It was a very cold and wet day in Peel, so I decided to talk to the man cooking Queenies and other Manx favourites on the Pier. It was a little strange asking the man if I could film him cooking, but he was really nice and he was happy to talk to me about Queenies. The local fishermen trawl for Queenies most days and they get them out of the shells off shore and then dump, the shells, which is why the local beach is absolutely covered in scallop shells. Even though this is shells in this case, it just shows us, that anything that we dump at sea ends up on a beach somewhere.
I just bought a pot of Queenies and I ate some in the local harbour master, who advised me to cook them with a little bit of smoked bacon. I knew that the local smoke house produced smoked bacon, so there was no time like the present, so I walked there and bought the bacon, along with some kippers, which I had tried before.
Once back on the Lass, I popped a bit of butter in the pan and cooked some boat toast. This is very much like fried bread, but we call it toast, as its the only way we can cook it, seeing as we do not have a grill on the Lass. Once I had got the toast, on its way, I added just one slice of bacon and then the queenies for the last few moments, so that they were hot.
The combination of the smoked bacon and the queenies was just scrumptious, and really added to the taste. For the rest of the day, and the next day it continued to be wet and miserable, but working on the Lass, is a really great place to work, so time passed quite quickly.
After two days, the weather started to ease, so we decided that we would leave Peel that evening and moor up on the local mooring for the evening, then once we hit low water, we would head south to Port St Mary.
So we left Peel, that night and picked up the mooring ball. The seas were really bouncy and I really couldn't settle there. So we decided that we would move and raft up to one of the fishing boats. I had used the pick up strop, to attach us to the mooring and that was so difficult to move, but I managed it in the end. We went over to the harbour wall and although there was lots of wall that we could moor to, the fishing vessels had put their ropes in such a way, that we had to raft up to one of the fishing boats.
That night at about three o'clock, the local fishing boats wanted to leave for fishing, so we had to move. Luckily the sea state had calmed and we could get on to the mooring, for a broken nights sleep.
The next day, the weather looked perfect for a short sail to Port St. Mary.
