No ferries today from Oban

We made it across to Mull this morning at 8:00 but due to the storm surge and it coinciding with high water we couldn't use our forward ramp to discharge the vehicles due to the height of the tide. This meant turning the ship around and putting the stern in, it is configured differently from the forward ramp, so it was usable.  It meant some of the bigger vehicles having to back all the way ashore, but they did get there.  The wind was coming round to the West all the time and increasing in strength, as forecast.  The first photo shows the view from the bridge on the way back, about a Force 10, wind at about 50 knots.  Now we are pinned alongside in Oban with 50 to 60 knots of wind on the beam and the ship banging away against the pier, see the second photo.  No more sailings from Oban, or nearly anywhere else on the West coast for the rest of today.  This has got to be one of the windiest months for a long time, this storm is due to peter out tonight before, hopefully dying down and we can have a gentle step into the New Year.  

Back to normal

For the first time since I joined the ship last week, today finds us back on our normal schedule. Until now we have either been sailing up from the Clyde, following a holiday timetable or indeed been on holiday. Routine on here is the norm, and it is reasonable to say that the crew are far more comfortable with the familiar and predictable. There is an expression for those of us that have been on this service for a year or more as becoming "Mullified", embarrassingly I must admit to having joined this set. I know when to appear and where to stand to the minute and the inch. One of the deck crew was most perturbed when ordered to move from his normal standby station at the bow to work down aft on the poop when we had some new men on board.

Earlier in the month I had an interview for a 2nd Mates position that had become available in the fleet; unfortunately I wasn't successful in my application. I have the opportunity to get feedback from the company, so I'll probably take them up on that to see where I can improve or went wrong on the day. Jobs are becoming difficult to find at the moment so I am grateful for the work that I do have here with my schedule laid out until the end of 2012.

Weather today was OK, well for this part of the world, tomorrow promises to be a real stormer with a forecast up to Force 11, winds in excess of 60 knots maybe. I hope that you aren't aiming to go to Colonsay.  

Thanks to the cook

We had a very restful Christmas Day.  Thank you very much to "Fitzy" or John the cook on board for all his work on the day.  It was great to sit down to a fully prepared meal and not to need to wash up afterwards.  We are slowly fading away to small mountains with the amount of food that we had at lunchtime and just in case we got hungry later in the day the mess room table was groaning under the buffet that was left out for the evening.  

Weather wise there was no concession to Christmas Day.  Wind and rain all the way but so mild, 12.6 C today, not winter at all.

Hope that everyone had as good a day as we did.

It's not a real one

Christmas Spirit

Decorations are now up in my cabin and in our mess room.

Home again from the Garvel

Hebridean Princess with Isle of Mull in background

Stern section with Greenock Ocean Terminal and the hills covered in snow

In the dock looking forward to the bow thrusters.

Bow thrusters

Starboard stabiliser fin in stowed position.

Twin propellers and rudders

Variable pitch propeller 

Becker rudder, note the extra flap at the back to increase the effectiveness of the  rudder.

I'm not long home from the ship, left high and dry in the dry dock at
Greenock. The work has started in earnest now and the ship is slowly
but surely being taken apart by small teams of men in dirty boiler
suits and quilted jackets.
Some of the main jobs are the painting of the hull above and below the
waterline. This year the hull is being hydrowashed from amdships to
forward to take off all of the old paint and go right back to the bare
metal of the hull. The ship in the dock with us is the Hebridian
Princess which has undergone the same treatment overall, you can see
the brown rust on the hull. Apparently this is necessary to key in the primer
coat of paint.
Hardly ideal weather conditions to do any work with frequent snow
showers and icy winds, but what can you do in December?

Good to be in Greenock

Well we made it to here but it was a rough old passage down here to Greenock from Oban.  There was a gale of wind which is OK, but alongside it was a high westerly swell that hit us on the beam once we were clear of Islay and heading for the Mull of Kintyre.  The ship's motion was pretty awful and then about 4 in the morning we took one seriously large roll of 30 degrees or more and the decision was made to head towards Ireland to ease the pain and damage.  Fortunately this paid off and the motion came back to tolerable, we stayed on this course for an hour then turned due East and surfed our way in towards the sheltered waters of the Firth of Clyde.  

Here we are alongside in James Watt Dock ready for our training exercise tomorrow and then into the dry dock itself late afternoon.  We will be sharing the dock with and ex Calmac vessel the Hebridian Princes formally the Columba.  Snow on the hills all around and temperatures down to freezing, so it should be fun splashing about.

Heading for the Clyde tonight

We have one more run to do across and back to Mull and then this evening we are heading off at 20:30 for Greenock, on the Clyde.  James Watt Dock to be exact, we were there earlier in the year at the Marina with Tarawa.  We are aiming to arrive about midday to suit the tide and will be tied up there till Monday evening when we transfer to the Dry Dock next door and we dry out to sit on the blocks.

Before that we are carrying out an emergency evacuation drill on Monday morning.  This will involve inflating one of the liferafts and the MES, (Marine evacuation system) which consists of a slide and floating platform and then as many of us as can be rounded up sliding down into the wet platform and boarding the liferaft. It is for our own good so hopefully it all works well.

So dear reader while you are snuggled up in your bed tonight think about us heading round Cape Horn, sorry Mull of Kintyre, into the snow and wind.  Winter has arrived now with a thump

Holiday snaps

If you care to go to Jamaica then you can see a mess of photos from our recent holiday out west.  The photos are rather higgly di piggly as the latest way of displaying photos doesn't seem to allow me to edit or order them in any way, so apologies for that.

Spectacular fireworks

Earlier in the year Oban had a fireworks display for Guy Fawkes night,
unfortunately due to a technical hitch the whole display went up in
one minute rather than the 20 that was the intention. Youtube at
http://goo.gl/hI5Xf

Tonight we were treated to another amazing display from the Northern
Lighthouse Boards quay which as well as being fantastic went on for
about 10 minutes. Well done to all those involved.

I have never seen fireworks fired into the air which then carry on
firing even when they are floating in the water.

Close call

It has been a spectacularly bad spell of weather yesterday and today.  Heavy rain with a South Westerly gale all day, fortunately the berths are sheltered at Oban and Craignure from this direction, so we have continued running. With the heavy rain the visibility is quite limited and of course at this time of year it is still dark at 8 in the morning.  We were coming into Oban Bay at about 7:30, the seas had been high and the rain was still coming down hard.  I was leaving the stabiliser fins out to the last minute before the narrow entrance.  The port one wasn't for coming in so we slowed right down and kept in to the starboard side to let the engineers sort things out.  We came into the Bay and just after turning towards the berth a small steel hulled fishing boat passed down the port side, it had broken free from its mooring and was drifting quickly across towards the North shore.  No one had seen it in the dark as it had no lights and looked low in the water.  A minute or two earlier and we would have probably hit it square on, if hadn't been for the slow down on the approach it could have been a bad start to the day.

We have continued to run all day, most of the other services are off now, not a good day for travelling anywhere though.

So much wind

Not long back and there are 3 of the shipping forecast areas with
Force 12 Hurricane winds forecast. Well we kept going today though
the last run was touch and go, always seems to be much worse when it
gets dark.

Clouds

Some concern this morning that a few clouds have appeared in the normally blue skies. Not to worry though, it is still 30 C in the shade and the water is warm.

Toilets

The hotel being all inclusive means we can drink, eat and burn ourselves to a crisp without restraint. Due to our lack of will power we are over indulging and may need a lengthy detox on return to the Dear Green Place.
When one is tired after a couple of rums it can be confusing deciding which is the Gents by the signs. Can you work out which one this is?

Out west

Day three of our visit to Jamaica, lots of sun, rum and swimming. A photo of Julie at the breakfast bar, palm trees, pool and a Trade Wind blowing in of the sea. It is an amazing place.

Off on our hols.

Bye for now folks, we are off to Jamaica for a couple of weeks. I will be making a determined effort to not watch any news or indeed go near an Internet connection.  

Democracy

Horror of horrors, the Greek Prime Minister has proposed a referendum on the bailout package that will impose severe cuts and austerity on the Greek population.  The very suggestion that the people be allowed to determine their own future through the ballot box is anathema to the Bankers and Bureaucrats of Europe.  Democracy, as demonstrated the other day in our own Parliament, is only convenient when it suits those in power.

Politicians got us into this mess, why do they think that they have the solutions to get us out of it?

Rex O'Reilly Lyons - RIP

Today was spent over on the Isle of Bute attending the funeral service of an old friend Rex Lyons.  Rex was never one to embrace the conventional and today was in keeping with his philosophy. The service was held in the Marble Hall of Mount Stuart House, a magnificent setting.  To start we were all treated to a glass of champagne on entering the Hall and were asked to toast his life by his daughter Leyla.

Music and readings finished with the Willie Nelson song, For all the Girls I loved before.  Which if you knew Rex was a very apposite song.

Later we attended at Barone Cemetery at the back of Rothesay to his final resting place.  The world is a slightly poorer place for his passing.

I'll take the High Road

Despite the overcast skies with rain showers Julie, Dave and I set off in the Yeti for Overtoun House near Dumbarton to stroll amongst the hills and glens.  The first part of the walk was grand, albeit a bit damp, well sodden, underfoot but we had our boots on and were suitably clothed in the middle class outdoor clothing of choice, Goretex.

There was a certain amount of dissent amongst some of the party as we slipped and slid our way up the hill but once we had caught David back up again at the top, the views made it worthwhile for all the effort.  On our way backdown the heavens opened up and we arrived at the car soaked through from the waist down, the Goretex keeping the upper half dry and sweat free.
Overtoun House is owned and run by a Christian Group, mainly from America, and they are in the process of turning it into a refuge for women and children. They have also opened up one of the downstairs rooms as a tea room which we headed for to dry, or drip off.
The house is now somewhat in the twilight of its years having laid empty for 15 years but the group have plans and it will be great if they can seem them through.
We came into the building through the rather grand entrance and were met by a couple of very friendly ladies who were warming themselves by the fire.
The main room at the front is quite spectacular, and the Glenn Miller music playing in the background made it all seem a little surreal, as we were the only customers I felt like we had stepped into a Stephen Poliakoff play.  The tea was lovely as was the cream scone and we came away much fortified after our soaking.

There are many more photos at the House web site http://overtounhouse.com/

Weather damage

We have been experiencing strong South Easterly gales over the last few days, unusual for this part of the world where strong winds and storms usually hit us from the western half of the compass.  We were scheduled to do our first run of the winter timetable south to Colonsay on Monday, but with the pier being on the east side of the island and the forecast predicting a SE force 7 to 9 we had to sensibly call off as it would have been impossible to tie up safely.

Due to the disruption to other services, out to the Outer Hebrides, we continued with our Mull service.  There were high seas and strong gusts of wind which lead to the vessel rolling and pitching heavily on the way across, indeed as can be seen in the photo below we did sustain damage in the mess room.  Fortunately procedures are in place to minimise and contain any consequent damage in that the cap was securely screwed on.

The chef this time round is excelling himself, this was the sweet of the day for lunch.

It isn't like this all the time, honest!

To the nice people in the 274 cars that we carried over to Mull today, presumably from England, to start their October school holiday we are very sorry.  Even we haven't seen this much rain before, when the locals start commenting, it must be bad.  Unbelievable.  Also those folk that went all the way out to Tiree and Coll today on the Clansman and then came back because they couldn't get alongside, sorry

Friday breakdowns

Another wild old day, with gale force winds from the south.  The removal of the fish box and the insertion of a nut and bolt into the rope guard seems to have helped a lot with the vibration. 

All was going well until early afternoon when we couldn't raise the aft ramp after loading at Oban.  The fault was tracked down to one of the hydraulic units that supplies the power to the aft winches and the rams on the ramp to raise and lower it.  Fortunately our busy Chief Engineer was on the job and we were off again after about 45 minutes.  We were now running so late we cancelled one of the round trips from Craignure, this allowed us to catch up with the timetable and we were able to get folk to Oban for the 18:10 train back to Glasgow.  This is a priority for us as this is the last train of the day.

As compensation to the people that had their sailing cancelled they were allowed to sail for free on the Loch Aileen ferry across to the mainland.  A lot further to drive but they would be back into Oban quicker than waiting for us and saved the fare.

When we arrived in Oban I was despatched down to the bar to attend to a gentleman who had collapsed with chest pains.  Glad I did my first aid course last year and fortunately the paramedics attended quickly and treated the gent for a suspected coronary attack.  Eventful day really.

Bouncing about

When we were departing Oban yesterday afternoon the ship was vibrating a lot more than usual, particularly at 60% pitch.  It was getting to the point that it was difficult to fill out our forms on the way out of the harbour, so clearly things were getting bad.
On leaving Craignure we used each engine independently and found that there was more vibration from the port engine as compared to the starboard.  Clearly something was amiss so the company organised divers to attend last night, to check out the propellers.
They found a plastic fish box off a fishing boat stuck in amongst the propeller gear and a missing bolt from the rope guard on the starboard prop.  This morning, things seem to much better so they must have been part of the problem, though the vibration hasn't gone completely.
From a chilly 6C the other morning it was 13C today, accompanied by a Southerly Gale, blowing on the way across, complete with driving rain.  Autumn equinox gales maybe?

At sea again.

Island of Lismore.

Duart Castle with Mull in the background.

It was a rough old night alongside at Craignure Pier, the wind blew
all night and the ship bounced off the pier. I mustn't grumble as I
had a bed and duvet, unlike our new residents that had a few blankets
between them and the couches. Some of the stranded passengers found
accommodation in Tobermoray, to add to their stories the taxi ran into
a deer on the way down the coast. No one hurt, well other than the
deer.
We got off OK at 6:45 and even the two drunks that were chucked off
earlier made it back on board. The sun came out and the snow, yes
snow, came down and covered all the tops of the hills. My camera
isn't up to the long shots required but here are a couple of the views
on the way across to Oban.
That's me half way through the week, quite eventful with engine
breakdowns and storms.

Conversion to passenger ship

We knew that it was going to be a windy old day and so it proved to
be. We had a bit of a heavy landing onto the pier at Oban as the wind
freshened up from the NW, then in the early afternoon we called off
the berthing at Craignure just as we were approaching and hove to,
waiting for a squall to pass through. When it had died down a bit we
came alongside and everyone got off but we didn't load anything, just
waited and waited to see what would transpire while listening to the
wind howling in the rigging.
Here's a couple of photos taken out of the wheelhouse as we hove to,
if you look carefully you can spot a yacht heading up the Sound of
Mull, going to windward against the tide. Put's the rest of us fair
weather yachters to shame or maybe we're not that daft!
The wind continued to howl and we couldn't depart for fear of damaging
the ship or maybe running aground when we pulled away. By 18:00 a
decision was made that we were going to lie alongside here for the
rest of the night in the hope that the wind would die down by the
morning. Unfortunately we have 114 passengers on board, some have
found accommodation ashore but 60 odd are now making their beds around
about the passenger areas of the bar, cafeteria and observation
lounge. We gave them a free meal and drinks, a local hotel has
rummaged up some blankets and we are now all bunking down for the
evening. Apparently this has never happened before, can't believe
that, but it makes for a change.

Thanks for all the snowballs

I have been on board now for nearly six days, for the first time ever
I missed the boat on Wednesday when I joined, thanks to the roadworks
on Great Western Road in Glasgow. Only by minutes despite the
herculean efforts of the bus driver we arrived in Oban to see the ship
sailing across the Bay.
This weekend was the Mull Car Rally, sponsored by amongst others
Tunnocks, who anyone from Scotland will know, makes Caramel Wafers,
Snowballs and Macaroons. Mr. Tunnock knows his clientele well as the
Scottish have a fondness for sweet sticky sweets, particularly those
made out of dubious ingredients. Does anyone know what that sweet
sticky stuff is inside a snowball? Their retro van was on board and
the driver was kindly handing out free samples, see photo. The dark
chocolate caramel wafers are delicious, so I'm told, as clearly I
wasn't going to be having any on my diet.
It has been interesting seeing the rally cars going out on Friday and
the bits coming back yesterday and today. Due to the pretty appalling
weather there was several cars damaged that had to retire.
We unfortunately didn't cover ourselves in glory today when we broke
down alongside at Craignure on the first trip of the day. Two and a
bit hours later we got going again, sorry about that folks. The Chief
Engineer is now phoning around trying to source bits for a 25 year old
water cooling pump. Anyone who has looked for spare parts for
something that age will sympathise.
Pretty grim weather as well today, up to Force 9 in the Minch and our
fellow ferries have been badly disrupted in carrying out their vital
lifeline service. More tomorrow, this time from the North West which
may impinge on our service too.

On my way home

At Tower Pier

Dining Saloon

Docking Telegraph

Left the dear old paddler this evening and now making my way north on
the train. Sorry to leave as it was good fun on board, a bit like
piloting an aeroplane, quite long periods of dullness with short
moments of terror.
Back to the day job on Wednesday, will seem even more
'straightforward' than usual.

Trip across the river

Waverley alongside at Tilbury Landing Stage

Princess Pocahontas Ferry

Princess Pocahontas

Gravesend Pub, note chandeliers

As we were off for the third day in a row, myself and Tony the Purser
went on the Princess Pocahontas ferry to Gravesend, which is just over
the other side of the Thames from Tilbury. We had to go and deposit
some excess change at the bank. Once that was done we had a walk
through the quite smart town and visited Princess Pocahontas's grave
in the churchyard. See http://goo.gl/IMYfT for more information.
Naturally we felt obliged to visit a pub to sample the local ales, and
found this rather splendid place with its chandeliers and delightful
Polish barmaid.
The good news is that the weather tomorrow is scheduled to abate and
we are going upriver on a charter run from the Tower, so at last we
will be underway again. Crew will all be raging alcholics if we stay
here much longer.

No sailing again today

The weather has still not abated, we were all up at 6:00 this morning ready to head upriver to pick up at Tower Pier.  Given the strong winds at the moment we would have been able to carry out the first part of the cruise downriver but with the forecast it would not have been possible to carry out the rest of the day down to Southend and the River Medway. We would probably only have been able to take the people to Tilbury and then bus them back, about 2 and a half hours, so Ian, the Captain, has decided to cancel all of the day's sailings.  This is the third day of cancelled sailings and everyone feels really bad about it, but it is hard to see what else we can do.

Weather stops play

Unfortunately our great spell of hot and calm days has come to an end. It is overcast now with a stiff west or southwest breeze blowing down the river. The forecast is so bad we have had to cancel our day's cruising as we would have been unable to berth at Clacton or Southend. Regrettably tomorrow doesn't look any better, indeed worse with a gale forecast. Still we might make something of it, it's another day and things change.

Cloudless Skies

Still unbelievably warm, passing Greenwich you can see the clear blue sky.

New Building

Unless you have been in London recently you may not recognise this new skyscraper. That is HMS Belfast in the foreground.

Not another sunrise!

Well yes, but this was taken at Tilbury on the River Thames this
morning. Not the most scenic of places, well actually probably one of
the most un-scenic of places, but in the early morning with the sun
coming up as a big ball of flame and the mist on the river it was
pretty good.
We have a great day, carried 600 odd folk up and down to the centre of
London and now we are on our way back up there on a Show Boat. Jazz
band on board bashing it out.
Tremendously warm day, up to about 28C and in the engine room 41C.
Engineers are all looking quite thin.

Drinking in the culture

Like getting off a flight to the tropics alighting at Euston Station. 27C in the shade here, fortunately I have found some cooling refreshment. They expect Scotsmen to turn up on the ship with a good drink in them, cultural stereotype.

London bound

At the moment I'm on a comfortable train heading South for London.  Later in the day I'm going to be joining the Waverley to do a few days steaming up and down the Thames, hopefully in the glorious weather that is here today.  I'm sure that there will be the odd anecdote or picture to post while I'm on board, please keep coming back for updates and maybe even leave a comment!

Latest visitor

The Norwegian passenger ship Fram has anchored in the Bay and is sending her crew ashore in fast craft. Interesting ship.  It looks like she has been ice strengthened and probably has been in ice recently judging by the lack of paint around the bow on the waterline.

There may be troubles ahead.

A glorious start to the day but these red skies in the morning usually predict a bad day ahead, Shepherds and Sailors taking warning etc.  And today would appear to have gone downhill quite quickly with rain and wind already and a gale forecast for during the day.  The good news is that London is forecast to experience a spell of unseasonably warm weather, and that is where I'm off to on Thursday to join the Waverley.  Long may it last.

25% Poorer

Apologies to Matthew Parris in the Times but as it paywalled I have pasted his column from today. I believe that this sums up the situation we now find ourselves in, in terms that I can understand anyway.

Hard times: prepare to be 25 per cent poorer

We in the overindulgent, overspent West are living beyond our means. We must live less well or work harder

This spiralling downturn, we are told, is a failure of capitalism. Financial systems have seized up. Liberal market economics isn't working. Someone should have intervened — there should have been regulations, mechanisms, emergency bail-outs — to stop this, and keep us getting richer. Now we must find ways to kick-start growth, recoup the losses we've sustained, and smooth away our debts. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand has let us down.

Rubbish. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is slapping us about, as we deserve and need. We are in denial. Since 2008, and for the rest of some of our lives, what we have seen and will see is a gigantic market correction. Brutally because belatedly, the market is bringing us crashing back to earth.

We had tried to buck the market and for more than a decade seemed to get away with it. We meant to get richer without working harder. We tried to grow our economies without increasing our productivity. We wanted to grow our health, our welfare and our pension provision at a rate our taxes and our businesses could not sustain. We gave citizens and employees rights without asking how they would be provided for. We in the old Western democracies have been living in cloud-cuckoo-land, and now that we are hurtling towards terra firma we cry foul and demand to know what went wrong.

We went wrong, and the market is telling us so. The market is working. The shock is healthy, overdue, and right.

Yet we find ourselves this autumn in an atmosphere of anger and recrimination. The cry goes up that someone — probably some bankers — made a big mistake, and we must put it right. A huge unstated assumption underlies this caterwauling for a remedy: that the problem is remediable without all of us getting quite a lot poorer.

The problem, it is assumed, has arisen from a glitch in the mechanism of the market — like a blocked petrol pump in a car's engine. The car has stopped. Simple, then: the blockage must be removed so the car can power us on. Bonnet up, we examine the workings; expert economic heads are scratched. But nobody asks where the fuel is coming from. The problem, we assume, is a process problem. So repair the process.

Process, process, process. How this oh-so-millennial fixation has sickened me these past 15 years. It is pure Freudian displacement activity. We keep telling ourselves how we need to have urgent "nationwide debates", great national "conversations", about the way we organise this or that.

And it's all a subliminally induced distraction from the hard questions we don't want to face: obsessing about how we count the votes in the ballot box, rather than talk about what the elected representative, once elected, ought to do. Fiddling with the knives and forks instead of asking where the next meal is coming from.

This autumn, one great evasion dominates all others. We attribute our economic woes to a malfunction in the market. Two principal causes have combined to produce this effect. They are (1) a public misapprehension about the theory of the market economy; and (2) profound embarrassment among politicians and economic commentators because they never saw this coming.

The misapprehension is the belief that free market economics guarantees growth. It doesn't. Most people realise (even if Gordon Brown didn't) that there will be booms and busts, hills and valleys; but they assume the overall trend must be up. Market economics guarantees no such thing. A nation can grow poorer, relatively or even absolutely, and stay poorer. Half the world — America and Europe, for instance — can fall behind permanently. There's nothing automatic about growth. If you're not keeping up with the competition, the free market will shrink your economy. This is not a failure of the market but a failure of your economy.

Politicians and commentators have an unconscious need to persuade themselves — and a conscious need to persuade their audience — that this crash was avoidable. After all, if it was unavoidable then they have some big questions to answer about why they never predicted it. I have found my colleague Anatole Kaletsky's argument that it was somehow all because the US authorities didn't bail out Lehman Brothers, frankly bizarre, as if Lehman was some kind of asteroid hitting our global economy from outer space. If the camel's back was so near breaking then the identity of the last straw seems secondary.

On seaside holidays in childhood my brother and I used to build sand walls against the encroaching tide, racing to shore up whichever section looked closest to being breached. In the end there was always a section that did fail — and it was always the case that it would have held if we had reinforced it better. But another would have failed in its place.

Distrust the temptation to ascribe the crash to a particular catastrophic event: the unlucky failure of a component somewhere in the capitalist machine. The machine has worked with a clumsy and destructive violence, but it has not failed. It roared ahead then ran suddenly out of juice. An engine, however, does not provide its own juice. We — you and I, our fellow countrymen — are the juice. It is upon our labours than a national economy is built. And we haven't been working hard enough; or not for the ever-improving lifestyle and retirement we've come to think our right. Travel beyond Britain, Europe and America and you will encounter a very different approach in the balance people make between what must come from them and what must come to them.

Travel Britain. At every level, too many are doing too little. Many do want work, or more work, but others don't, and they load on to our economy costs that drag down the rest. By what grotesque moral logic do those who won't stop eating become entitled to mobility scooters on the NHS? I mention this trivial idiocy only because it's indicative: something has gone seriously wrong with our idea of entitlement. Greece is simply rather farther down the road.

We in the West cannot continue living like this without overencumbering ourselves and our successors with debt until we topple forward on to our faces. All the rest, all the hocus-pocus about leverage, and sub-prime, and derivatives, and financial instruments, and PFIs and bonds and sovereign debt and bankers' bonuses, tangles into an intellect–baffling thicket, blurring our vision of the truth behind it: we are living, and borrowing, beyond our means. We must live less well, or work harder and longer, or both.

I've stopped deferring to professionals in the world of finance and economics, having found my own uneducated guesses no more deficient than theirs — so I'll venture this. Short of a rebalancing of individual input and output that I fear would be too cruel for any democracy to undertake, we in Europe and America must expect the market correction we'd rather call a market failure to persist, in fits and starts, until we are about 25 per cent poorer than we are today. Not until then will things begin to settle down. That is the message of the markets. Stop blaming the messenger.

Weather and audits.
Bit of a blow on here today, strong SW'ly blowing up from the Irish Sea causing a nasty swell around Lismore Light but we are continuing to run.  Having to lash down all the trucks and commercial vehicles just in case, naturally the crew are happy to help in this extra task.
Maybe in  preparation for our Safety Mangement Certificate audit next week, our Company Mangement auditors are on board to do an internal audit today.  Still as a small cog in the machinery of the ship this does not unduly affect my day to day activities.  Captain seems to be quite busy though.

Permanent Crew

I have just heard that my position with Caledonian MacBrayne is to be permanent, here on the Isle of Mull, trading twixt Craignure and Oban.  So doubles all round when I get home.

Sunday Activities.
Every two weeks or so we hold a man overboard drill which requires us to launch the ship's FRC (Fast Rescue Craft) to carry out an exercise in recovering a man in the water.  Today was very suitable with a gentle wind and little sea, well I guess it was suitable as long as we only have people over the side in good weather.  Anyway we launched the boat just after leaving Craignure and it zooms away at 27 knots to await our arrival in Oban.  Here's a picture of it being recovered once we were alongside.








We are now on the reduced timetable so our last trip of the day was the arrival in Oban in 18:00.  As it was so lovely I went for a walk up the hill to McCaigs Tower that overlooks the Bay.

How about a sunrise?

Autumn is here and we are seeing the sun rise in the morning as well
as setting in the evening. So for a change here is the sun coming up
over the mainland as seen from Craignure on the Isle of Mull this
morning.