I and Trilleen are still lying at Stornoway, and if engineering things continue going as they have been, I may be lying here over the winter. The business of re-engining Trilleen has been prolonged and complex. Three times now I’ve had the pleasure of thinking I was nearly ready to wander the seaways again, and three times I have been disappointed for varied reasons. At times its been as daft as a warehouse operative in Portsmouth picking a part that… differed to that on the invoice. Each delay though, because of where Stornoway is, has added about a week. I don’t regret any of the individual engineering decisions that I’ve made. Even in retrospect they seem like the best decisions I could have made with the information at hand, and that is the best I can ever hope for. As I write this the engine is running – in the workshop and we are just waiting for a weather window to lift the boat and do the installation.
Each successive fortnight the tidal cycle reminds me that I belong here, to the wild wind and water, even as the summer is swiftly ending. It hasn’t been a good summer – indeed, everywhere it’s been remarked upon as the worst in living memory. From my berth deep in the inner harbour I look out upon the vast sea wall of Lewes Castle, where the beech woods copper by the day as they shed their sustaining plunder into the imported soil in which they flourish. On the mudbanks around me the curlew have returned, their trilling call serving as a gentle alarm in the pre dawns which grow later – and colder – morning my morning. For now the curlew hunt amicably among the heron pair, and a pair of buzzards has taken to circling the castle woods in the updraft, their keening love a constant presence.
Now with the winter’s track of depressions perhaps established in the Atlantic the window of opportunity for more progress in this much delayed Round Britain and Ireland maybe slamming shut. I don’t yet know what that means, but my immediate plan is to get the engine into the boat, the boat back running and the engine run in, and then decide. It may be that I have to lay the boat up here for the winter which will be an irritant. Equally it may be that on balance I decide to abandon the current project because it’s gone so badly. I really haven’t decided yet, and I just need to take each day at a time
The summer has not been entirely wasted. With the engine removed I’ve had the much needed opportunity to paint and service the whole bilge area, re-running cables which though I renewed them when I bought the boat followed weird and convoluted routes around the joinery and through holes which I always worried would joy to saw them apart through friction. Now all the high current cable is running inside nylon conduit. I had one other job that I was planning – to revise the drainage of the shower tray, but I didn’t start it because I thought at the time I would be leaving shortly, and then I couldn’t face taking the boat apart again. The other gain has been that I’m learning more and more about what it takes to keep me comfortable and well on Trilleen – and none of that is wasted. It’s a lot easier to work out the gnarly bits of a boat’s living arrangements when you have time to examine them closely – just as its only sailing that refines the bits that irritate me about the deck and arrangements there.