Scrapping Wendy Ann II- The Sequel.

Featuring Becky Hewlett…




The weekend before last we were at it again, disposing of all our scrap. Fortunately this was the last time we absolutely knew we needed a skip to throw bits of our fine vessel into. Over the course of the bank holiday my dear (and, frankly, well ‘ard) Becky collected and removed Four Ton Three Hundred And Twenty kilo of mangled steel that was strewn around the now largely complete Wendy Ann 2. She did all this while I chased Larry madly around the aft deck, frantically trying to get the last structural bits of steelwork done before Becky accidentally chucked them, and us, in the skip too. EMR provided the aforementioned skip, and frankly you’d find it hard to believe what they currently pay on a ton of scrap steel. Are you sitting down? Only £170. Holy fuck, that’s over double what they paid less than a year ago. Jim, the EMR rep- summed the reason up succinctly (again) with the word ‘China’. Apparently the tiger economies demand for our rubbish old metal is even more insatiable than ever. By way of response I told him he’s probably in the right business then, which elicited a wry smile. I on the other hand have decided that I like the Chinese very very much, even more than I like their dim sum, and when B wasn’t looking I quietly assessed the scrap value of our new, old boat. Luckily the results of my calculation did not warrant my warming up the cutting gear. On Wednesday the cashier at EMR rewarded B’s efforts by presenting me with a rather large wad of used notes, a transaction which (unusually for a boat owner) gave me a nice financial surprise. Considering the range of dubious looking characters queuing up close behind me at the cashiers desk when this wodge of money was slightly too publicly shoved into my greasy mittens, you can probably understand why the bit of my brain that deals with paranoia was doing strange somersaults as I hurriedly scuttled out of the scrapyard. Do a little bit of maths if you just have to know how lit up my paranoia lobe really was.