Scotty (Dave) Can Hold Her, Captain

It's now a week since I headed home from the sunny Midlands to the equally sunny south coast where the Swanage Carnival has been wreaking it's annual shake-up of the usually sleepy little town. Not that Swanage is dead by any means. It has a vibrant musical life with two Blues Festivals, a Folk Festival, two Comedy festivals and numerous other entertainments year round. It's just that every year at the end of July and beginning of August the whole town and it's visiting tourists go batshit crazy and behave in a most un-English fashion. The whole thing is kicked off by a carnival procession involving any exhibitionist that cares to brave the Isle of Purbeck traffic and plonk themselves down in Swanage. So this year there were motorcyclists in fancy dress (a peculiar mixture of Ghost Rider lookalikes, people in cowboy gear, a white rabbit and Wallace & Grommit and not a helmet in sight.) Dune buggys (remember them?) where the nearest dunes (Stusland Bay)are protected by the vigilance of the National Trust, dunes buggys are not just frowned upon but would probably be the centre of a ceremonial pyre and danced around by naked National Trust folk painted to match their surroundings. Carnival floats representing many local organisations some exceedingly strange, town criers, folk dressed as pirates, the Flintstones and, last but far from least, a group of what looks like professional carnival performers from Luton, whose gayly coloured and incredible costumes would look amazing in bright sunlight but only achieve a kind of nervous giggle on the overcast Swanage Sunday that it is. Which is a shame because the full splendour of their garb would blossom in the kind of sunshine that the town has been bathed in for the last 3 weeks. Still this is England after all and too much gaiety is frowned on and has been since that warty bastard Cromwell inflicted his particularly dour brand of religion on us.

Just Add Sun - Some Hopes

Be that as it may I'm back in Swanage and waste no time in finding out about launching facilities, costs, tidal options and the general geography of the launch slip. Which all seems pretty tame stuff given that Dave is beavering away big time and has fabricated the stainless steel bracket to protect the bow and anchor and sent it off to be welded, removed and replaced the rubbing strake which, held only by a pop rivet, had pulled away from the hull. It is now fixed with a sturdy stainless bolt which probably means the rest of the boat will fall apart to leave one proud rubbing strake and the bolt behind. He's stripped, cleaned, oiled, WD40d the engine which to his surprise fired on the second pull of the cord, painted the trailer with Hammerite. Released the seized on trailer brakes including the tow bar brake mechanism which had also seized, sorted the anchor well and numerous other small and not-so-small tasks that required attention.

We've identified the engine as Yamaha 5hp air cooled single cylinder outboard built somewhere between 1973 & 1980 which means it's elderly, probably noisy and perhaps slightly unreliable but it'll do for now and we'll consider our options during the winter layup months when some other tasks will have to be addressed.
More anon.