Travels of a Fish Nut

I’m going on holiday for two weeks in May. I’m really excited as I’m going to Peru. I’m going to Cusco for a few days and then I’m heading to the Manu Rainforest Reserve for a tour around the rainforest! I’m really excited and have bought a new zoom lens for my camera so I can hopefully get some decent photos of the wildlife. As always I’ll put some photos here when I return.

I’m leaving the Falklands and I’m going home. Since Dave died I haven’t been enjoying my work as much as I once did. Going to sea for weeks at a time is a fantastic experience when you are happy but when you are sad or grieving it can become a nightmare, trapped and alone with nothing but your own thoughts for company. I had problems on my first boat back, finding myself crying at nothing and unable to motivate myself. Just wanting to go home. I had the same problems on my second boat and came to the realisation that this wasn’t healthy. Looking through my diary I realised I had been unhappy all year and had said in almost every entry that I wanted, I needed, to be with my family. I couldn’t deal with the grief alone. So, a week or so ago I decided that enough was enough and gave my resignation to my boss. He’s been incredibly understanding for which I’m very grateful, and I can happily report that I’ll be home at the beginning of June. I’ve felt much better since making the decision. ...

I'm off again. I'm due to be out for between 3 and 5 weeks depending on the fishing. I'll write when I get back.

One dark and cloudy night we had a rain of birds. I’m not exaggerating (much!). It was a few days before new moon and the sky was incredibly dark. Our boat (as all boats do) had bright deck lights and when I came out of the factory around midnight birds were on deck and flying all around the boat like moths attracted to a flame and, like moths, hurt themselves in the process. They would fly towards the light which was attached to a wall and then fly into the wall. I spent some time picking the birds up and letting them fly off until I realised it was pointless, particularly when I let one go only for it to fly right back into the lights and landed on deck clearly stunned. The next morning I went out and caught in nets on deck and hidden around the boat. Some had got around the winches for the warp cable and had got covered in oil. Luckily we were heading back to drop someone off in Stanley that day so I gave them to a friend who then gave them to Falklands Conservation. Unfortunately (...

I’ve just come back from a few weeks on a squid trawler. We were fishing near Beauchene for a lot of the time, which is an island to the south of the main groups of the Falkland Islands although it’s still part of the Falklands. It’s uninhabited and is a wildlife sanctuary with visits being strictly controlled. Fishing around this area brings lots of birds to the boat (more on those later) due to the large breeding colonies. For two days we had peales dolphins around our boat. On the first day they came and visited up for a few hours but on the second day they followed us all afternoon and into the evening. The numbers grew from about 10 on the first day to at least 20 on the second day. The number wasn’t the only thing that was surprising – their behaviour was incredible. They were highly active, jumping out of the water repetitively (I counted one jumping 35 times and it had already jumped at least 10 times before I started counting!); swimming upside down and slapping their tail fin...

When you need your grass cut the normal thing to do is get the lawnmower out. But what if you don’t have one? In the Falklands this isn’t a problem as people are always looking to loan out their environmentally friendly lawnmowers and it doesn’t cost anything. In fact, you do them a favour! There is a real shortage of good grazing in and around Stanley but lots of people have horses. This leads to the predicament of what to feed them. During the winter this means they are often turned free to a large extent to roam over commons or islands. During the summer the predicament is lessened somewhat as people have gardens with rapidly-growing grass. The two problems – lawns that need mowing and horses that need feeding happily solve each other by putting one with the other. And so it is that we sometimes have horses in our garden! In February we had an old friend back, accompanied by a new friend. Samira, a grey mare, had come to graze just before christmas. At the time she was heavily pregn...

At the end of January I went with some friends into Camp for the weekend. One of my friends was leaving the islands to go travelling and had hired a house for the weekend for a party. It was in the middle of nowhere about an hour’s drive or so from North Arm, a small settlement in Lafonia. I had a great time and got to try out my new camping gear which was great. The best bit, though, was going to the beach which was a 15 minute drive from the house. The beach had been the site of a massive pilot whale stranding about 5 or 6 years ago. Some of the skeletons still litter the beach, although a lot have been taken by collectors. The bones got better the further you went along the beach as you went further than most people would be bothered to go. Many of the skulls had been looted for their teeth, but eventually we came across some with jaws largely intact. As we went further along the beach the skeletons got better and better until we came across a few that were largely complete. Some ...