I wanted to go to St Davids and check out what is in the storage sheds at Scott’s Clegyr Boia property. And, of course, visit Rose and the dogs. When she knew the day I would get there she arranged a wake at The Farmer’s Arms pub, which is about a two minute walk from her house…where she and Scott lived for the past few years.
I decided to rent a car for this trip. I would drive up on Tuesday August 7th, back on Wednesday, then down to Poole and back on Thursday for meeting with Scott’s accountant, Andrew Hill, and the solicitor he recommended, Gary Pick.
When I went on Google Maps and did a search for car rental places it showed two that were next to the bus station and train station…both about a five-minute walk from the house. So I walked over there, thinking I would get a quote from each and then drive a hard bargain. I walked to about where the first one was supposed to be but didn’t see it. I asked in a couple shops and nobody had heard of it. So headed for the second one. Same thing. Fed the address into GM and asked for directions. Showed it as being just down the street. I watched the display as I walked and seemed to walk right through it. Hmmm…turned around and walked back through it. All I can figure is that they are in another dimension. Google must also map that dimension and let some data leak through.
Walking back past the train station I asked a taxi driver if he knew where they were…he said there wasn’t one in that area and never had been. He said the nearest one was Hertz, which was about a mile and a half west, on the other side of the Avon. So off I went in that direction.
Got there about 25 minutes later, chatted with the guy at the desk, and arranged to pick up the car when they opened at 8am on Tuesday, and return it when they opened at 8am on Friday. Then walked by a different route…on the north side of the Avon…back to town to pick up some food and a bottle or two of beer on the way back to Scott’s.
That was Friday, so I had three days to think about driving on the left side of the road, which I hadn’t done for about 20 years. And I am getting to be an old fart. Maybe my judgement is getting worse, or my reactions are slowing down. Maybe…
So Tuesday finally came around and I walked back to Hertz. After explaining a bunch of stuff to me, that I immediately forgot, the attendant gave me the keys and wished me luck.
To be honest, within about three minutes things started to feel normal. It was a 5-speed manual transmission, so I was shifting with my left hand…but at least the pedals were the same relative to each other.
The slow drive back to the house was uneventful…but would have been difficult without Google Maps. The street layout is complex…small streets that curve a lot and that are often only a lane and a half wide, with parked cars taking up half a lane. There is a certain level of cooperation required with on-coming drivers.
Anyway, got to the house and loaded the back of the car with boxes of dog stuff…food and other gear. Since Rose has all the dogs now, she might as well have this stuff too.
When that was done I closed up the house, mapped my route, clicked Start, took a deep breath, and headed out. Once I got past the first half mile of narrow street, it was fine. The UK is a big believer in roundabouts. Even on the big motorways (our freeways) they don’t have overpasses shen one motorway intersects another…just another roundabout. The real trick is to remember to always look left as you approach the roundabout. That took a conscious effort. And since there might be four or five exits from the roundabout, it is important to be in the correct lane going into a big one. GM was great about this, as the voice would tell me to enter the roundabout in the n lane and take the n exit onto xxx road. Where n is numbers and x is words.
When I got on the motorway, I figured I would just get behind a truck in the left lane (the passing lane is on the right) and just mosey along. But being me, within about 15 minutes I was in the middle or right lane staying about 10% over the speed limit. I ended up getting to St Davids about five minutes after Google originally predicted…and that included a quick stop at a service area to get a cup of coffee.
It was a beautiful day, the scenery was lovely, and I had to make an effort not to look at it. I really wish I had brought my dash cam along…then I could look at it all when I got home. Scott once told me that his memory treated life like a movie that he could scroll back through or instantly jump to a specific place.
I followed the directions to Rose’s house. The street was more like an alley, running between the backs of two rows of small houses. I parked and went to the back gate, but it was locked. I called Rose’s name a couple times and heard a response from out front. There was a narrow path between her house and the next one, so I walked over to that and saw her and the dogs n another narrow path that ran in front of the houses.
We greeted each other with a hug and a moment of sadness…and the dogs jumped all over me. They may have been miserable and near death a few months ago, but living in the NOW, they were nothing but happy.
We went inside and Rose made us each a cup of coffee (instant coffee is still very popular over here). While drinking it we exchanged the usual words that people use when a loved one has died. Maybe saying them is good for you. Maybe it glosses over the pain.
Rose had arranged for a fellow named Phil to meet us at the sheds after he got home from a medical checkup. In the meantime, she suggested we drop by Steve Rees’ boatbuilding facility…Robust Boats.
I hauled in all the dog stuff and some human food Scott had left, and my gear, and then she guided me over to Steve’s.
Steve was a little reserved at first. We had never met, and it seems that Scott didn’t talk a lot about other people he knew…though he had told me that Steve was good builder and that he (Scott) planned to work on several projects with Steve (who he always called Stevie).
He took me out to the Express Surveyor 23’ Aluminum boat he had built for Scott. The intent had been to use this for a shallow-water survey boat. Steve told me that he built it at cost, and he and Scott were going to partner up on the surveys, with Scott handling the booking and data processing and Steve skippering the boat. Then Scott decided a 26’ boat would be better for that job, and asked Steve to sell Express Surveyor. It had been on the market for about 18 months at that time, for £75k, with no interest shown. He explained that was partially due to the extra stuff Scott had added to the construction, which would be of no interest or use to anyone not wanting to use it for survey work.
Steve loosened up a bit as we chatted. I know Scott liked and trusted Steve, and I was prepared to do the same…and maybe some of that came through. When Rose told him that we were meeting Phil at the sheds in a bit, he said he would meet us over there.
Rose guided me over to Clegyr Boia, which involved going back through the narrow streets of St Davids and then along a road I recognized from my trip over in 2012. We parked by the upper shed and wandered around a bit, looking in on one shed that had a broken section of roll-up door from when a big wind storm damaged it. We ended up walking down a trail to the top of the pasture, where there was a bench where Rose could sit down while we waited. A horse, which I later learned was owned by Steve’s daughter, was grazing in the pasture and came over to check us out. When it turned out we weren’t dangerous and didn’t have food, it lost interest and returned to its job of keeping the grass trimmed down.
About half an hour later Steve showed up, and Rose called Phil to see where he was. He was just about to leave the doctor’s office and would be there in half an hour. Which actually turned out to be fine, as Steve and I wandered around the field and chatted a bit about Scott and the things he was working on. When it became obvious that I already knew about most of them, Steve relaxed a bit more. [A week later, listening to a voice recording Scott made, he said that he liked living in St Davids, but had almost nobody he could talk to about the things that interested him…Steve was about the only person who could understand him…and they talked mostly about boating stuff.]
Scott had used the field we were wandering around as a test facility for search software he was writing for his drone…a high-end DJI Phantom Pro. [integrate email about this later]
Phil eventually showed up with the keys, and we all went around to the shed area. The sheds are of different dimensions and heights but are all joined together at common walls…so it is like one big building with pieces jutting out at different areas. There are no internal doors between the areas…each area has a big roll-up door that you could move heavy equipment or boats through and a normal-sized that is more appropriate for people. The roll-up doors are locked from the inside, and the people ones from the outside.
The structure is oriented along a line from northeast to southwest, and we decided to start with the southwest shed, as it was nearest the pasture. This shed had a massive roll-up door on the SW side and a large iron door on the NW side. The door was pretty impressive…a slab of rusted iron that was hinged on the right side and swung inward. There was no obvious lock…Phil pointed to a small hole in the rust, near the left edge of the door, and then shoved an old-fashioned skeleton key into it and tried to turn the key. It didn’t budge. There was a vertical metal bar mounted above the hole…a handle. Phil asked for someone to pull hard on that and when Steve did that took the pressure off the lock and the key turned. We could then push the door open on the its old and very tight hinges. Phil said that he lubricated this regularly, but it didn’t really help much.
Once we got inside I recognized the mess…it looked pretty much the same as it did in 2012 when Scott brought me here. It is a large rectangular area with the roll-up door on the right as you come in, and a high roof that leaks. Plus lots of ventilation under the eaves that allow the pigeons or seagulls to get in out of the bad weather. Large birds had left their calling cards on the tarps that covered the low mound of ‘stuff’ spread a couple feet high over most of the floor. The tarps were probably intended to keep the water dripping from the roof off of what was stored under them, but it would eventually drain down to the floor and some stuff was going to soak that up from the bottom.
According to Phil most of this was trucked up from the Bath house when it flooded about ten years ago. There is a lot of old electronics under the tarps, plus books, clothing, some furniture, and boxes of stuff with hasps and hinges too rusted to want to try to open. Near the roll up door was a large lump covered in a black tarp, for a little variation. Under this was a massive leather chair that Rose later told me was a massage chair that Scott bought at a trade show for £5000. It fit into the house they were living in at the time, but when they moved to her house in St Davids there was no room for it…unless she moved half her living room furniture out. So it ended up in the shed. My initial impression of this shed is that the chair is the only thing in it that would be worth more than the cost of hauling it to the dump…but even it isn’t in the best of shape.
After pulling hard on the door to lock it, we continued in a clockwise direction from there. The door to the next shed was on the NW corner, and this was custom built by Steve. The building is concrete and the door frame is metal. Steve welded a tab on the outside of each side of the frame. Each tab has a hole for a hasp to go through. He then cut a piece of heavy aluminum that was a bit bigger than the outside of the frame and cut a slot in it for each tab to come through. And welded a big lifting handle at about shoulder height and width on the front of it. Each tab had a new-looking lock on it, and Phil unlocked those and removed them. Steve lifted the door off and leaned it against the building.
Most of the stuff in this shed is fishing or boating related. I later came across a receipt for (as I recall) $14k worth of stuff that Scott ordered from fishery places in the US, and his dad had shipped to him over here. Ironically, there were four boxes of fishing stuff that were misplaced in the that process, so never made it to Scott’s shed. When they were found they were delivered to Aleck and went into Scott’s storage shed behind the family home, and I eventually moved them to the storage unit I got for Scott in Sequim, after his dad died and the house was up for sale. Those were about the only things that Scott wanted me to send him, when he decided he no longer wanted to keep all the old stuff that he had stored for probably 20 years. I was looking into a way to do that when he died.
Included in this shed are two electric outboards…one looks like it had been used and then neglected by everyone other than the birds. The other was still in the original packing from 2007. There is probably a lot of stuff that would still be appreciated by boating and fishing people…but moving it to a location where there would be a larger audience would be costly. Perhaps it could be peddled on eBay to an international market, but shipping would be costly. This is something to explore when I can spend more time at the sheds.
The next shed, around the corner on the NE side, was one that Rose and I had already explored before Steve showed up. The large roll-up door had blown in in a windstorm and when someone put it back up the lower horizontal panels had been left slid to the side, so a person could slide sideways though the hold, which we did. Later Phil pointed out that the big lock on the small door was for display only…it didn’t actually secure the door. But we all used the opening in the roll-up door to get in.
The main thing in this shed is a large blue fiberglass boat hull that I know came from a mold in the next shed. There is also an old rowing boat that belongs to Phil I think, and a life raft…the kind with a hard bottom and inflatable tubes on top. I think this is something Steve build and Scott intended to be able to hoist it onto the roof of the cockpit on Maureen.
Toward the back of the shed is a room that goes off to the right and has another roll-up door which would be on the NW side of the structure, a ways to the right of the aluminum door to the second shed. This is where Phil works on cars…or used to. He came down with some serioius pulmonary disease a year and a half or so ago and became so weak he could hardly walk ten feet, let along work. He is substantially recovered now, but lost about 40% of his lung capacity, so is pretty much winding things down here, and plans to move his stuff out of the shed soon.
The boat hull and the lifeboat area about the only things of value in this shed.
The fourth shed has a roll-up and person door just down the wall from the third one. We unlocked the small door and went in. The first thing that catches your eye is the large mold that the boat next door came out of. There is another hull in the mold, but I don’t know what stage it is at.
There is quite an assortment of other gear in here, ranging from a few big workshop tools to electronics, survey gear, and personal items. At some point Rose moved the stuff Scott left in house to this shed.
The bulk of the survey gear came in on one or more big trucks. This is gear that Scott bought from Christoph Hempel, the owner of Aquarius, a survey vessel that was under lease to GEMS when GEMS filed bankruptcy. Scott had gear on board and GEMS had gear. When Scott heard that the gear was about to be seized he called Christoph and warned him. He immediately had the boat cast off from where it was docked and head out for an unknown location. When things settled down a bit he returned Scott’s gear to him and confiscated the GEMS gear in lieu of money that they owed him. When he didn’t get paid he sold the gear to Scott for what he was owed…a total of 141,115.74 Euros, which he allowed Scott to pay in installments over three months. This was in April 2013.
After poking through the stuff in this shed and taking pictures, we closed up and Rose and I headed back to her house to clean up and rest a bit before the wake.
We had left the dogs there and they were absolutely ecstatic to see us. Sandy in particular wanted to be all over me. I went upstairs to what is the attic converted to a rather nice bedroom / lounge. Rose said there was no internet access…I don’t know if that disappeared with Scott, or if it is still there and Rose doesn’t know about it. There was also no cell coverage, so I was pretty much cut off from my normal world. I sat down in a comfortable chair with my laptop on my lap and tried to write up some notes about the day, but Sandy was pretty aggressive about trying to replace the laptop with her body, and I couldn’t bring myself to be unkind to her after all she had been through. So the laptop relinquished its position and we visited for a while.
A bit before 6pm I changed clothes…real shoes, slacks, and a reasonably dressy shirt. I figured I would be a bit overdressed for the occasion, but better that than under-dressed. Turned out that most of the guys were more casually dressed than me, and most of the women a bit the other way.
Rose and I walked the few blocks to The Farmers Arms pub, which is where the gang usually hung out. There were just a few people there when we arrived, but more kept trickling in and pretty soon the place was packed…and noisy.
It was an interesting and varied group of people. Many of them originally met Scott at gatherings such as this one. I think the houses around here are pretty small, so when people want to celebrate a birthday or holiday or a wake like this one, someone puts a few hundred quid on the bar bill and people gather around. Rose put down 250 for drinks and 50 for food…and the food spread was pretty amazing. All finger food, but a lot of variety.
I noticed that most people had their first beer or two on the tab, then started paying for the rest. Some of these guys can hold a lot of beer.
Anyway, in the beginning Scott attended celebrations as a guest of Rose, and after a while had relationships of his own, based mostly on boats, fishing, and soccer…Scott didn’t play but did donate money to the team and was an official member.
As people’s tongues and minds became more lubricated, and they were more willing to tell stories about Scott, their speech took on more of an accent and the noise level went up. So I spent a lot of time picking out a word here and there and nodding. At some point, after someone else gave a toast to Scott and everyone raised their glasses in his memory, I called for another one and told everyone that I plan to write about Scott and would appreciate if those who had memories…good or bad…about him would share them with me soon. I told them I would reach out to them through Rose.
I did talk with Phil during a quiet moment. I told him that I thought I had a ring of keys that looked like those he had. He suggested we check that out…he said he would pick my up at Rose’s at 8:30 and we would go back out and try my keys. And then he would treat Rose and me to breakfast.
I managed to slowly work my way through a pint and a half of reasonably good beer, and about 5% of the food table. When people started drifting away, Rose and I headed back to her place.
I tried to barricade the stairwell at the bottom to keep the dogs downstairs, and it pretty much worked.
I spent an hour jotting notes, then crawled into my sleeping sack and drifted off. A few hours later I woke up shivering and shaking. There were three skylights that were open, and a cold wind was blowing in. But I was in that half-asleep state where I really didn’t want to get up. So pulled a blanket over my sleeping sack and tried to get back to sleep. Around 4am I gave up and got up and closed the skylights…which didn’t actually make it much warmer, just less breezy. A little later Sandy breached the barricade and jumped up on the bed. I pulled my head under the blanket and became just a big lump that she eventually snuggled up against and went to sleep. Other than occasionally waking up for a few seconds when her snoring got louder, I got a pretty good few hours of sleep.
I went downstairs when I heard Rose up and about. Turns out she and the dogs fell asleep on the couch watching TV, and woke up at 4am. The dogs were following her to her bed when Sandy decided to lunge over the piece of cardboard I used as a symbolic barrier.
Rose fixed coffee and a couple slices of something kind of like fruitcake for us. It was sugar-free, as she is diabetic…but not bad considering it had no sugar.
Phil showed up at 8:30. Rose had a doctor appointment to go to around 9:30, and would meet us for breakfast around 10:30. So I loaded my stuff into my rental car…other than the bag of keys…and Phil and I took off for the sheds. It is probably a good thing he was driving…on the way out of town, as we were about to whip around a tight corner on an street that was about two feet wider than the car, we encountered a massive tourist bus coming in the other direction. He didn’t even think about it…just slammed the car into reverse and shot backwards very rapidly for about 60 feet until there was a wide place he could scoot into. I guess when you live there that is just part of how you drive.
Back at Clegyr Boia we started with the same first door…the one with the skeleton key…which was the one I thought I recognized. And I did have that key. We took another few minutes to look around a bit more and moved on to the big aluminum door…no luck…they were obviously brand new locks.
Then to the shed with the hole in the roll-up door and the fake lock on the other door…none of my keys fit that lock…though it didn’t exactly need a key. But we went in and Phil poked around in his toolbox and came up with two copies of the key to the locks on the aluminum door.
None of my keys fit the lock on the last shed, so Phil opened it and we made another pass and I took more pictures.
So I had keys to two of the doors, and nobody knew where the key to the unnecessary lock on one door was, so I needed one key. We hopped in his car and headed back into town, where we stopped at a hardware store and they made a copy of that key. He then insisted that we drive back to the sheds and make sure it worked…pointing out that Rose wouldn’t be done with her appointment for another hour.
We did that and they did work. I wonder a bit about the key situation. Scott told me last year that he had changed the locks and Steve had a copy of the keys. And a few months ago Steve told me in email that he had been keeping an eye on the sheds for Scott. But when I asked Steve to take me over and let me in, he said he didn’t have a set of keys…and he sounded a bit abrupt about it. And then he wanted to join us when we went over there. I suspect that Scott changed the keys and gave a set to Steve and that someone else…probably Phil…cut those locks off and put new ones on. The skeleton key stayed the same, as it would be very difficult to re-key. But overall I’m not real concerned about that. The stuff has been sitting in those sheds for years, and anyone could have easily broken in and taken anything they wanted. And now that I have pictures I can probably tell if stuff goes missing. Not that I would probably give most of it to local people if they would help clean the place out.
Phil dropped me back at Rose’s, saying he had to drop by his house for something and would pick me up in half an hour. I was, of course, locked out of her house, but had my car key so settled in there with my Kindle…and immediately feel asleep until Phil pulled in beside my car.
I hopped in and he drove to the pub on the edge of town where Rose now worked. We passed Rose walking along the sidewalk, about a block from there. Phil parked in the pub lot, then we walked across the street to a café at the visitor center, falling in step with Rose as we got to the door. Timing doesn’t get much better than that.
The breakfast was probably the most food I have had for breakfast in years. Two eggs, two big strips of bacon…I would have called them small slices of ham, two large sausages, hash browns, and a cup of baked beans. Plus a big mug of coffee. And I finished it all. We ate slowly and had a nice conversation about St Davids and Scott. And the Phil drove us both back to Roses. I went in and had a quick look for anything I might have missed packing, but didn’t see anything. Said goodbye to the dogs and made my exit.
Google Maps usually gives really good directions on the roads over here. The female voice has a strong British accent, which I could probably change (the voice), but am getting used to. I saw that it was leading me back through the center of town…which I knew was mobbed with tourists…and I was pretty sure I could backtrack to the visitor center on my own…and that was on the way out of town. And I did, coming out at a round-about just past it.
I clicked Start to start getting directions from there, and it immediately told me to take the exit from the round-about named xxxx. But I couldn’t understand what she said and none of the roads seemed to have that name…but road names are in Welsh and English and trying to read them and quickly make sense of them is sometimes hard. But I saw that going straight put me on the route to a numbered road that looked like the one I came in on, so did that. There was a pause and the voice told me to turn left in about four miles…which didn’t seem right, as that would take me in the opposite direction I wanted to go.
I wanted to pull over and look at the map…but being a little country road, there was no place to pull over for a mile. But eventually did, and figured out that I should have taken the third exit rather than the first, so turned around and took what was now the first exit and was on my way home.
The rest of the trip was uneventful…the directions took me to Roy’s parking space at the base of the stairs, which I had his permission to use for the night. It was only about 4pm, so I unpacked and then walked into town to get food for dinner and breakfast…I was going to head south to Poole the next morning.