Snaffling Snails
After a promisingly sunny start to the day it rained. Big, fat, thundery drops came down for about an hour, leaving behind air not fresh, but thick and muggy.
This encouraged the large snails that inhabit every nook, cranny and crevice of our “natural looking” garden to come out and play. This is all fine (apart from the distressing crunches from underfoot it often brings) but our three cats have good reason not to share our relaxed approach to snails.
They are pampered pussies who only wander the garden supervised, and when they can’t be supervised they go into their outdoor area which consists of a run with multi-level shaleving for sun-bathing and birdspotting, a tented area for the ginger one to avoid the sun, and an insulated and linoleumed shed, equipped with cushions, pillows and a duvet for avoiding the thought they are outdoors at all!
As one of them is diabetic food is provided all the time to even out his eating. This comes in the form of special slow energy release diabetic cat biscuits. Snails like these too. When I popped out a moment ago to escort the three lovelies indoors I found their bowl being raided by three fat snails with one of the cats sat watching in disgust! I grabbed the camera and managed to get a snap of one of the perpetrators before they sped away……if you see this snail do not approach him. He is a desperado on the run from the law and may be dangerous..
Less U-Who than U-No - the Revenge of the U90 jinx
Once upon a time, a long time ago (well, March actually) there was an intrepid band of YD-ers who wanted to dive U90. U90 is a First World War U-boat that sank under tow at the end of the war, just off the southern tip of the Isle of Wight.Sadly, nature conspired against us and the intrepid band were, what is technically known as, “blown-out”. Undeterred a hard core rebooked to try again and were joined by a rag-tag group of assorted hangers-on . Today was the day.
Only one thing could stand in their way…and that thing was a certain Mr Matt Binnie. Continue reading this entry »
Diving Belles - Portland on MayDay Weekend
A few weeks ago Fiona reminded me that we didn’t have anything planned for the May Day Bank Holiday weekend. This would never do, so after a scout around and some advice from YD I booked up a series of four dives for Saturday and Sunday with Breakwater Diving at Portland (www.divedorset.com).
Reports of outstanding viz the weekend before had us on the edge of our seats all week, and fingers, toes and anything else we could were crossed in hope that it held out and that the May bloom didn’t beat us to Dorset. Continue reading this entry »
Silt and Champage - the Wreck of the Seine
Finally, after the usual early season blow-outs we got into the sea! We tagged on to the end of the traditional YD Easter Gig at Dover, Kent, and took up a couple of spaces that were free for the Monday dive. It was billed as a 35m maximum dive, so in the week running up to the Easter weekend we got our twinsets filled with 30%. Given it was the first sea dive for a while we decided to leave the stages at home and to limit bottom time to only a little over no deco limits. We would then pad out the stops on the ascent to give ourselves a margin of safety. Besides which it was going to be cold and I didn’t want to be stuck at 6m regretting the extra 10 minutes on the bottom! Continue reading this entry »