Tag Archives: thora

Tuesday 9th October 2018 – OUCH! THAT WAS …

… a tough day today.

Just before going to bed I received a message from my internet supplier saying that my site had now been upgraded as requested. And so I set to and uploaded all of the Arctic photos while I was at it.

strawberry moose sue graff handstand antlerstand ocean endeavour canada september septembre 2018And while I was also at it, I had a little bit of fun with one of the photos of Strawberry Moose that we had taken.

One of the people on board The Good Ship Ve … … errr … Ocean Endeavour was an Olympic gymnastics judge and she had taken quite a shine to His Nibs. And so we had done a little posing session with the two of them.

Add a little bit of text and here we are.

The result of all of this was that it was about 02:00 when Yours Truly toddled off to bed. Not the ideal way to end the day when you have to leave your stinking pit at 06:00.

But it made no difference because at 05:05 this morning I was wide-awake and awaiting the alarms. I have a feeling that I’ll be paying for this later.

I’d also been off on a nocturnal ramble again.

Just by way of a change, not to the High Arctic. But where, I have no idea. But we returned to this very impressive stone building that turned out to be a boys’ school. We were all starving and having to queue up near the door, and I had the Cunning Plan to loiter around near the air hostesses because I imagined that with them being “staff”, they would be let into the dining hall first. But when we were let in, we were allowed to take one liquid food off the trays that were being handed around, and then another thing from somewhere else and so on. And eventually someone stuck a cold sausage in my mouth. I made my way back to my room, which was at the end in an alcove off the dining hall. And I was given a large plate of food to take with me. A little later I went back into the dining hall but it was now deserted. Someone had left their mobile phone in “broadcast” mode on one of the tables so I started to look around to see where it was broadcasting to (and to salvage some more food) but the few boys who were left were making such a noise that they interrupted my search.

Anyway despite the alarm going off at 06:00 it was much closer to 07:00 when I finally arose. And with plenty of things to do this morning it was about 09:00 when I had my breakfast. That was followed by a little tidying up and a half-hour session on the bass guitar now that I’ve restarted playing.

And then I had a little snooze. The first of three or four that I had during the course of the day.

Most of the day has been spent on the voyage to the Arctic. I’ve added the photos to one of the earlier pages of the voyage and expanded the text accordingly.

Having completed that (because it took much longer than it ought to have done) I’ve updated the front page for the travel section of the website, prepared an index for the voyage, completed an individual page of photographs for each day and made a start on writing the text for the first page.

None of those is on line yet because there’s going to be so much to do, but as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … if I don’t start, I won’t finish. So I need to push on.

It didn’t help with the odd bit of dozing off here and there during the course of the day. That 3-hour sleep didn’t do me much good at all.

port de granville harbour manche normandy franceLunch was on the wall with my butties, my book and a lizard. And I dropped my banana by accident.

But it was a beautiful day, really sunny and warm with a lovely blue sky. I took full advantage of the conditions by taking a nice panoramic photo of the harbour and the surroundings, all the way round to St Pair sur Mer.

Later on in the afternoon, I went for a walk around the headland. Plenty of people out there today enjoying the sunshine. And I ended up by taking off my jumper and catching a little sun on my arms.

thora port de granville harbour manche normandy franceWe had a visitor in the harbour too. Thora had sailed into port today and was moored up at the crane.

I didn’t realise that she had a visor bow. I cant have been paying much attention. But there it is, raised up and out of the way of the loading operation.

One of these days I’ll get to go for a guided tour around her to see how she is and to find out how come Grima was retired from operation.

Tea was a frozen aubergine and kidney bean whatsit with pasta, more to make some room in the freezer than for any other reason. I’ll be off shopping in early course and we need the space.

And then I had my evening walk around the walls in the pleasant evening.

Fallen asleep again, but I’m going to do this and them I’m off to bed regardless of how early it is.

I need to be on form for tomorrow.

Thursday 2nd August 2018 – NOW HERE’S …

thora granville manche normandy france… a thing.

Not so many days ago I was saying that we hadn’t seen Grima for quite some considerable time. So when I walked into town later this morning, I was surprised to see this boat moored up to the quayside.

At first glance I thought that it was Grima, albiet having had a major refit because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, she was looking rather tired after almost 45 years of service.

thora granville manche normandy franceBut on closer examination she isn’t Grima at all but another former Shetland ferry called Thora.

She’s not quite a sister of Grima because she’s slightly larger and has a different superstructure.

But she also worked around the Shetland Islands and the last information that I have was that she was laid up as a reserve in 2011.

thora port de granville harbour manche normandy franceAnyway, here she is in all her glory. A rather blurred photograph unfortunately but it was taken rather late at night on a very slow exposure.

And I would have liked to have found out much more about her, but there was no-one around to ask.

On eof these days I’ll have to go down there when there are people around, and see if I can talk my way into having a guided tour.

It was another bad night last night. I spent most of it tossing and turning. It wasn’t until light that I started to drift off to sleep. And so I rather ignored the alarm when it went off.

With having a late start and a late breakfast, it was getting rather late to walk up to LIDL. And then Ingrid appeared on the internet so we had a really good chat for over an hour.

No chance of going shopping now so I just popped into town for a baguette, when I encountered Thora.

I don’t understand these lizards.

For my lunch I went and sat on the wall as usual. Two lizards came to keep me company, and although I dropped three pieces of pear on the floor, they spent most of the time fighting over just one of the pieces, totally ignoring the other two.

Back here I had a shower and cut my hair, and then started to tidy up. Everywhere is vacuumed and I just need to wash the bathroom and the floors, which I can do tomorrow before I go to the station.

I also did a lot more tidying up, and there’s not all that much more to do now.

Tea was one of the pies out of the freezer, and that reminded me of something. I have some gluten-free pastry here so I made a couple of green bean and mushroom pies for tea tomorrow night. No sense in wasting the pastry, is there?

channel islands ferry granville manche normandy franceIt was another beautiful evening when I went for a walk around the headland.

There were crowds of people out there tonight picnicking in the lovely weather, and while I was looking out to sea I noticed a movement right way in the distance.

And one of the advantages of having a really decent telephoto lens and image editor is that you can crop and enlarge the image to see what’s going on.

channel islands ferry granville manche normandy franceNo prizes for guessing what it is of course.

It’s the Channel Islands ferry, the old one (I’ve not seen the new one for quite a while, thinking on – maybe she’s up at Barneville) coming back from the last run of the day from St Helier.

The tide is on its way in right now so it’s the right time for the ferry to come back and moor up. And then, I imagine, she’ll be going off into the inner harbour for the night.

marite port de granville harbour manche normandy franceShe’s not the only one who’s back in port right now.

As well as Thora who is still where I saw her at lunchtime, Marité has also returned from her latest voyage and is moored up here at her quayside this evening.

She doesn’t appear on any port call list that I can find so it looks as if she has just been on a trip around the bay. But not, presumably, at five bob a head.

So now that I’m back, I’m going to have an early night. I’ve managed to go for a whole day without crashing out, and I’m going to be busy for the next few days, so I need to make sure I’m in good form.

Not quite sure how I’m going to manage that though.