The rat lay onthe mat

It was a beautiful day yesterday, with a rather startling dead rat on the mat to greet early morning toes. I suppose better dead than munching in the pantry.

It appears the solenoids to the Speed Queen are stuffed. I have been able to get it to useable for now, while I try and replace them. This is not a happy idea for me, as my electronics skilz are tepid, and James will be gone before they get here. Still, what must be done, will be tried.

The evening saw us go for a dive in the long summer evening - It's sundown at a quarter to eight now, and getting 2 minutes later every day. We pay for it in winter, but it's great now. We only hit the water after 5. Got our Abs and went looking for fish, and James shot a silver trevally with the adapted mono-point flounder spear (a handspear, with a single barbed thin prong, with a wider pole beyond) I missed. He put a bit much into it... right through, onto the pole itself. And as he tried to lift it... It swam off as the hole was now bigger than the barb. It was destined to die, and I'd have liked to have brought it home for tea, but Barbs saved the day and caught a beautiful flathead on a little latex fish (this is a link to the seller's store) something I bought on e-bay dirt cheap on spec - and replaced not quite so dirt cheap, but not ridiculous, from the seller's website. The picture doesn't do them credit as they're far and away the closest to our hardyheads of any artificial I've met, with a very natural movement in the water. They're deadly on salmon, popular with other rock fish... and appear to work on flatties. We didn't know this and were still looking for fish for tea, when we spotted something I've been looking for here for years - Scallops. It's out of season and they were undersize (close-ish, though) but we did dive down and check they were indeed live scallops.