What a week this has been! A real week of storms, firstly we have had three major cold fronts coming through one after the other causing drenching rain and high winds that have caused much misery and discomfort in the informal settlements around the Cape. Added to that there have been very high seas running which have caused major problems with shipping, three vessels nearly running aground after dragging their anchors.
Here in Saldanha Bay the swells have been running between six and eight metres which has caused us some major headaches, yesterday three of our mussel rafts dragged their moorings or broke loose and drifted into the shipping channel.
We went down to the south end of the farm to investigate and the swells were incredible, like being out on open sea and the Mussel Cat is not built for those conditions, in this picture the raft is on its way into the channel and nothing we could do about it. I turned the vessel around and headed to sheltered waters, not wanting to endanger the crew or the vessel. I made arrangements with the harbour authorities for a more powerful tug to do the salvage. That was one of three rafts that went "walkabout", it was going to be an expensive day.
We went down to the south end of the farm to investigate and the swells were incredible, like being out on open sea and the Mussel Cat is not built for those conditions, in this picture the raft is on its way into the channel and nothing we could do about it. I turned the vessel around and headed to sheltered waters, not wanting to endanger the crew or the vessel. I made arrangements with the harbour authorities for a more powerful tug to do the salvage. That was one of three rafts that went "walkabout", it was going to be an expensive day. 
In this picture (if you squint your eyes and lean in really close) you can see one of the other rafts just in the shoreline with the swells running along, a very rough sea and there was no way we could do any harvesting of mussels.
To add insult to injury the little "Mytillus", our maintenance vessel lost her steering and we had to tow her in.This morning the swell is running at over six metres and the wind is peaking at 30knots so it looks like another wasted day, these weather conditions also make it extremely difficult for any salvage work that we have to do, oh well I suppose it's all part of the aquaculture life and also all part of the farming life in general - keeps it form getting boring!
Needless to say there has not been any biking lately and I still haven't had the opportunity to wash the big red machine yet, there's a busy weekend coming up so I won't be using her for another couple of days, maybe next week?
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