Beach hut north of Mablethorpe

We’re on “staycation” at the moment, and today took a day trip to our local coast in Lincolnshire.  We headed to Mablethorpe, known to the locals as “the village of the daleks” due to the unusually high number of motability scooters in town (and it is true!)

A very traditional British seaside resort, with beach huts (although some unusual designs as you can see), donkeys on the beach, sticks of rock for sale, only bucking the trend with a complete absence of “kiss me quick” hats and both a nearby on-shore and off-shore wind farm.

A beautiful coastline with great beaches, and the pinnacle is surely the Gibraltar Point nature reserve just south of Skegness; maybe it was the fact that it was such a vivid and welcome change from it’s neighbouring resort, or the fact that the sun finally came out when we got there, but the peace and tranquility was stunning.

Selected highlights below.

Another beach hut

And another

And a load more!

Donkeys on the beach

And sticks of rock!

It was a long hot day of concrete pouring for the foundations of the turbine.  About 30 cubic metres of concrete was required to make the foundations secure, and it had to be tamped down (smoothed with a big piece of wood; a bit like icing a cake …) to slope away from the foundation ring so that rainwater will run away from the base.  You have to work quickly as the concrete soon “goes off” (sets), but it all went smoothly are here are a selection of photos of the day’s events.

Concrete being pumped

The Pump Meister

Remote control pouring

With a little manual intervention

A vibrator to help the concrete settle

Then the tamping begins ...

... and thankfully eventually ends

The finished product (well, a tower, turbine and grid connection still to go)

Our lake is well stocked with carp:

Which is why the heron likes it here so much ….

The heron catches a carp (honest, zoom in ...)

We had a visit today from the BBC to do some filming for Country Tracks.  Country File visited many years ago, so they’ve come back to see how we’re getting on.  The focus of the item will be on our renewable energy generation, both on site, which meets 90% of our demand, and the latest project to install a village community turbine.

Presenter Ellie Harrison interviewed Liz and I at HHP (no photos of that for obvious reasons) and then went up to the site of the new village turbine and interviewed our neighbour Nick Martin who was busy installing the foundations, but not too busy to be interviewed by the BBC – see some photos below.  Not sure when the programme will be broadcast, but we’ll post when we know.

Nick Martin and presenter Ellie Harrison

Nick & Ellie talkin' turbine

There was a sad end to the day though when we found one of this year’s lambs dead in one of the lakes in the “bean field”; poor thing had got his head stuck in a watering can and fallen in the lake.  With this life you have to take the rough with the smooth.

3 years in the planning, 3 months of fund-raising, and the base of Sustainable Hockerton’s community-owned turbine is finally in.  Just a lot of concrete pouring and the transport and erection of a 31m tower and turbine to go…

Both turbines are now back up and operational.  The Iska is hoisted manually – it is hard work and takes time:

Heave-ho

For the Proven though we have to enlist the help of a local farmer and his tractor (thanks Patrick):

A real tractor and Simon on our Dinky version

But by the end of the day they are both up and generating clean, renewable energy:

Back and better than ever (we hope!)

We recently lost the plastic cowling off our Proven turbine (this is the bit that helps it turn into the wind, so quite useful …) so we had to get it down to replace it.  Here are some photos from today’s lowering … note the fine August weather!

Going ...

Going ...

Gone! Down

At the same time, the very nice people from Iskra came along to replace our Iskra 5kW turbine with a new version.  Hopefully it will be more efficient and quieter (not that the current one is particularly noisy …).  Here it is on the way down …

The leaning turbine of Hockerton ...

And here’s the new one …

I think they might have forgotten a bit ... it will certainly be quieter!

Of course it’s not the new one; they were testing tension in the tower guy wires, so easier to do so without the turbine on the tower.  The turbine will be hoisted tomorrow, watch this space …

Lucy Clarke, a photography student doing a project on people & their eco houses came to photograph us on 10th May, and this is the result …

Not that our house is in the photo though!

We were visited this weekend by a good friend, Simon Westcott, who in his past was a professional photo journalist.  He took some rather lovely photos of HHP that I thought I’d share …

Number 2 from across the lake

The terrace from across the lake

From the roof of number 2

Farmer Luke

The houses from the Sustainable Resource Centre (SRC)

Bridge, lake and houses

Freezer time!

Today we harvested our first crop of broad beans, and after a lovely lunch of young broad beans with cream (from Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook – thoroughly recommended) it was time to start shelling beans big time and getting them in the freezer.

These are some mean beans ...