Fladda

So now I have worked out how to load pictures here are some of the damage caused by the winter storms to Fladda that I took earlier in the year.
Most of the Damage was to the south of the Island, here is the top of the southern wall near the lighthouse

The southern seawall hardly ever gets damaged by the sea but this time it was heavily pockmarked

Back on the fixing of the storm damage. I have tried to get a number of local builders to fix the hole in the sea wall but no one is very keen to do it. Its strange as I have had this problem in the past, heavy duty construction work on an island is something that builders see as a bit to risky so either they just wont quote or if they do then it's eye wateringly expensive. As I have fixed a number of holes in the past I think the best thing to do is to get a couple of young, fit lads who I know to give me a hand do the work myself.
A quick calculation has shown that the hole is about 3m x 2m x 9m or 54 cubic m which implies about 120 tonnes of concrete!! Yikes. Wonder if that is right. At about a 5 to 1 mix that means about 20 tonnes of cement. I think I will get 2 tonnes of cement to start off with and fill in with large slates from the beach, that seems to be how the rest of the wall was built. I will also need a petrol driven mixer and a couple of wheelbarrows as mine are not up to this sort of work. Luckily Faldda has a lot of reasonably fine sand on the beach which I can use to mix the concrete and there is plenty of water in the tanks as the weather has been so abysmal. Duncan, who does all my heavy duty transportation (I have a small 20ft shetland boat for shopping etc but it is not up to carrying heavy materials) can carry 1 tonne at a time so that will be at least 2 trips.
I have posted some pictures of the hole.. fingers crossed that this works.

Alas there is no broadband on Fladda and given that there is no telephone service it is unlikely there will be one in the foreseeable future. At present I use my GPRS enabled trusty mobile phone (a C500) as a modem to my laptop, connected via bluetooth. This works reasonably well for downloading / uploading but browsing seems to be painful beyond belief, I think that the GPRS link gives me about 70K actual line speed. I write this blog offline and then upload it to get around that problem.

Anyway I would dearly like to have a broadband link on Fladda so have been watching what has been happening in the 3G space. I was talking to someone I know about G3 enabled modem card (well it was EVDO actually) which they were using and were very enthusiastic about it, saying that they got about 400K line speed. EVDO is of course not supported anywhere but the US so I need an EDGE or UMTS card such as on one of the Vodaphone cards. Vodaphone has the best signal of all the carrier's on Fladda (it still wont work near the range in the Kitchen though!) but I am not sure about their 3G coverage. Anyway I would have to buy a new 3G phone or PCMICA card which would still only give me dual ISDN levels of performance which is hardly great. On top of that I would then also have to pay the 3G data rate charge which is not insignificant if you spend as much time online as I do. So I have been sticking to my old GPRS / Bluetooth setup as it works well and doesn't cost too much but have been thinking a lot about how to improve my line speed.

Anyway I have come up with a really bright idea to get very high speed broadband out on Fladda which costs very little and has Mb performance. It involves Pringles cans and I will blog about when I have done a bit more investigation.

Most of this summer on Fladda has been focused on repairing the damage done by the storm and high tide in January. Fladda normally doesn't have to much storm damage because it is reasonably well protected from the south westerly prevailing winds by Scarba and also has a large rock outcrop to the South West. Most of the damage caused by the storms is strangely enough to the north of the Island and is caused by the swell sweeping around from the south west and the suction damaging the sea wall and the Jetty to the north.
Whilst I own all of Fladda except the lighthouse tower the jetties are maintained by the Northern Lighthouse Board which has meant that over the years I have had a lot of interactions with that august body. Suffice to say they have had to maintain the north jetty although the south jetty has been left to fall away.
One winter ten years of so ago most of the slate rocks on the north east of the Island were swept away in the gales and have never come back and ever since then the sea wall to the north and east of the Island has had a lot of damage in the winter.
As a note Fladda is complete encircled by a seawall built around about when the lighthouse was built (1860) which is up to 30 feet high in places and some 15 feet thick. This is constantly under attack by the sea and so a big part of maintenance on fladda is fixing the wall.
Anyway back to this years storms. These were unusual insofar as they were directly from the south where Fladda is very poorly protected and also the tide was very high so the amount of damage caused was very considerable. The force of the sea was amazing, slabs of concrete 8 ft by 8ft and six inches thick which were on top of the seawall some 15 feet above high water were ripped up and thrown 5 feet back, the slate retaining walls were thrown 15 feet into the garden and steel braced windows were blown in.
The most serious damage done however was to the seawall near the lighthouse tower. A hole about 20 feet long, six feet high and 15 feet deep was knocked out of the wall and the soil sucked out of the garden behind the hole to create a crater about 30 feet by 30 feet and 15 feet deep in the garden.
Clearly if this was left and there were any more storms then there wouldn’t be much left of Fladda so the first priority was to get this filled. The proximity of the hole to the lighthouse was also a concern, it would be possible for the tower to be undermined and lost which would not please the Northern Lighthouse Board. Normally they do an inspection of Fladda in May and leave me with a long list of things that I need to do however for some strange reason they didn’t do that this year, it could be they have enough problems elsewhere!
I will be detailing in the following blog entries the work that has been going on over the summer to fix the damage done by the storm and the trials and tribulations of heavy construction on an island.

This is a blog about the island of Fladda, its history, geography, buildings, weather, houses, people, lighthouse, wildlife and anything else that comes to mind! I am the owner of Fladda and the author of this blog and my name is Michael Platt.