Island 2000 Trust Blog

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Well, it’s 1.30am on Saturday, and it has been a hectic week. We were pleased to welcome Solo, organisers of the Isle of Wight Festival as our first corporate members of Gift to Nature recently. Part of our partnership with the Festival involves us manning a tent with information on Island conservation and in particular our Bees project developed jointly with the Festival. As usual with these things, everything took longer than usual to arrange, printers let us down at the last minute and so on. Then to top things off the weather on Thursday meant vehicles were banned from the festival site in the late afternoon - just as we needed to get all our gear on! A hectic morning followed on Friday, but we managed to get set up in time for things kicking off onsite at 2pm. We had a bit of a soft start on Friday afternoon, but will be pursuing Festival Goers tomorrow (I mean later today) with a vengeance, encouraging them to plant our fabbie bee wicks and part with their cash in pursuit of Bee conservation. Give Bees A Chance.

We’ve teamed up with Biffa and IW Festival and asked artists to decorate 10 bins that will be used as part of the festival this coming weekend. You can see eight of them here, we’ll post pictures of the ninth one, done by Michael Forrest, when we’ve delivered it to the site. The tenth one is the lovely Bee Bin that Aaron Fletcher did which will actually be used as donation bin over the weekend in the Gift to Nature tent. We don’t know where they’ll end up but hopefully they’ll help festival organisers in their efforts to make the festival a more green and litter free place. Dave Badman enlisted help from students at Chale Primary school to do his large bin. After an educational lesson all about waste, recycling and what to do with your rubbish the children designed their own cartoon story based on imaginary festival goer ‘Rocky’, as he says, “Don’t be a litterbug”!

Well, it is now upon us.   The Big Green Picnic kicks off in about two and a half hours.   Island 2000 have been busy preparing all kinds of stuff, from lollipop signs to entrance way arches.  Gift to Nature will be there throughout the day, with an opportunity to see video clips of our work and have a chat with staff about our Friends scheme and the projects it helps bring to life.  Magpie has turned some rubbish into incredible creations which will be on show around the Biffa waste displays.  There will also be some interesting on-street signage, but more of that after the event….   I’m not going to post any images of the amazing creations that will be there, as you should come and see them for yourself.  County Hall  Car Park, Newport from 10-6 Saturday and Sunday.  Oh and there’s lots more interesting stuff from other people too!

Dave Dana, dragonfly recorder extraordinaire, has reported 2 very exciting records from the Gift to Nature pond at the sandown Wetland Walk. He found Hairy Dragonfly Brachytron pratense and Four-spotted Chaser Libellula quadrimaculata, both rather scarce on the Island and the former scarce just about everywhere! This is a great reward for the conservation efforts of the Trust, many volunteers and Southern water who own the site. Here’s one of Dave’s fabulous pictures of the chaser.

As part of our work for Yarmouth Harbour on all things Yarmouth Pier, we were asked to put together a show to celebrate the pier and mark its re-opening. The Not-The-End-Of-The-Pier Show was born. A certain member of staff who shall remain nameless decided it would be a good idea to claim we could light up the pier as part of the show. We calculated we had around £1,000 to illuminate the 609ft long pier. A quick bit of online research turned up various projects to light piers. Saltburn Pier had been lit, but permanently. Cost? £380,000. hmm… New Brighton Pier came in for a more modest $50,000NZ. Nowhere I looked had a budget of less than £25K, even for temporary installations. Oh dear. The Island 2000 team kicked around various ideas, including illuminated balloons, which would have looked beautiful but gave us too many issues of reliability, safety and marine environmental risk. Out of this however was developed a simple, low cost idea.  Post event we had enquiries from people wanting to replicate the idea, and I thought it might prove helpful to others looking to light large structures to blog details on how we did it.

We bought tiny LED packages designed to insert into balloons from Ebay and threaded them together with garden wire in groups of 3. Each group of 3 was then strapped to the enormous handrail with 4 long cable ties linked together at 4ft intervals (or 4 plank widths - it was the easiest way to measure, even if you look rather silly tiptoeing down the pier counting!). The local community helped light the pier, collecting a set of lights each from the bottom of the pier, then strapping them on where we had put out the cable ties. It was still light when we started, and we hadn’t tested the concept on the pier (only testing had been strapping LEDs on the back of my car one rainy night and running halfway down the street to check they were visible) so it was a nerve racking half hour as the sun set. As it got darker though it became clear that the effect was working. Once the lights were in place we deployed the last stage of our lighting, floodlighting the timber roundhouse at the end of the pier. We used a Ring PowerPack - a handy combination of heavy duty battery and inverter in one box, providing 300W of mains power to supply power to 4 low energy site lamps from screwfix.

The approximate cost breakdown was:

600 LEDs - £300
4 work lamps £160
Powerpack £100
Garden wire £3
Cable ties £50
Experimentation along the way £200

The end result was captured beautifully by Julian Winslow. Because of the angle of the shot (aimed at capturing the fireworks - not included in the budget!) you can’t see the lights close in to shore that well, but the ones at the end 600+ft away can be clearly seen.  Click on the picture for a larger version.

I had the great privilege of joining in with Professor Boffin’s walking festival walk around Cowes and East Cowes “The Queen’s Bloomers” on Sunday. What a great walk! If he manages the trip across the Solent to present it again next year I would heartily recommend it. The YouTube video below gives a small taste of the days fun.

Saturday saw the re-opening of Yarmouth Pier after months of work replacing piles and improving the look of the pier. Alan Titchmarsh officially opened the pier, and unveiled a plaque listing donors to the pier appeal. Meanwhile Island 2000 provided all manor of excitement in Pier Square and at the end of the pier, including arts and craft activities, a Gribble hunt, pier wildlife safari and a display of the New Pier Archive including an audio-visual presentation. In the evening an estimated 500+ people returned to light the pier and enjoy a fantastic fireworks display.

Some pictures below courtesy of Cat James

No Ian, Alan Titchmarsh is opening the pier, get down!

The second sexiest man on TV charms the crowds by discussing piles before opening the pier.

and then unveils a plaque, assisted by Richard Gribble, who is very proud of his curtains. A member of Island 2000’s crack security detail hovers to the right, hiding behind a silly grin…

…while another guards the image of Roger Herbert. Don’t let the smile fool you, this man is SAS trained you know.

On Monday, Island 2000’s bio-tech department reported the results of the latest stage of its GM trials. A joint investigation with Yarmouth Harbour Commission is seeking to establish whether splicing DNA extracted from the gribble (Limnoria lignorum) into the human genome can impart the ability to breathe under water.

Samantha Buck, who has been running the trial said “There’s nothing unusual about breathing in an aquatic environment. Lots of species do it. We just need to make some minor adjustments to the way our bodies function. If we can crack this one, it could provide a significant boost to the Island’s tourist industry and would be the perfect accompaniment to the launch of our Isle of Wight snorkelling guide. Although results up to now have been disappointing, we must remember that this study was very small and we cannot be sure that the results are statistically significant.”

The trial recently ran into controversy when three volunteers were admitted to St Mary’s A&E suffering from water on the lung and two others developed an uncharachteristic urge to gnaw wooden objects.

We currently have a part time job vacancy and a volunteer position available within the Gift to Nature team. If you would like more details please take a look at the Gift to Nature site where you can download an application pack.