Barbara and Conor

 Its been a bit windy over the last couple of days  - first Storm Barbara thesn, 24 hours later, Conor.

The headline wind speed reported by the BBC was 82 mph.  Orkney has a number of weather stations around the Islands. The information they collect is available on the Orkney Harbours website 

Some data from Black Craig ( just outside Stromness) . Openstreetmaps has Black Craig  in the correct place. Google maps has it located in Shapinsay , for some reason .

The first peak is Storm Barbara, with a lull in the early hours of christmas day, then the wind gets up again for Storm Conor.   So 90.5 knot gust = 104 mph.

Kirkwall itself wasnt as bad - its sheltered ( a bit ) from string Westerly winds

So we would have been somewhere between the 2. 

Someone in Birsay lost the roof of  their shed 

And for us .  venturing out : 

 a couple of the lamb shelters got overturned and moved 

And some of the beds in the vegetable garden got trashed.  So i clearly didn't fasten  everything together as well as I should have done in the spring.

And you can see what turmips , swedes(neeps) and carrots look like with the leaves blown away

Christmas is coming

in the past we have kept cockerels through the winter   - but its a bit of a waste. They consume feed and  don't put on much weight .
So we have a concerted effort before we get  too much into the winter .

 They all get plucked, but some just have the breasts and legs removed. But some become roast chicken.

So we are self-sufficient in  chicken, 

bantam vs pheasant

We had Hoppy  the pheasant around in June. He is still around , and there are several more that are regular visitors.
And they make nuisance of themselves   terrorising the geese, ducks and hens out the way to eat any corn that has been scattered.
But the smallest of the hens, Harriet the bantam, has clearly had enough of this.

Our own race

This lot  are heading towards tupping-time. And we need to give them  a mineral/viatmin supplement. And rthey arent keen. With fewer sheep weve just corralled them into a smaller spaceand then administer it one a  time , but with  23 it wont be as straightforward to keep track of who has had and who hasnt.


So we made a sheep race  from hurdles, gates and stuff

Encourage the sheep to come down  with a bit of food.

And put them a few at a time intro the race , so they can be dosed and then let out

Job done !

And then its tupping in 6 weeks or so .

BA -again

BA are certainly not my favourite airline   - NABAFWBAFNFWBACF
is one reason .   And ive managed to avoid givign BA more money for 2 years or so - FlyBe going to London City Airport and I've discovered that the Caledonian  Sleeper is a reasonable  way of travelling north

 But I need to travel again ,and Fly(May)Be don't go to London City in November, so BA it is after a 2 year hiatus .

So i try and choose a flight and I need to  be back on monday morning . Im not going to spedn hours  getting out to Heathrow and hanging around , so saturday , and London City it is.

And why does coming back on  a saturday cost twice as much as travelling south on a tuesday ?. Because they can charge that , and get away with it .

Selecting dates gives you the option of being flexible . Does it matter ? Well I think it does . Im still trying  to work out what buttons do what on flight choices and prices, but this is the situation at the moment ( I think)

heres a screenshot . If you  tick flexible dates , the price of saturday flights is a bit lower than if you say the dates are fixed.

 

Depending on which outward flight you choose, the price of the   return flight can vary. Its either £188, 194 or £195

£194 return flight

£195 return flight

It is not possible to see the  return flight and the outward flight  on the same screen - the list is so long , you have to scroll.  And when you select the outward journey, the prive for the return one changes .

And they do it with some javascript .

So they charge depending on how desperate to travel on a particular day .
'Dynamic pricing' means one price changes depending on what else you choose.
They design their website to obfuscate what they are doing .

And has BA gone up in my estimation ?

Farewell to the Kye

... to the cows. Its time for them to move on  and give the grass a chance to regrow whilst there is still some daylight and warmth.

So


1. Herd the cows down from the field

2. Pen them whilst we get ourselves sorted out

3.  Bring up trailer

4. Encourage cows to go in aforesaid trailer

5 Cows ready to leave

things ive learned over the last few weeks 

• Cows are big 
• Cows are very inquisitive and curious and will come to see what you are doing 
• When cows push on something ( posts/fences) it gives way eventually I
• I know now why bones can get broken if someone gets in the way of a cow. 

The easy (well,easier) way to pick up sheep

Eric, Ernie and Edwin (they are a bit nervous)

1. Take trailer to Stromness ferry terminal

2 . Leave trailer at Ferry terminal, to be loaded onto the Ferry 

3. Ferry takes the trailer to Scrabster and Phil takes the sheep to Scrabster and puts them in the trailer 

4. Ferry brings trailer ( with sheep) back to Stromness

5. return and pick up trailer after its been taken off the ferry 

Job done  !!

some visitors

We've had some visitors over the last few weeks, to take advantage of our excess of summer grazing

A few weeks ago the cattle arrived and were 'encouraged'  to leave the trailer.

And then they end up eating up the hay and grass that the sheep  have left lying.

  but they cant stay in the one small field indefinitely .

never mind 'one man and his dog ' 

We had One man and his quad bike 

so :
Gather a few friends and round up your cattle

And the next bit is easy - herd then along the drive , with a quad bike .

And shortly after ,they are happily  ensconced in their new home

 (well, it wasnt actually quite as straightforward as that !)

Out with the new, in with the old.

So the new sheep have had their 48 hours of quarantine and been dosed and injected with stuff , so they can be let out . But its not that simple . One of the rams is being castrated by the vet  at 10am and so needs to be caught and brought inside.  And the new sheep are going into the field vacated by this ram ( and his mates)
So first step is catch  a ram , and a mate as they are social animals.

Then move the new sheep on to the field.

 Then move the ram into the shed

and let the new sheep explore  their new field

 PS its not actually as straightforward as that because the sheep don't want to move anywhere different to where they are .

More

We've been to pick up Boreray sheep from Clachtoll  before, in 2014  and also in 2013 .

And we were going again .  But this time  a couple  of differences.  Instead of doing it in a day , which is a tight turn-round time before heading back , and then arriving in the dark and  trying to sort out the sheep in the gathering gloom, we thought we would take 2 days to do it , with an overnight stop.

We have 2 ferry crossings to choose from. Stromness to Scrabster ,operated by Serco Northlink,  and  Banks' Boat between  Gills Bay and St Margarets Hope. This is  the MV Pentalina, operated by Pentland Ferries and  better known as Banks's  Boat because the whole operation was set up by Andrew Banks OBE.  Serco Northlink receive subsidy from Scottish Government but Banks's Boat doesn't.  Some details are here .  And after  the peak tourist season, from September onwards Northlink can only run a morning and evening ferry. The Pentalina  runs 3 times a day . So as this trip wasn't a dash down and back , it was Banks's  boat.  And  there were a lot of cars on it.

The car and trailer is 7.2m in length. For this trip a  bit of challenging reversing with the trailer,  onto the boat. And then down the gap left by the containers.

And after that , on to the overnight stop  in Brora, the Royal Marine Hotel. A nice hotel with exceptionally good food

And then on to Clachtoll.  The  problem this time is the NorthCoast500. The route is the B869 - the winding Clachtoll single track road. And the tourists seemed to be doing it in an anti-clockwise direction .  And some of them had no idea about driving on single track roads. Its not possible to squeeze 2 cars side-by-side, let alone is one of them has a trailer. So I ended up reversing car and trailer up a winding road to let a Mercedes  driver who seemed totally incapable of anything other than progressing on his tour in an anti-clockwise direction.

And sheep duly picked up

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A bit easier on the return trip - just drive on ( and round and off at the other end)

The Scrabster -Stromness ferry goes past the Old man of Hoy , on the west coast of the Island of Hoy.  Banks's boat goes past the islands of Switha, with its herd of feral cattle  and Stroma and its abandoned houses.

Stroma

And as we were back in daylight , moving the sheep from the trailer was a bit easier .

Although the sheep weren't keen on cooperating

Once is the shed, they will be quarantined for 48 hours then can explore their new home .