All change

Its been a busy week.  Shaun arrived on Wednesday to start work and Tanya arrived on Sunday.  The Concordia Bay was delayed due to the relentless high winds we have been having.  It was due last Thursday and finally arrived today.  Shaun and Christopher loaded 53 bales of wool, 47 lambs and 115 cast ewes.  The day was pretty windy with a big swell in Eagle passage.  Also received cargo, all the double glazed windows from the two storey semi detached house that Shaun and Christopher pulled down in Stanley.  Plasterboard, skirting, coving and three new radiators for the new kitchen in Shaun and Tanya's house and plasterboard for the crab factory,  The boat had no sooner left when Shaun got a call asking him if he would like to come into Stanley and do some stevedoring, we call it "squidding", it is the transshipping of squid/fish from trawlers to freezer ships.  It is very good money and it was agreed when Shaun came to work for us that he could still continue to do squidding when the opportunity arose.  Christopher also does it  but at the moment we are just too busy.  We had decided that we would come across and come into Stanley later today if the wind went down but it was looking decidedly unlikely that we were going to be able to get across.  Tomorrow would be a no go day as the wind plot shows gales again with Thursday being the same.  It was decided that because at least one of us, either me or Christopher needs to go to the ram sale on Thursday and because Shaun needed to get in for work that we would book to fly in on the islander tomorrow.  We were in the process of starting to arrange it when we realised that FIGAS has now went onto their winter flying days and Wednesday is a no fly day.  As a last ditch effort we decided to ring FIGAS to see if there were any planes flying over the island today, this was at 1pm.  We didn't really expect that we would get an unscheduled flight but we got ready just in case.  A lot of things have to be taken into account if a plane is to divert from its schedule i.e. is it carrying enough fuel, what payload it is already carrying, is the airstrip they are diverting too weight restricted.  Today was our lucky day and by 3:30pm, me, Shaun and Tanya were on our way to Stanley.  This is a truly fantastic service.
While we are in Stanley we will core test all our bales of wool.  The purpose of wool coring is to find the micron and yield of your wool.  We will lot our bales into groups of the same grade wool for coring.  All wool that I have graded as A will be cored together, all B together etc.  This will be a hard days work for Christopher and Shaun because they all have to be cored by hand as the bales are too heavy for the automatic corer.  This entails manually pushing a hollow spike into each bale to extract a sample of wool,  depending on how many bales are in a lot determines how many samples need to be taken from each bale.  The smaller the lot the more samples that have to be taken from each bale.  Once this is completed the samples will be DHL'd to New Zealand, I will then complete all the necessary paperwork and ship the bales in a container to Prague in Germany. 

The fishing vessels that Shaun and Christopher work on in Berkley Sound

Concordia Bay at Speedwell Island

As it happened the wind did go down this evening and Christopher has managed to get across to Flores Harbour, I am expecting him in at about midnight.