The furry-friend headcount remains intact. Everyone’s still gracing this soggy land of the living. So, our hunt for nourishment has taken us further afield; in fact, across the field and onto the nippy waters of the Sound of Jura.
This funny little croft is blessed with a rugged shoreline that throws open a whole new world in our quest for self-sufficiency. Mackerel, pollack, crabs and lobsters are out there in abundance; it’s just a matter of braving the weird currents, skerries and infamous whirlpool.
Armed with a couple of creels, rods – and a bit of paper that says we know what we’re doing, the farmer, dug and I head out. Minutes later I can be seen hanging precariously from our wee boat hauling up a dead-weight tangle of seaweed that might have our creel hidden in its depths. If the seabed relents and lets my puny arms drag the creel to the surface then dinner might, actually, be served.
A sizeable navy-blue lobster is the wee belter we’re after, but a heaving horde of creepy little crabs is more often our lot. The tiny crabs have the good fortune to move like a nightmare of armoured spiders, so gain immediate release. This, I perform in expert manner, eyes closed, screeching and hyperventilating while shoogling the creel vigorously over the side.
Lovely big brown crabs and daddy lobsters are less frequently our prize, but all the tastier for it. Only large lobsters, and only one at a time, is the rule for non-commercial folk like us. But given the option of having one each while suited and booted in a fancy restaurant or sharing one on the beach by a fire with a bottle or two cooling in the shallows – I know where I’d rather be, even if the dining attire requires thermals, hoodies and a manky anorak.
Because we haven’t yet dressed the entire family in those natty Arctic survival suits, I’m afraid the beach barbecues have been kiboshed for the season. The boat’s on its winter mooring and a fun, new challenge has begun. The biblical, teeming rain we get here in the West is threatening daily to sink the rubber dinghy we tie up at the jetty to ferry us to and from the mooring.
This dinghy has one oar.
Of course it does.
Having battled the prevailing gales for a year, amusing neighbours with circuitous attempts to reach the boat in a storm, more often landing back on shore than anywhere near the boat, we invested, not in the obvious solution of a second oar, but in a wee outboard engine. Rather than repeatedly clouting a nervy, life-jacketed Great Dane on the nose with the solitary oar, she can now sit proudly up front, wind in her ears, like a damp and smelly Kate Winslet.
But now November storms mean bailing out the dinghy with my granny’s old pot. It’s been a slow, bugger of a job, so we arrived the other day at the jetty mob-handed with enough muscle to up-end the dinghy and tip out the gallons of rainwater it had gathered overnight. What we didn’t have, sadly, was enough brain-power between us to work out that we should have first removed the engine. Gravity took over where we left off and the little outboard flew from its hooks and plunged deep into the freezing water. Now, I am known to be daft enough to swim in these waters at any time, but that day’s underwear was not my finest and I doubted my bingo-wings could have lifted the engine against the force of the water.
Help, as often happens in these parts, was literally within shouting distance. Within a couple of minutes a gem of a guy, fully suited up in dry-suit and oxygen tank, passed the engine up to us with the kind, if not necessarily entirely true, words: ‘ach we’ve all done it’.
Crucially, the engine lost none of its fuel so the only damage caused was to any smidgeon of credibility we might have had locally. With more of these stories to come that might be a fast-depleting resource…
The Softer Crofter 