Island 2000 Trust Blog

Many companies spend vast amounts on viral marketing campaigns. We appear to have stumbled on one by accident. Well, part by accident, then we mercilessly exploited it. Very Island 2000!

Ian decided to post a picture to his personal Flickr site of the doors to our lock up at The Gatehouse, our old offices. It managed to creep out onto Reddit then hit the front page of BoingBoing and turned up on Digg too. At this point I must admit to only having a passing familiarity with these sites (shame on me, what kind of nerd am I?) but as the hit count at Flickr mounted I realised we needed to link Ian’s pic to the Island 2000 site. Result? Half a months worth of site visits in less than 2 days! (and our site is fairly well used anyway)

Well, weird is always popular on the internet, and we have all flavours on offer here. So, if you have arrived via Ian’s flickr posts, welcome. There is much more madness to behold, please browse the blog, <plug> and don’t forget, all this madness comes from positive charitable endeavour, so if you want to say thanks, why not joing our Friends scheme? </ plug> (Just trying to demonstrate I really am a nerd, even if I don’t do digg, read reddit or brave boingboing.) If you didn’t understand the < > bit, then go and learn html.

Forget afternoon tea breaks, afternoon rowing breaks are the future! After too long in front of the computer monitor, Dan’s suggestion of a quick trip out in the boat was too tempting to refuse. So Dan, Simon and I sloped off for a bit to row out from East Cowes seafront into the Solent. It was a beautiful afternoon, with silky smooth seas and the sun low in the sky over Cowes. What a fantastic way to reinvigorate yourself before heading back to the office for some more hard work. For half an hour…

The video below shows some select bits from our little voyage, including some views of Island 2000’s home, Venture Quays (formerly known more interestingly as the Columbine building or Columbine shed) - just look out for the Union Jack. You can also see just how easy to transport and put away our boat is - even in a first floor room!

Well what else would you call a flint finch?

Here you can see the progress of The Purple Kite from scraps of plywood pulled out of a skip, to the proud craft bobbing down the river below.

Like many projects, it’s the result of a random turn in a conversation. Simon was talking about beavers and streams, then someone said it would be great if we had an inflatable canoe for surveying wildlife in ponds and rivers. After that someone came up with a challenge: to make our own boat in one day using only recycled materials and anything we could find in the office and then row it across the River Medina and back.

We set to work in our small inventions workshop in East Cowes which SEEDA let us use specifically for making interesting and unlikely creations.

Well, we failed to make it in a day and cheated by buying a box of screws, but as it took shape over the next week our confidence grew that it really would stay afloat with us in it. It started to feel more and more like a proper boat.

The more organic lines can be explained by the fact that there weren’t any plans and there wasn’t a lot of measuring either.

This picture shows Simon ceremonially rubbing down the boat in whiskey prior to painting.

There are two port-holes in the bottom for observing fish, rocks, seaweed and submarines passing beneath us.

At this point the boat had no name, but by means of a democratic process, we arrived at The Purple Kite. The Island 2000 logo is of course a purple kite and it is also, by sheer coincidence, the rarest species of sea-bird to be found in the British Isles, never having been observed or recorded.

Launch day - a last minute attack of responsibility makes us leave behind our recycled life-jackets and ask Offshore Challenges next door if they can lend us something more reliable. They hand us two very swanky-looking flotation devices which, we understand, deploy automatically as soon as they get a whiff of sea-water. Simon instructs us that if it looks like we’re going down, we’re to throw them back onto the land to avoid the punitive cost of recharging the gas canisters.

Luckily, this isn’t necessary as it turns out to be the driest rowing boat we’ve been in. We launch from the slipway just next to the car ferry, waved off in a cloud of sherbet by well-wishers and curious staff from Red Funnel. The oars are on the long side for such a small boat, but The Purple Kite is easy to row and very manoeuvrable, sitting surprisingly high in the water.
If you’d like to see the cross-Medina escapade for yourself, take a look at the Youtube video below.

We’re now planning to produce some commentaries on the wildlife of the Isle of Wight’s rivers, viewed and recorded from the water. The Purple Kite is available for other water-borne tasks or challenges. Any suggestions?

Twenty-five years after her disappearance in a mysterious canoeing accident, Jo walked into East Cowes police station, apparently unaware that she had ever been missing.

The latest exciting instalment of the Island 2000 newsletter is now online. To read the November issue, or any of the back issues, just visit the newsletter page.

Take a look at this rather beautiful thing. It’s about 3×2 cms and looks like polished metal.
My youngest son found it when we went beach-combing down along the shoreline at the end of Fishbourne Lane. We were looking for good skimming stones (there are loads of nice flat flints and slates there) and whatever else we could find when Jerry picked this up. At first I thought it was a bit of seaweed holdfast or a lump of old Sugarkelp until I held it and realised that it was stone. I stopped Jerry from hurling it into the Solent by giving a much nicer pebble and carefully pocketed the whatever-it-was. And, having scanned it in and sent a picture to expert palaeontologist Martin Munt at Dinosaur Isle, I ‘ve been waiting keenly to learn what it might actually be. Well, it wasn’t disappointing that’s for sure! It is a ’scute’, that’s a piece of body armour, from a 35 million year-old crocodile called Diplocynodon!
How completely fantastic.

missing image

The Arts Team asked local basket maker and artist Tim Johnson to give I2k staff an expert guide round the fabulous ‘East Weaves West’ exhibition at Quay Arts last week. This was an incredibly inspiring and rich exhibition showcasing Basketry from Japan and Britain and it has been received with great enthusiasm from gallery goers on the Island. A whole spectrum of basketry was on show, from the strong and functional to the decorative and fragile and all things in between. We wanted to look at the show in relation to the variety of work we do at the Trust. In particular we realised that the natural materials that are cleared in some of our conservation work could be channeled back into arts and making projects and that our fledgling ’scrapstore’ we are developing should have a ‘natural scrap’ section too.

The picture to the left shows Danny and Ian modeling (Chinese and Dutch respectively) woven shoes. Warm, comfy and good for sliding across galleries apparently but very creaky.

Whilst out checking a fairly remote spot for its likely reptile habitats I came across this wonderful hat. It seemed to have been there for a long time. It has ‘Happy Birthday’ written across it and some candles on top and since it is nearly my birthday I took it as a sign to pick it up wear it.
I believe it may have been left there quite deliberately by a reptile community grateful for the time and effort we spend on their behalf. After all (and with apologies to Eddie Izzard) if bees can make honey why shouldn’t slow worms make hats?
If I look quite emotional it’s at the thought of animals with no hands struggling to make hats.