27th April: Jetty final touches!

While the main jetty rebuild was finished towards the end of March there were still bits for me to finish off.  I refastened the old tyres to the uprights in the hardstanding area and used a spare piece of scaffolding and fittings, which had supported the weather station during the rebuild, to create another raised anchor point for attaching the 6-part purchase when careening the Seafly.

The bamboo screen which provides a windbreak for west and southwest winds had come to the end of its life and was broken up during the levelling and strengthening of the staging area over the river.  The replacement needed to fill a 2m by 1m area and the nearest to that size I could find was 4m x 1.2m Bamboo Split Slat Screening being sold through B&Q by Best Artificial Ltd. who turned out to be in northern Ireland.

They shipped the purchase via DX and I waited in for it. When nothing arrived I checked the tracking and it said I had not been in and they had left a card.  I was and they didn’t.  I rearranged the delivery.  What arrived was, frankly, rubbish. The outside of the bamboo must have been very dirty when it was split and the wiring was so loose that slats could fall out!

I couldn’t be bothered to send it back so I put it up using roofing battens from Covers who, in contrast,  couldn’t have been more helpful, cutting the battens into 2 halves for me and putting them in the car.  On a windy couple of days I managed to get two layers of bamboo in place to restore my windbreak.

On the east side  of the staging I re-used two hardwood lengths which previously had acted to stop the pontoon rubbing on the metal piles as it went up and down at the end of the jetty. They are a very dense red coloured wood and drifted up in the river sometime after I first moved in.  I was pleased to  have a bit of the old jetty incorporated into the new.

Finally, because since each length of Millboard would provide 2 jetty planks with a length left over, I had asked Mark to use them to relay the garden path.  We both miscalculated so in the end it was necessary to buy more Millboard and the project turned out relatively expensive given that the idea was to use up the left-overs…  however the path used to get very slippery in winter near the shed end and the new path should be much safer, except perhaps in icy weather, we shall see!  Mark did most of the work on 17th April and, having had to order yet one more length of Millboard, finished it of the 23rd April.