Category: flickr

Chicken Rock

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My Mum and Dad recently jumped on a special ferry from Douglas in the Isle of Man to… er… Douglas… in the Isle of Man.
This “round the Island” trip is a chance for locals to go… er… round the island and see it from a different perspective.

Here’s one of the photos they took:

This is the Chicken Rock lighthouse off the south west coast of the Isle of Man. Wikipedia tells us:

The 0.1 hectare rock is home to a 44 m (144 ft) lighthouse which was designed by engineers David and Thomas Stevenson after it was realised that the lights on the Calf of Man were not sufficient to warn ships away. Construction of this tapered granite structure was completed in December 1874 and the first official lighting day was on 1 January 1875.

So not quite as old as the Cape Agulhas light, but given that this one is built on a rock that is completely submerged at high tide and which lies 4.5km off the mainland (and about 7.5km from the nearest port), I think that’s a pretty amazing feat of engineering for that time.

Gannet

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This isn’t the first time we’ve featured a photo by Chris Wormwell on 6000 miles... That’s because this was the first time we featured a photo by Chris Wormwell on 6000 miles...

But this is beautiful:

gan1

This is a fine example of a Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus), off the coast of the Isle of Man. Chris describes this as “pretty much just a bread and butter shot”, so I look forward to seeing some of his “fine dining” work at some point.

You may see close relatives of this fellow (the bird, not Chris) off the Cape coast too. But those, like just every other bird found around here, take the title ‘Cape’ – Cape Gannet (Morus capensis). And whereas there are loads of Northern Gannets to go around, our local species is classed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, so don’t go poaching them, ok?

There are some pretty cool facts about gannets. They are cleverly adapted (Evolution FTW!) to be able to dive from a great height to catch fish. Because they can hit the water at up to 100kph, special air-sacs within their skull protect them from the massive impact, like biological bubble wrap. Additionally, their nostrils are inside their mouths, preventing that awkward unintentional nasal lavage that can all too often ruin a good dive.
It must make things pretty nasty when they get a cold though. Eww.

Photo credit: Many thanks to Chris for his permission to use his photo.

Last Of The Summer Braaiin’?

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That is a legendary title for a post. And yes, I recognise that I announced the onset of winter a couple of weeks ago, but after that dreadful day, apparently summer sobered up, had a bit of a sit down,  realised it missed us all and popped back to prolong itself a bit.
That’s why last week we had this:

While today we were treated to an absolute cracker, with cloudless blue skies, not a breath of wind and temperatures of 30°C.

Perfection.

Mindful that these meteorological conditions have other places to be and can’t stick around forever, we used the time wisely to get in a nice early evening braai:

And while, to the untrained observer, it may appear that there is some sort of breeze blowing, this is Cape Town: our smoke is so used to being moved rapidly in a northwesterly direction that even in flat calm conditions it just comes out of the stack and heads that way automatically.
It is Pavlovian smoke, but you don’t even have to ring a bell to influence its behaviour. This is good because I don’t actually own a bell.

With dwindling supplies of braai wood, now comes a tricky seasonal decision. One must balance the amount of wood one owns, because while on the one hand, you don’t want stacks of wood getting wet and being useless during the winter month, on the other, there will be days when you just need to braai and you just need to have the requisite materials to hand.

It’s a fine line, generally best trodden, I find, by sticking two bags of rooikrans in your garage and having some briquettes on standby.

I shall arrange this tomorrow.

Done ’em

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I promised photos upon my return to Cape Town and I’ve stuck some up on Flickr – my first set in ages thanks to this.

Following on from yesterday’s striped theme:

In fact, there are a lot of animals and birds in the set, because we saw a lot of animals and birds over the last week or so. They’re not the best photos ever, because I’m not the best photographer ever.

They do serve to document our activities for those elsewhere though, which is primarily their aim.
So I win at that.

Evaporate

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Whizzing through flickr (I have got my camera back, after all), I spotted this and loved it:

evap

It’s the inside of a cooling tower at Satsop nuclear power plant in Washington state and it’s even more striking bigger and on black.

And yes, that tiny black rectangle at the end of the walkway is a door. So yes, the scale and size are incredible.

Photo credit: Rustyjaw on flickr