Star-struck

With the end-of-May Fairground pantechnicons moved off the Rec we can go a nice walk tonight catching up that favourite route, so that Haggis can stroll, while I race about after the ball.

Dad is a-buzz with an exciting encounter tonight, all be it one which would mean little to anyone not interested in barges. He's been invited down to the barge after work to meet, along with Will-the-Project-Manager a guy who actually served on the Cambria as "Mate" during her last years of trade. This guy is a brilliant, down-to-earth bloke although he's so famous in barge-circles that he's like a "celeb" and Dad is worried he'll be all tongue-tied and awe-struck. More so when Will gets hospitalised by gastro-enteritis, and Dad must host the guy on his own, although Master Shipwright Tim steps in to greet the guy in case Dad can't get there in time.

In the event Dad needn't have worried, as the guy is so un-assuming and chatty and natural, it's dead easy to chat away and the hour-plus whizzes by. He's full of stories and anecdotes; a real old salty sailorman.

I managed to wheedle out of Dad a bit of an anecdote of his own about Cambria this weekend. Dad was juggling camera and lenses as he came down the gang plank with his "oppo" Richard and managed to fumble a lens cap which fell and landed flat on the sloppy tidal creek mud, 6 feet below and 6 feet out from the quay side. Dad was happy to write it off, with the tide racing in, but Richard hatched a cunning plan to "borrow" one of the shipwrights' ladders, let Dad and he down onto a wooden fender-block and then lay the ladder almost horizontal from the block out across the mud, scramble out along it and retrieve the lens cap.

It nearly went pear-shaped, as the ladder started to gloop down into the mud, and also to slide away from the bank and fender block, but with Richard holding the slide, and Dad scrambling quickly before the ladder could sink, the cap was recovered, the guys climbed back up the now-quite-muddy ladder to the quayside and , whistling innocently, returned the ladder to the place it came from. The tide came in and quickly covered the ladder-shaped scar in the smooth tidal mud. They wonder if the shipwrights were curious as to how the ladder got muddy.....

We're not telling!

Deefer