Long time no blog (sorry)
Tipping the last of the grain and pellet based food into the galvanised trough and turning out the lights of the lambing shed, I head over the yard to slide the GP shed door shut. Meeting Hazel outside we stop for a moment to admire the stars, sitting on the cold concrete in the still and chilly air of the Orcadian night. A million pinpricks of light from horizon to horizon stretch above us, stars like dust on some astral beings TV screen. It would be bloody boring if it got a squirt of pledge and a wipe over.
Things really moved up a gear when we realised the number of days to the dive season kicking off was now in single figures. 9, 8, 7, eek, so many things to do, the ceiling still needing seemingly endless coats of paint, downstairs looking as if a small paint shop had exploded and 1001 other jobs to be done.
During our trip back to Orkney with the boat and ever since we have noticed we were getting water into what would have been the fish hold. Not a problem when it was a fish hold, but now it holds cabins and divers, so it is a problem. Once we used the high pressure powerwasher to blast the old loose paint off we could see the problem - the deck had more patches than your average broke councils highstreet. Valkyrie had been re-engined several times, and to do this they cut a hole in the forward deck and take the old engine out and insert the new one. This had left its mark in a number of ugly and badly done patches, also a number of ice hatches had been filled in during her conversion (ice was needed to pack the fish and was loaded from port). Sooo we decided not to bodge it back together with caulking and tar, but to get the whole thing sorted properly. We got Ian Richardson the boatbuilder in Stromness to come down and do this……
Once the old planks were removed, the new ones could start to go in. Those planks really are as thick as they look - 3 inches over the deck.
Here is the pile of crappy wood they took out…..
And here is the hole nearly filled back in again 
Primed and undercoated…..then it bloody rains, hence the big blue tarpaulin.
Just before it was topcoated…you get the idea
The construction of the lift marched on despite the awful weather, and it looked on track for being completed on the Tuesday of the following week. We eventually complete all our jobs with a few hours to spare and our two divers arrive to take advantage of having the whole boat and more space than you could shake a stick at. As Hazel put it, you could blow in one end of the boat and they would rattle around like the pea in a whistle in the middle. The week goes smoothly, the weather being very kind to us and making our lives easy. Even the lift gets working by the Tuesday and all is well in the world.
Lift in action
Our next group is from Nottingham university, we are invaded by Digger, Woz, Kev, Jen and Janos among others. The week is a real learning exercise for us. They are fully catered, so I seem to spend my life with my hands in the sink or in the oven, constantly cooking something or washing up. A few minor disasters on my part with me struggling to keep things hot all at the same time. The galley being changed around is now top of our list of things to do. We also have some awful weather, which means we manage to break the lift by getting its electrics very very very wet. Once it is wired directly into the boats systems it is all fine, but caused us grief while it was out of action.
One of the days we moor up against Lyness pier and the weather is sufficiently quiet for me to be able to try out the new monofin. Feeling very self conscious I climb onto the side of the boat and slip my feet into the very tight footpockets, minus any neoprene socks (I’m yet to get some…..). Fook me that water is cold but I lie on the surface ignoring the comments from above. Breathing up I release my grip on the platform and duck dive down, two kicks of the fin and the bottom at 8m comes into view – bloody hell that was easy! I kick along the bottom for a few strokes and then turn to head back up again, surfacing a few feet from the boat.
Tiny moon jellyfish the size of a 2p pulsate in the water column, and the ghostly shapes of urchins appear from the gloom like sheep lost in fog.
A book which has been instrumental in my take on life has been the Tao of Pooh, but there was small part of it which I struggled with. It basically said that knowledge can affect the way in which we view the world in a negative way. Ok, so it took a while for this to make sense to me, but now it is so damned obvious. I see urchins on every dive, the same with dead mens fingers. The knowledge that they are common makes me not bother to look at them, to not appreciate them for what they are – beautiful examples of marine life. Knowing that seeing something that is rare makes us appreciate its sighting more, but we shouldn’t ever forget that common things have beauty too. So these tiny jellyfish, the urchins and the anemones I saw on this dive, despite being common as having a massive credit card debt, were exquisite.
The sheer power of the fin is amazing, I think this will seriously help with my freediving.
Today was a chill out day, spent having a long lie in on the farm and then an afternoon beachcombing along the many small rocky inlets along South Ronaldsay and Burray. Walking along the crunchy pillows of dried seaweed looking for floats for shotlines we find something we wish we hadn’t – an unfired parachute flare. We leave it exactly where it lies, mark the position with a 25l drum which was lying close by and go back to the farm to phone the coastguard who will send a team to remove it.
We go back to working on the boat doing painting in the good weather, getting our new ladders from the shelter deck roof onto the dive deck painted and looking good. We also get the generator changed around so we can run more electrical stuff without blowing up the fuses every 5 minutes.
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Loki
For those of you who dont know, Loki is the Norse god of mischeif and jokes. Well, we felt it an apt name for our new toy - a 4m Avon inflatible with a 20hp Mariner engine to whizz us around the flow and islands. Bought from Wigan, Loki seems to have been an excellent buy, but now we need to get a cradle on the boat for him to sit in and be launched from off the boat.
