First post

Lovely day in paradise today. This is the eastern beach.

 

So no, of course I don't mean my first post to the blog, but we did concrete the first house corner post in today. We weren't able to lift the post into the hole so used a kind of gin pole arrangement.

We formed a cross using two 150x50 (6x2") timbers tied with rope in the center and bottom and were able to fairly easily lift the post using the long tail of the cross for leverage and prop it up.

Then using a hand-crank boat trailer winch we pulled the cross forward, lifting the post upwards.

And with a little assistance from the crowbar dropped it into the hole.

We bought some aggregate on the mainland at TOP$10 per sack. It's crushed coral rock, which is of course limestone, except quite a bit harder than what we're used to in NZ. It took a couple of dinghy trips to bring 3 sacks and a bag of cement over to the island. We bulked it up 50/50 with sand we collected from about 20 meters in from the high tide line so it wasn't salty, and chucked in a quite a few coral rocks to bulk it up a bit more. It took a good chunk of the day to collect rocks, sand, water from the well and get the post raised, braced and concreted but getting the first corner pole in made for a good day.

Don't forget the camera

I remembered this time. This is the coral about 400 m southeast of the house.

Broken ground

Today we dropped the last of the large trees that would pose a risk to the hut (except for a couple of smallish coconut trees)

 

We also pegged out the hut corners and broke ground on the first of the pole foundations

 

We hit old coral rock at 950mm, which is fine because I only wanted the holes to be 900mm. However, this hole was the farthest from the waterfront so we might not make the full 900 on the closer ones. The holes are 400mm wide and the poles are 200mm wide. It was fairly easy digging in gluggy red clay.

Loo revisited

Yesterday Mandy wove a roof for the outhouse so we have privacy and some limited shelter from the rain. Most importantly it's stopped all the leaves, seeds and fruit falling on the seat, which were making some nasty looking stains.

 

The walls of the outhouse are just the packing boxes I made to safely transport the solar panels. The plan is that if/when we get a big hurricane looming I'll pack the panels up in these boxes again to increase their chance of survival. I will slightly bury the box and put some logs in top.

Not much progress otherwise though. I've cleared a new garden site near the well and planted some more papaya. My back is playing up so we've not got much done on the house site recently.

Today it's bucketing down with rain and we're getting a bit of thunder and lightning. The rain barrels are topped up again so at least we have plenty of water.

Bananas

Mostly for my own record, we planted some banana palms yesterday - three lady-finger and three  "normal" palms.

 

Clearing continues

Today I cleared the flat section on the eastern beach. It was a mix of some sort of stalky grass and weeds so I hope the grass will become tame. It will make a nice spot for a picnic table. A year or so ago when we were scoping out the block I planted papaya seeds all over the place just in case we came here. The spindly papaya you can see are probably those but they are not doing very well, and I haven't found any others that survived unattended.

Other than that, clearing of the house site goes on. It's just a daily job of cutting a tree or two down, chopping them up into firewood sized chunks so it will burn green and burning it for a couple of days. About one more week, maybe two and we should be ready to start digging holes for the corner poles.

 

The guttering finally arrived so we put that up but there were no joiners and nobody had thought to order any so it will be a few months before we can get one of those. In the meantime duct tape will have to do.  It looks like we might get some rain on Saturday so we've just rigged up a hoki downpipe for now so at least we can get some water (there are always plenty of bottles washing up on the beach because rubbish bins are not customary tools here). We might get a fresh water shower this weekend, all being well!