Floor has landed

We towed the floorboards out to the island today.

 

Spy decided we'd made him a jetty to spy on the fish from. At that moment there were two big tuna swimming along the beach.

Should get the floor down in the next few days. There is still a little bit of framing work to finish off first.

Rugby and joists

On Friday Tongans were out in force to support their team, wearing their colours and driving around honking horns.

I'm almost glad the team lost because town would have been shut down for days of celebration.

We got the floor joists on today and are just starting to tie and bolt things down.


 

We need to haul floor boards over to the island but the winds have been too strong for the last week and it looks like they will continue for another week until we get a break so it might be another quiet week on the island.

Hut posts done

It's been a fairly slow couple of weeks but today we finally got the last of the hut posts concreted in, the bearers on and the outer two floor joists in place. Work has been slowed by the need to get aggregate, cement, etc. over to the island but also because I've gone and given myself a hernia, leaving Mandy to do more than her fair share of the work. We're yet to come up with a plan to manage that but the hospital in Nuku'alofa is pretty good so I guess I'm going to have to take a few weeks off to get surgery. That will put us well into the rainy season and the tent is already showing signs of rot and mould.

We also cut down a couple of Fijian kauri trees that the neighbour said we could thin from his plot to make some posts for the verandah. We got three 3m posts out of each tree. We had to float them round from the other side of the island. A fun fact is that the bottom half of a freshly cut kauri tree doesn't float, so that was a bit of a surprise.  However with the top half tied in as well they were roughly neutrally bouyant so only needed a little encouragement to walk them round the island. We still need to get more aggregate and cement over for those but they can wait a while to dry.

Visa

We finally got our Visas today. We applied for our Visas in March so this is about normal we're told.