We came down to breakfast on Saturday morning clutching our voucher. “Which door did you come in?” demanded the dragon dinner lady. The one nearest reception we replied (wrong answer apparently?!!) and ate our begrudgingly given breakfast.
Foxy, in the Lee Van Cleef role, stared her down and demanded that his 99% fat bacon be exchanged for something slightly edible.
Jools “no-name” Sutcliffe then tried to escape via the same door, avoiding the dragon dinner lady, to find she had sneaked out and barricaded it from the outside, but he still managed to bust out anyway…
It was a gloriously sunny morning and we were in a hurry to be off, but this didn’t stop Alastair (the shifty one) trying to steal several other people’s kit from the quayside and putting it on our boat! But he was soon found out even though the other skipper had to chase us for some miles.
In the afternoon we went to dive the
James Egan Layne, to find a large boat with a rear-mounted hydraulic lift going
around barging into RIBs backwards – it then cut our bow line as well. It’s
engine was stuck in reverse and the skipper was going around backwards in
ever-decreasing circles which seemed a bit dodgy what with all the divers in the
water. His kitted up divers looked a bit nervous I can tell you. It’s the
first time I’ve been glad to be on a boat with a normal ladder….
It pissed down with rain after a
cracking dive, we caught a water taxi to town practically from our doorstep
& stuffed ourselves on a 15 course Chinese feast, and the sun came out for a
beautiful evening, as we promenaded along the front.
Peter had to change rooms because he
refused to sleep in the same room with a quote “great fat starfish” unquote
that snores like a warthog. Jools sabotaged the men’s loo next door to our
room so it couldn’t be used – it did sound like Niagara falls the previous
night.
Sunday morning, and we had found that
the dragon dinner lady’s tactic had changed. She had cunningly partitioned the
room so you couldn’t get to the dining hall via our door any more. We
tentatively went in the “right” door and handed in voucher number 2.
“You must have 2 vouchers!” barked
the dragon dinner lady. “You have
to get the other one from reception”. There
then followed a 3 corner stand-off similar to the end of the good, the bad and
the ugly, with me as the ugly Mexican
one, looking nervously at the other two.
Jools, surprisingly logical after having
a good night’s rest, politely pointed out that we were given only 2 and we’d
given in one yesterday. There was
nothing she could do except go back to the kitchen.
Both rounds & the rashers to Jools
methinks.
The sun shone all day, and most of us
got another couple of half decent dives in. Viz was around 5m-8m all weekend, in
spite of a bit of a plankton bloom forming. Even the journey home worked out
well - by 8pm I was back in my local eating Thai green curry.
Thanks to Karen for organising this trip
it, albeit by remote control. Alastair was a crap sub obviously, but probably
the best she could find at the time! Seriously, it went very well, and the
Mountbatten centre is Spartan but very convenient, and I like not lugging
kit across miles of tarmac personally. Really good showers too but beware the
wrath of the dragon dinner lady.
Bren
Last Edited 29/08/2002