Spotties away!

I’m busy sat here yawning into my laptop after a most productive day, it’s 8:00pm I’ve been on the go since 5:15 and come 9 o clock the cork will be coming out of the fine bottle of Hardy’s red wine I don’t usually need any excuse to have a wee glass but today I’ve earned it because by 5:30am I was doing my VAT return! OK I didn’t actually finish it until an hour ago but quite allot happened in between. I actually made a start on it last night insomuch as I piled all my mixed up invoices, receipt book, VAT book, calculator, pencils, rubbers and Tipex on the kitchen table, I looked long and hard at the metal box containing all my papers and statements took one glance at the box of red wine and decided to leave it till the morning Anyway by feeding time at 7:30 I’d made a severe dent in it with about 75% of the invoices entered and the rubber still unused! The four wee spotties that had spent the night in the trailer were quite happy with nice tight curly tails ( always a good sign ) and once the rest of the herd was fed I headed down the road for the 9:00am ferry. Originally the company secretary was coming to handle the mass of paper work required when moving pigs, and the shopping list but my boy had woken up ill so was not going to school. Actually he’d not woken up at all so there was obviously something seriously wrong with him as he’s usually awake well before 7:00 and there’s not actually that much paperwork to do it’s just I hate doing it!

A serious fencer

Once on Skye my first port of call was Harbro the local feed merchant where I’d arranged to meet Guleesh Spencer of GMS fencing. I first met Guleesh a couple of years ago when he was putting up a fence across a thousand meters of mainly solid rock from sea to sea at the north end of Raasay and when I say north end I mean the far north well past the end of the road.

The 'far north'

Somewhere between those two black crosses about 2 miles down or should I say up a mountain track. Normal practice these days in terrain like this is to charter a helicopter and get the materials dropped along the line of the fence. Not Guleesh, he turns up with an old Suzuki ‘Quad Runner’ and hauls it all 2 miles over ground a goat would think twice of crossing! I have been along this track on an unladen quad and it is SCARY, he does it carrying 2 strainers and 10 stobs at a time and he does it on his own in the middle of a heatwave and to this day I don’t know how he got the 10′ gate along there.

A serious fencer

Anyway today he was at pigs and not fencing and as the car park in front of Harbro was full of vehicles and fork lifts we transferred the two pigs on the old Co op car park next door and the last time I saw him he was carrying two 25kg bags of feed in his arms the hundred meters to his truck! The HSE would have a fit if they saw this man work!

Synchronicity
On my way out of Portree to drop off the next two spotties I stopped to pick up a hitch hiker, I’m a great one for picking up hitch hikers and have met some really interesting ones, I’ve met one or two fruit cakes as well but on the whole I’ve come away richer from the meeting. Today I met John Wright who had not only read the blog but was a friend of my next customer and has his own wind turbine. Needless to say I invited myself around to his house after I’d dropped off ‘Dice and Domino’ as they are now called with their new owners in Bernisdale

With those two wee grubbers settling in nicely and me full of coffee and chocolate biscuits I headed over to John’s croft to check out his Iskra 5kw grid connected wind turbine http://www.iskrawind.com/product/product.htm

and was well impressed

Iskra AT1 5kw on 11m self supporting mast

John has been well pleased with his turbine that has now been up and running for 18 months and because he’s connected to the grid (unlike me) gets well paid for his surplus power as well as getting paid for every kilowatt he generates.

'Windy Boy' grid tie inverters

His turbine was installed by Highland alternative energy limited http://www.haelgroup.com/iskra.htm
and he speaks very highly of their service but all to soon it was time to stop talking about pigs and wind turbines to rush for the 13:15 ferry back to Raasay.

Waiting for the ‘Tooth fairy’

Regular readers will know that I’m a bit of a sad case when it comes to my Land Rover, I do know this and I am seeking therapy but can you believe I’ve just spent over £40 on 3 lts of synthetic gear oil! I’ll not bore people with the details but this particular oil from http://shop.difflock.com/difflock-evolution-fully-synthetic-speed-gear-litre-p-51.html

is supposed to work miracles for the Land Rover LT77 gearbox so I thought I’d give it a go and as it was waiting for me when I arrived at Sconser it seemed like a good idea to change the oil once I arrived home. The old girl was due a service anyway so it seemed like a good excuse to change the engine oil and grease up the prop shafts whilst I was at it.

Looks like a tooth to me!

It was when draining the nice hot gear oil that I heard on ominous clunk as something hit the bottom of the drain tray. Once the gearbox was empty and I’d fished about in the silvery looking substance that was my oil I found this so was faced with a bit of a dilemma. If my gearbox is about to die do I waste £40 worth of oil or do I put the miracle oil in there and hope it don’t get any worse? As my gearbox was quiet and functioning well I chose the latter course though I did fill it up with standard oil first and then flush it out again to remove any swarf. So with all my oils replenished and my service records updated I did a little work on the barn guttering, fed the pigs then finished off my VAT return. All in all I’m pretty chuffed with myself!