Heading South

May 13, 2024

I love Scotland, it’s really wonderful. Beautiful scenery and kind people and I can even understand about 80% of what they say. (That’s a joke about the very strong accent and dialect).

Still, I have to move somewhere south where I can ride a bicycle without bundling up in winter riding gear. I have looked at the UK on a map a thousand times but I didn’t realize just how far north I am. Largs Scotland is at 55.75 degrees north compared to Toronto’s 43 degrees north. That’s 1200 km further north.

The effect of that latitude on my boating is the sky never goes dark here.

I departed Largs yesterday and expect to arrive in France by month’s end stopping in a few places along the way and pending weather.

I am reading a lot and watching a lot of television to kill time underway. Single handing means a lot of time alone with my thoughts and they are bad company!

The boat has behaved very well so far with all the repairs but there remains more to do. On Monday night I had a failure of the raw water lift pump on my wing engine so that replacement took up the better part of Monday evening.

I have had many opportunities to ride the bike over the last little while and I am looking forward to a lot more when I get to the west coast of France.

Not much in the way of picture taking but two of note.

Hammerhead crane at Norfolk shipyard is different and came much later.