It's only a week till the crew arrive. You can plan for tides but not for winds. The charts are now in folios. I've been up top for a look around - replaced frayed rope and tightened a wire here or there. There's still plenty items on the list without a tick. But we can talk to HI~Arts web site.
 

And there are 2 crisp new notebooks - one for Nicola Gear who'll manage the log, in writing and sound. And one for the
skipper who'll be listening for resonant phrases.
 

The difficulty is drawing a final line. That applies equally to making poems or to preparing a boat for sea. El Vigo now has the charts and a new radar reflector and a serviced liferaft. But her bottom could do with a scrub, her topsides a lick of white. And, as I'll be living aboard her for the best part of a month, some work to the interior woodwork.

There are good tides for beaching her over the weekend so,
weather-permitting we'll give it a try if all else is done. Tough on the crew – off the plane and straight down to the shore,
roller in hand.
 
 

I've a new gansey, smelling of Shetland, knitted for me by Di Gilpin. She handed it to me the other night and explained how the cables and turns do not follow straight lines. They swither like conversations. Di told me a story about meeting with minke whales, under Neist Point, Skye. That's now worked into a video we made together, as she cast-on this gansey. It will be shown at The Byre Theatre during the Stanza festival. But she also told me about the Skye waterfalls which sometimes don't
fall.

I was walking in the Neist Point area, tail-end of last year. Blast of breeze blowing a waterfall back and up into the air, from the cliff. Here it is and it's also in the sound-log. And in the gansey,  of course.
 

  Neist Point 
by Ian Stephen

The nearest you'll see to
water flowing backwards
against the run of slope,
gravity losing support

as the anabatic blast
drives the cliff's burn back
and up cloudward

in a rhythm you can't clock
and is irrational
as any sort of love

but rainwater
has a chance
of reaching sea
even if today
you don't see it fall.

Listen to Ian Stephen's first audio log below: