… another day like yesterday.
No alarm of course so I was banking on a good sleep. Especially as it was about 04:00 when I finally wandered off to bed, such is the exciting life that I lead here.
And so awakening at 08:30 was no part of the plan whatsoever.
Just like yesterday I turned over to go back to sleep by by 09:30 I gave it up and raised myself from the dead.
Somewhere during the night I’d been off on my travels too. And it all had a very familiar ring when I compare it with what usually happens in my life too.
I was up getting things ready for a party and this involved doing all of the organising, the paperwork and the tickets and so on. I’d folded up a pile of tickets to put in my pocket and so on – my pockets were full of stuff and now I had to sit down and start to do the paperwork. First thing I needed to do was to find my pen – a highlighter pen – and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I emptied out all of my pockets and put the tickets in a nice pile and they all fell over and fell on the floor. I had a really good hunt around and in the end I found my pen – my highlighter pen – and then I had to go and get the letter to pick it up and highlight it and I couldn’t find the letter and I’d only had it in my hand a minute ago and I had to hunt around for this letter and I couldn’t find it and I could hear all people outside and I don’t know whether they had started to ocme to the party early or something like that but I was nowhere near ready at all and I still couldn’t find this paper and I’d only had it just that minute before.
Doesn’t all of that sound familiar?
We had the usual medication and breakfast, and then I spent an hour or two updating some pages on the website. I’m now somewhere on the north-west coast of Newfoundland in 2010 which means that I’m about a third of the way through – and that’s just doing the active pages too. When I look at all of the pages in the queue, it makes me shudder.
Another thing that I’ve been doing is working on my little project. This involves the help of Youtube and the Allman Brothers Band and a considerable amount of research. And I’m still at it even now.
There has also been some considerable excitement here.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the strap on my fitbit broke a few weeks ago and I ordered a new one.
It never arrived, so I complained. And it turned out that according to the supplier “it was delivered and signed for on 29th October”.
Well, not here it wasn’t, so I complained again. This morning they sent be a copy of the delivery receipt from the carriage company, and asked me about the signature.
My reply was that it certainly was not mine, and I could say that with confidence because the address on the delivery receipt is wrong. For some unknown reason about which I know absolutely nothing at all, they seem to have sent the bracelet to an address in Italy.
Nevertheless, we now have to go through some stupid claims procedure with the freighter, when the reason is there right before everyone’s eyes.
What will inevitably happen will be that it will take a year to sort out, by which time they will tell me that the product is now out of stock and I can’t get one anyway.
So in the meantime, I’ve found a generic one on eBay at a quarter of the price, and that should be on its way here now even as we speak. I can’t be doing with all of this.
With a late start I had a late lunch, and then I went out for another long walk – and then had to come back because I’d forgotten to put the memory card back in the camera.
And, even more strangely, there are 25 steps from the ground floor up to my apartment – and I ran all the way up. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, there have been days when i couldn’t even crawl up.
So armed with a memory card, it was back out into the howling gale (when is it ever going to stop?) and along the rue du Nord.
There was another really rough sea rolling in from the Atlantic and the waves breaking on the beach were quite impressive.
The tide is still quite far out right now.
And with the tide being quite far out right now, there was a large crowd out there on the Plat Gousset looking as if they were waiting for something.
Not that I might know what it would be, but if it’s waiting for the waves to come in and crash over the sea wall, I reckon that they have about another hour.
They could have gone for a coffee or two and come back with plenty of time rather than waiting out there in the wind.
My route this afternoon was longer than usual seeing how I’d missed my morning walk.
Instead of the habitual route I went down the steps, through the lower town and out to the port de plaisance – the yacht harbour – to see if there was anything exciting going on there.
And here tied up at one of the pontoons is one of our old favourites, the Lys Noir. I’ve no idea what she’s doing moored up out here, but she’s not doing very much right now.
Something else that I will have to do is to check her itinerary for the near future and see where I can go.
She wasn’t the only one of our old favourites in port today either.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that Pecheur de Lys was taken out of storage earlier this year and put afloat in the harbour. And she’s still there too, riding out the waves.
But I wonder if she’ll ever get to see the open sea?
It was busy in there too. One of the ferries from the Ile de Chausey had just come in and it was disgorging its passengers and cargo out onto the quay.
However, my attention was elsewhere. Right now we were in the middle of one of these flash rainstorms that we have ever now and again. And a heavy one too.
And right there over the town we were being blessed with one of the most beautiful rainbows that I have seen in a long time.
We’ve had a few just recently and I’ve photographed a couple, but this one this afternoon takes the cake. And look how black the sky was too.
Meanwhile returning à nos moutons as they say down there, the inner harbour was very busy too.
The harbour gates can’t have been open for all that long because there was a regular procession of trawlers coming in to tie up at the fish-processing plant.
And also smaller trawlers too, with all of their family and friends lined up at the quayside ready to catch the catch as it’s thrown up by those down below in the boat.
There are two of our regular boats that weren’t in the water today.
Here up on blocks in the Chantier Navale is our old friend Aztec Lady that appeared in port the other week. There didn’t seem to be much evidence about the work that might be being undertaken and there was no-one with her to ask.
Mind you, I doubt that they would tell me anyway. Commercial charter companies are very reticent to talk about defects in their equipment.
Next to her up on more blocks is our other old friend Spirit of Conrad. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been for a birthday party on board about 2 years ago.
Her owner, one of my neighbours, was down there so I had a chat to him. Apparently she has a hole in the hull caused by some kind of impact damage and she’s going to be patched up.
He showed me the hole and it wasn’t really all that big and it seemed to be above the waterline too. So it won’t take long to fix.
On the way back, I walked all around the headland, in the teeth of a howling gale.
Out at the Pointe du Roc where we turn into the English Channel, the seas were quite heavy and this little trawler here was having something of a rough time of it turning her beam to the wind.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you think about the real cost of the lump of fish that goes onto your plate on a Friday. How would you like to work out there in conditions like that?
Coming into port in a storm like this is one thing, but how about going out to work in it?
When the other trawlers were coming in, there was one just setting out. And here she is ploughing her way out through the waves in the doom and gloom on her way to her fishing station somewhere off the coast of the Channel Islands.
It’s not something that I mind doing once in a while, but to be out there in weather like that all the time is not for me.
My mega-walk is now one hour or so later than when I started and the tide is now well in.
The waves are giving the sea wall at the Plat Gousset a real pounding and as you will probably notice, the crowd has diminished considerably.
And seeing as it’s rather late, I shan’t be joining them either. I’m going inside for a coffee, some warmth and to do a little more work.
In fact, I’m going to make tea. Stuffed pepper with rice followed by the last of the rice pudding. Bearing in mind last week’s problem, I gave the pepper an extra two minutes (one minute on medium and one minute on high) and it was done to a turn.
Delicious.
Back outside for my evening walk around the walls and I was all on my own, which was no surpise given the wind.
The tide was on its way out too so the crowds on the Plat Gousset have dispersed. I carried on with my walk and to my surprise not only did I run all the way up the ramp at the end, I ran on a few more paces.
What with running up the steps, and running here like this, I’ve no idea what is happening. But I’m going to make the most of it while I can.
And my fitbit tells me that I’ve done 104% of my daily activity too.
If I’m not very careful, I’ll be getting myself fit, and where will I be then?
Rather like the guy who decided that he was going to run 4 miles every night. By the end of the week he had to run 28 miles back home again.
I’ll get my coat.
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