Not even 20:30 !!!!

Well it’s not, it’s only 8:20pm and I’m wrecked, and by the time I’ve finished posting I’ll be even more wrecked I know, it’s been a while since I was on here but I’ve been kinda busy with house related stuff. Not only that but Valentine’s day intervened and I had to do the romantic stuff with wifey Or should I say I had to give my darling all the stuff that Calum Don bought her I really don’t know what I’d do without Calum on the romantic front, he seems to know just which card to buy, which box of chocolates she likes and what wine to pick, perhaps he’s not telling me something Whenever ‘I’m in the brown stuff’ I ask Calum to buy me a bottle of wine or chocolates and he drags me out of the mire

Actually the swineherd was not the only person he bought flowers for on Tuesday, the check out girl must have thought he was some kind of Romeo as he arrived to pay for two bunches of flowers, one bottle of red wine and a box of Thornton’s

The longest load yet

I think the last time that I put ‘pen to paper’ so to speak was at some ungodly hour on Monday morning, after that I seem to recall it was quite a busy day.

At a full 19m long Matt Purdie’s ‘road train’ arrived on the 15:00 ferry from Sconser, as far as I’m aware the longest load ever carried to Raasay aboard the MV Loch Striven.

We’ve had some pretty strange loads on the ferry and one or two that have been turned away due to lack of lashing points but Matt Purdie’s http://www.mattpurdie.co.uk/  Scania had plenty of clearance and easily accessible lashing points, very professional

On the ferry maintaining front I did a repair on a capstan spool valve

 

that was suffering from a dodgy O ring and finished off all the stuff that I should have done earlier

We had a fire on the car deck at Sconser well not a real fire, just a drill, and that was about it.

 

Wednesday

My ‘back to back’ let me away early on Tuesday and I arrived home in daylight, or at least twilight An early night was had in preparation for lots of time spent on the phone and computer with carp associated with building a house.

As well as all the paperwork there was the physical work of trying to make the place look respectable for the surveyor, estate agent and anyone interested in buying 3 South Arnish.

 

It’ll be a bit of a wrench parting with the old croft house after 23 happy years but the banks are such a shower of robbing b*****ds that it has to go

 

The tw*ts  want to charge me almost £1000 for setting up another mortgage, they’re going to screw me for over £900 a month for the next ten years and want to charge me £1000 for the privilege

Thursday

After spending all of Wednesday cutting down trees, pressure washing paths and burning rubbish I called it a day. Wifey’s parents arrived and after a few glasses of wine we all went to bed

 

Thursday arrived a little damply but with promise of better things,

Bracken’s wee wains are getting bolder by the day and were squeezing under the gate to go exploring

We managed to acquire another ‘helper’

and got rid of some scrap.

My new ‘helper’ may not be able to drive the quad like her brother but she’s very enthusiastic

It really felt like spring today with leaves out on the hawthorn

 

 

snow drops, daffodils, daisy’s

 

those prickly things that come from Tierra del Feugo

 

and heather, lots of heather.

As well as all the exterior work I spent much time sorting out shed’s, burning rubbish and filling bins, coming across many a memory as I did.

 

My goat milking stand in the byre being one of them I think I came by this design in John Seymour’s book ‘Complete book of self sufficiency’ http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Complete-Book-Self-Sufficiency/dp/1405345101/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329430569&sr=8-1 and I have to say that it was perfect .

Hazel or Rosie our two Saanen goats would hop onto the frame and stick their head through the hole at the end to access the feed bucket.

 

Once the head was past the hinged flap it trapped the goat and you could milk it without breaking your back. I kept goats for about a year but they just weren’t compatible with the lifestyle of a fisherman that was likely to get stranded away from home. Many is the winters night that I’ve headed back to Rassay on a stormy black evening just to milk them, when a sane person would have stayed put.

After all that it was time to give Cyril a run,

 

Cyril being my 40 year old Lister SR2 with only 60 hours ‘on the clock’,

wifey was baking a lasagne and MIL was hoovering the house whilst I was using a grinder on the roof. The regular battery/inverter would have coped but it seemed like a good opportunity to test the ‘back up’ system of 6Kw generator and 50amp 48v charger

 

A tale of two Lister’s :-)

This is going to be pretty dull I’m afraid, I’ve never actually stopped moving this last two days, apart from when sleeping but I’ve precious little to show for it

Friday was pretty miserable on the weather front but that was just fine by me for I spent most of it in Portree. Or at least travelling to and from the capital of Skye, for it’s the best part of a two hour journey by road and ferry from Arnish and I didn’t get home until well after 17:00 despite catching the 15:00 ferry. Leaving at just after 9:00am to drop the ‘wee dug’ off at Jessie’s we drove past the welcome sight of a busy Raasay House, work at last appears to have started in earnest

I hate leaving the croft at the best of times but it had to be done for the sake of keeping the pigs fed, my accountant happy and of course to visit our architect. The latter being the only bit of the day that I was looking forward to The final plans were ready for submission for the building warrant so we had to check them over and our SAP calculation was ready.

 

The ‘Standard Assessment Procedure’ or SAP is something that is required (and costs) for any new house and as far is we are concerned is just another level of bureaucracy and expense. I’m sure that in the majority of cases it’s important but we’d set out to build a ‘low energy’ house in the first place so I was peeved at having to pay someone to tell me what I already knew.

 

  I copied this from http://andrewjball.co.uk/SAPexplained.aspx

A SAP rating is the technical calculation that is required in order to produce a Predicted Energy Assessment (PEA) and an On Construction Energy Performance Certificate (OCEPC) both of which are reports that abstract information from the supporting SAP calculation.

A SAP calculation is simply a home energy rating that seeks to calculate a score between 1 to 100+ for the annual energy cost due to

• the built structure of the home

• its heating and hot water system

• internal lighting

• any renewable technologies used in the home.

The higher the number the lower the fuel running costs, with 100 representing zero energy cost. Dwellings with a rating in excess of 100 are net exporters of energy.

In simple terms SAP calculations allow comparison of the energy running costs of dwellings anywhere in  the United Kingdom, in a similar manner to the well-known comparison of fuel economy in cars expressed in miles per gallon. This is achieved because the calculations are predominantly location independent and are based upon a notional standard occupancy that overcomes variations associated with physical location and the differing ways in which people utilise their homes.

And I have to say that I was well chuffed when our architect told us he’d never seen a rating so high 104 for energy efficiency and 105 for environmental impact. It almost made me glad we’d been forced into having it done Not only that but it is a conservative estimate and does not take into account an extra wind turbine that we plan to install

Portree was pretty quiet and after an excellent lunch at the ‘The Cafe’ in Wentworth street I abandoned wifey in favour of the harbour and oil depot.

Pretty much the whole of the ‘Kings port’ fishing fleet were tied up, the glassy calm of the harbour giving no clue to the half gale that was raging in the sound.

After giving my accountant a heart attack by getting my books in before he reminded me  I headed for the 15:00 ferry. Not in the ‘Old Girl’ for I left her with wifey to finish the Christmas shopping, I got a lift to Sconser with Calum Don. Who I was to assist in loading up my mates pickup with pipe and cable.

 

Not that I’m particularly obliging but because the 800m of SWA cable and two of the 6m x 300mm pipes were for me

Even though I was on Raasay for 15:20 I had to wait for wifey and the boy to arrive on the 16:15 from Sconser for my lift home. Though before heading north I’d to pick up my trailer that was loaded with 800lts of heating oil for http://www.uniquescotland.com/raasayschool/index.html

 

Arriving home at 17:30 I fed the pigs, filled up Cyril with fresh oil and fired him up Of course he started with barely any effort and I loaded him up with heaters, lights and battery chargers to help dry the paint I’d put on the floor the night before.

 

The 12v battery bank was looking decidedly poorly at 9.88v It’s very sudden demise from over 12v to below 10v indicating that at least one of the two large lead acid batteries was terminally ill

Saturday

A couple of hours of Cyril running pumped some life into it via a 30amp charger but by the morning it was dead again, despite a good breeze of wind through the night. 

The first job today, after the usual round of feeding was to head south for the 800m of cable and two drainage pipes for the barn and new house.

Having a mate with a 13ton digger beats the cr4p out of struggling with 200kg rolls of wire

And having another mate who just happened to leave his trailer with me http://skyeharvest.co.uk/ helps for transporting it And if you’re reading this Dave, Shona is doing fine and seems to have been well shagged by Rocky (that’ll be the Morgan’s spiced rum talking)

What I’d planned for the rest of the day was to start hauling coal and kerosene over to the ‘Old Schoolhouse’ at Torran but sudden interest in Twinny the ST2 from my good mate of ‘Loggit’ fame Simon persuaded me to get him ready for sale. If   http://www.raasayengineering.co.uk/ didn’t want him then at least he was on a pallet ready for eBay

Something that would have taken me a couple of hours to do when I was 30 took me all afternoon to do at 55   It took me the best part of two hours just to drill the holes and bolt him solidly to the pallet, then of course there was all the messing about with the fuel tank and exhaust. Still, I’ve got really attached to this old Lister over the years, it’s never let me down and powered some amazing ‘all nighters’ up here at the north end

Here’s CalMac’s very own Phil Salvadori at my 50th,

I have no idea who these two ‘space cadets’ are,

or these,

or these, but they were amazing nights and Twinny chugged away through them all, a fine complement to the 4, 4 techno of which I’m so fond Or at least was partial to in a previous life

By the time that the old Lister ST2 was sorted it was almost dark and pig feeding time and once that was done wifey turned up with three boys Chicken curry out of the way I put them to work

What a team, I’d be lost without them and that was after a day in Portree of them playing football, oh to be young again