I love it when fog descends on the sound, especially in early morning. This was taken from the rowing boat on Valentine’s Day, at around 9am. The cabin is just beginning to emerge in outline below the trees.

You can see the jetty is looking pretty rough, and in fact I had already decided to scrape the barnacles and weed off later in the day, and scrub it back to bare wood. However on closer inspection it was much worse than I thought. Periodically one of the sleeper uprights becomes so rotten and weakened that I have to drive in a 4x4 to shore it up before it snaps; but embarrassingly enough the upright in the pictures below had reduced to nothing without my noticing. The Sword of Damocles hanging over the water is actually burdening the jetty, not supporting it, and the whole structure is staying up by virtue of…what? I really don’t know.

The last two pics show my repair, carried out the same afternoon – the whole time I was standing beside the jetty, excavating and drilling, up to my knees in mud, I expected it to join me.

Incidentally, it says something about the nature of the bottom just here, that the entire length of post extending above the jetty (about three feet) was easily driven into the mud without any need to dress off the top.

That’s why you’re not advised to try to walk ashore if you run aground in certain parts of Strangford Lough on a falling tide..