After a surprisingly comfortable night we woke up chilly, so I fired up the “machine”. We thankfully have with us a small 2kw fan heater which seemed to happily run off the “machine” so with that and the gas fire, we soon warmed the place up. A couple of furry locals popped in to say hello. They have been regulars since and thankfully Tsala has not yet spotted them.
Today is all about diesel. 1000 litres of it to be precise. We have agreed to rent Rob’s digger on a long term basis and his tractor and trailer on a need basis. That mean we will require a lot of agricultural diesel on site. So, we have arranged a delivery of an IBC with with 1000L of red diesel. It's about half the price of the stuff we put in our cars.
It arrives on a lorry that is in a hurry. The lorry has a 2 hour window to dump all its deliveries and get back to the ferry. If it doesn’t make it, then it stays on Coll until Thursday or maybe longer if there is bad weather. It is our responsibility to off load the diesel with a tractor. As I haven’t driven a tractor since my school days, we opted to employ young Ben to drive Rob’s tractor and help us off load the diesel. That was a very good call. It was a very tricky manoeuvre. My overriding worry was that if the IBC got punctured we would have an environmental catastrophe on our hands. All was well though and after the delivery, I had a tractor driving lesson. Ben is an agricultural student who has been working on farms on the island while studying and he will be helping us with various jobs over the coming months.
We spent the rest of the day measuring and staking out the house and reviewing our plans for the garage location. Julia dug a small temporary vegetable patch… Judging by the size of it, our poly tunnel won't cost much!
I had been fretting about the “machine” breaking in the damp air so we made a spontaneous decision at 5:30pm to cut a 5 inch square hole in the side of the caravan in order to thread the Leaf cable through and relocate our precious device inside. I used my new angle grinder and it worked very well - much better than the rebar incident. Unfortunately I was rushing for a family zoom call and managed to fuse the whole caravan so we had the call in the dark. Family were doubtful about the explanation and slightly concerned for our well being! It was fixed in time for supper though.
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