bit large (2,019kb) for those dial-up luddites

macduff.mov

For those that still like stills…

30th March 06

How to get a 60ft plank up the beach intact, without breaking it, dropping it, bending it wobbling it or in any other way exceeding the design parameters of it’s operation. If you don’t have a boat but want to replicate the emotions, imagine someone coming along to move your house 100ft to the left. In the rain.

Now, gather together all your used squeezy bottles, toilet rolls, tin foil etc. Get an adult to do the scissors bit and don’t run round with them meantime. Work through each stage, starting at (a).

(a) Steam all day to harbour of choice. Sleep in and enjoy rude awakening from a dozen workboots clumping across the deck and corralling your boat across the harbour as if she were a petulant, unbroken horse.

(b) Position boat at bottom of ramp

(c) Send down the cradle

(d) match boat to cradle

In the blue hut on the trolly is a man with a wee hydralic engine that raises arms to clamp the hull so the boat doesn’t topple. This is a delicate art as the boat needs to be straight on the cradle and the rams not too far up so as to go through the side of the hull. The first time I took the boat out of the water I was a nervous wreck with a paranoid mind replaying all the disasters that could potentially happen. Now I don’t look. All credit to the boys from the yard who are superb and never confirmed my fears yet.

(e) start to haul

(f) side slip

Once out of the water the boat is side slipped onto a hard standing. This allows the cradle to be removed for use on other boats and gives a more secure footing for the Halton.

(g) the bloody long ladder

Once the boat is chocked and supported a monster ladder is put along side and all good skippers retire for a cup of tea.

And nothing was prepared earlier.

28th March 06

Where’s that?

Every year, Just as the birds are headed back north, I’m headed south. The boat needs a paint. An MOT. A bottom scrape. The bits fixed that you lot broke last summer. And Macduff is the place to do it.

11hrs south of Orkney and across both the Pentland Firth and the Moray Firth. Both bits of jabbly water at that time of year. Forecasts get studied, tides checked and then for the off.

This year was a nice enough trip compared to most, but there again it is later in the year than I normally go.

It was an early start: left the pier at 6 just as the first of the light was appearing over the horizon. Leaving atthat time makes you feel like a naughty kid sneaking away from the scene of a crime before anyone has noticed!!

Navigation is easy enough. Pick up Angus at Lyness, nip out the flow, round Duncansby and then 80Nm due south. The oilrigs break the monotony half way through as they are passed en route. Those are the ones (Beatrice) you see from the road on the drive up: it is strange to see them as far inside the boat as they are off land when driving!

With a max range of 40ish miles, land is spotted on the radar long before visual and it feels like an eon before it ever arrives.

We missed the tide going into the harbour: in spring tides, the bottom hour will see the Halton grouded at the harbour mouth, a stunt I pulled in error the first year I went. So we waited untill the water came in just as the sun was setting.

Tied up in time to meet Bruce and go for a beer.

Angus and Bruce left me to take the Sunrise home (she had come down two weeks earlier and was painted by now) whilst I tended to the Halton.

Ok, I am gonna have to cheat.

I went to Macduff and didn’t have the means to blog so I stored it all up on my laptop and now I am going to do it retrospectively.

That’s life. I know these things are meant to be live and in the MTV generation of 5 second sound bites and instant gratification that is yesterday’s news but you are just going to have to put it in yer pipe and smoke it cos that’s the way it’s going to happen.

So here goes..

Still very windy first thing this morning but the chippy had beaten me down the boat and managed to cross the 5ft chasm of sea (the wind blows the boat off the pier in a SE and one man is not fit to pull it back in again. Had to tie it to the tow bar and pull it in with the van yesterday. Normally this is a good excuse to go home but time is running out as the season approaches).

Trying to stay one step ahead of the chippy at the moment so that he is not hanging around with the meter running doing diddly squat. Ripped the loo out as there is a leak in the floor.

I quite like painting: the monotony allows the mind room to roam so i wondered about the following. I started to think about the technical side of this blog but then started to get a bit more esoteric. Why would you write one. Who would read it. Would you know if they had. Are they a soliloqy? A polemic? Interesting even?

I am writing as I like the technical side of things: it’s great way to unwind if you drive a boat all day. If you work at a computer all day, take a boat for a drive when you get home: it works in reverse too! This blog also serves to promote the boat (would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise) but I think at it’s heart lies a diary. Not sure if that is a pun or not.
By the time I came to, the wind had eased slightly, the chippy had gone home with a bad back and there were 3 texts of mounting ungency on the phone to clarify the time I was to be home for tea. In the event, it was charred but I still beat the dog.

Seem to have spent the whole day battling the elements so that jobs that should be done in a jiffy take twice the time and result in a soaking too….

Welding Deisel Tanks

2 Welding Deisel Tanks

Gazed out the window at lunch and watched over my cup of tea as Hazel danced alongside. Wind been a steady SE 40kts all day but didn’t start raining until after the varnish was applied.

Stormdrift dancing

Oh, the preasure mounts as the new season dawns and the little pitter patter of divers feet can be heard scrabbling away south of the border. Not long to go now and the to do list is as long as ever.

Still, with a bit of luck, this, my first blog, should go without a hitch and arrive on screen as perfect as a new born bairn blinking in the sunlight. Is there a spell check on this thing?