Northabout in Holyhead
Hi, sorry I haven’t written for a while, things were happening. Anyway, we left the Bristol Channel and everyone was fine. I was on watch first and it was all absolutely fine. Almost everyone was on deck for the first few hours. They all enjoyed the sunshine and the beautiful sea, until Milford Haven. At that point some of us started to feel ill. I was off duty so I went off to bed. Dad doesn’t have a watch, he’s our resident techie so he’s exempt. He went off to bed until midnight. Hazel got it worst. I was feeling fine by ten o’clock, which is when my shift starts, so I went up on deck and did my bit. At twelve, Dad came up feeling much restored and kept me and Annie company. At two o’clock Hazel came up looking completely terrible. Tired and on the verge of throwing up, she came on deck, and vomited into a bucket. Because of how she was feeling, it was decided that Dad would cover Hazel and if he got too tired he’d get me up and I’d do the rest. As it happened I was allowed to sleep, which was nice. I got up at half eight and had a bacon roll. John has turned out to be the boat’s excellent galley slave and none of us want to take his position. I went on watch at ten and not much happened. When I got off watch it was discovered that we had two or three inches of water in the bottom of the boat which shouldn’t be there. Dad and Dave tried to fix this but, as it turned out, our bilge pumps are broken, yay. It was decided that we would head to Wales and get some guys from Sharpness up to fix it for us. So we headed east and we’ve docked in the Holyhead marina. We called Sharpness and then we went to bed (they arrived at 23:20 and worked until about 01:30). This morning we got up, I went to the toilet, the people from Sharpness turned up again and I’m sitting in a cafe waiting for breakfast and writing this. While we were in the Bristol Channel we got a visit from those who thanked us for all the fish before leaving us to be demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. Yep, dolphins. We got lots of visits from dolphins at this point but the only one that really excited us was the first. It was about a hour after my first shift ended, Dad was feeling ill in his bunk so it was up to me to take pictures. We had the dolphins for a good long while and I think I might have got some decent pictures of them. On my night shift we had a very strange light source. The moon rose right up behind us. It looked a lot bigger than normal and was a soft but very clear yellow. It was right behind us for my entire watch and combined with the dark water and stars it was really very beautiful. I tried to get some pictures of it but in order to actually get anything the shutter speed on the camera was about seven seconds. And by the time the photo had been taken the camera had moved around enough to make it nothing but a blur. Then dad came up, changed the sensitivity and got some really nice photos. This morning I woke up to discover that a truly momentous decision had been made that would affect all our lives. That’s right, we were going to have breakfast off the boat. This amazing revelation has lead to me writing this now and telling you that I’m writing this now. And so I leave you, safe in the knowledge that I have managed to say nothing whatsoever about politics. I’ll write again soon, bye.