A Feast of Small Boats

The internet chose to start playing up yesterday, perhaps because it was one of the warmest days and certainly the most perfect day of the year. By checking with neighbours, it became evident that it was just our line which was misbehaving and, according to the very helpful person at BT, it is because we have a severe case of 'drop off' along our line. Our upload speeds are fine, it's just the download, which is now 0.12mbps.

So to get away from  the stresses of internet withdrawal symptoms, we took to the hills behind the house - this view shows Ormsaigbeg with Kilchoan Bay and, beyond it, the heights of Ben Hiant.

Another distraction was the parade of small boats of different sorts that seemed to swim through the heat haze in front of the house, like the always-busy Tobermory creel fishing boat Jacobite.

The Majestic Line's Loch Tarbert, works at a much more sedate pace, as it should. It's one of three small cruise ships they run which we often see in these waters.

The nigh-impossibility of accessing sites like the AIS sites is one of the problems of low download speeds, so I don't know which ship this is. With it coming in as close as it did to the Ormsaigbeg shore one would have hoped to have been able to read its name, but many owners seem to be shy of advertising their ship's name - a pity, as this is a very good-looking boat.

Another good-looking and evidently well-maintained vessel is this one. She probably has her name somewhere but I can't see it, but one has to envy the people lazing in the sun on her decks.

Losing some of our broadband capability makes one even more sympathetic to those living in places like Glenborrodale for whom 0.12mbps is the norm. We, at least, can look forward to a repair, hopefully on Tuesday, and, at some future date, to even better speeds when super fast broadband - originally promised by Openreach last September - finally arrives. For Glenborrodale, it's satellite broadband or these miserable speeds.