Down Below

The main business of the day, if you will forgive; we have new bogs. Our racing friend from Germany, Marcus, has kindly made available to us these top-notch Italian electric flush lavatories which incorporate a bidet, which is pretty fantastic, but is hot and cold too! This will make a huge change from Wickes black buckets on the fore-deck (when at anchor) or in the deckhouse if in harbour. It was one of the most trying things about being in harbour, people always trying to look in when one was busy…

In the engine room the steel deck-beams and their supports was needle gunned and treated with something like Rustbullet (don’t know which one) anyway, a rust inhibitor, a treatment which says it chemically stops rust (we would welcome feedback from anyone who has used stuff such as Rustbullet, although there are several others out there.)

The deck-head beams and bulkheads have been painted gloss white before the fuel tanks were fitted and fixed, each 4000 litres. Also before the tank were installed, all the frames and insides of planks were treated with black bitumen probably called something like Shoopaglopp, which manages to be sticky as well as slippery when trying to stand on it to take photographs. The “black” (“brown”?) waste tank has been safely installed in the lowest part of the bilges and a new Beta 44kw generator installed athwart-ships and is total man-bling, I think, the amount of polishing and showing off it gets.

The gear box has been installed and aligned, and the mountings welded to suit but at present there are these two foot-high white brackets where the old gear box was which have annoyed me until I knew what they were because they are ain in exactly the position of the downstairs shower, and they are going to be cut back. Someone's old stripey pants are going to have to be moved too.

There is a local fog phenomenon called the "harr", which is pronounced sometimes in Eyemouth in the same way as Marlon Brando delivered Kurtz’s last line; “horror”. This mist is a real treat for those of us who burn in the sun (and all its myriad glittering reflections in the sea here) we are going about without sun-block and enjoying a bit of cool.

In the harr, the big fishing boats were moving it was great looking down the harbour seeing the dark silhouettes dissolving away to sea. Today there is a huge amount of prawns being off-loaded from the night fishers, although usually the high-tides keep the shellfish in their burrows. I asked someone when the local herring season started, and was told they don’t arrive until after the “4th drink of May”, so I still don’t know when we’ll see the silver darlings.