Frogger

We have a sailing boat in Shetland and I think it definitely would be OK to liveaboard all winter in one of the marinas, (not at any of the piers - too rough) You would just have to be prepared to get fairly cold and damp but if you have electricity then you can have a heater and a dehumidifier running (we run that on our boat all winter just to keep the damp smell away.) In a gale though it would be pretty worrying sitting on a boat, we have gone and tied extra rope on but been very relieved to go home to our warm house and not have to sit it out on the boat which was heeling even in the marina! Most of the marinas up here would want sails off for the winter which is just as well as they can be shredded if left on the mast. The Lerwick marina did try to get us to take our whole mast down so we didn't leave the boat there for a winter. Your choice of marina depends on what facilities you want. Lerwick has all the town amenities but it is beside the power station in the middle of the industrial sector. Scalloway has two marinas, I don't know what space they have but I suspect your size of boat would be able to fit into either. Skeld is a great clean well kept marina and has all the facilities (inc wifi!) but no shop and the bus service is only a couple of times a day to the town (I think - only ever sailed there so don't lambast me if I am a bit wrong!!) Aith has the shop etc as mentioned in a previous post but the bus service is similar to Skeld although it does have free SIC wifi in the leisure centre. I don't think Voe would have any space for a winter berth for a boat your size as there is only one pontoon although worth a try as it is certainly one of the most sheltered and well built marinas up here but then the shop is a bit of a walk as is the bus stop - but you do have the excellent Pierhead restaurant and bar and a bakery at the head of the pontoon There are many more good marinas up here but those are the few I have experienced, all are well sheltered and as long as you have plenty of good rope and fenders your boat will be fine. They certainly all beat wintering in many marinas in the Med for swell creeping in as they are built to a much better standard and obviously up here you couldn't have harbours on the more exposed shores as they would be untenable whereas over there they will build them anywhere they think they can make some money. Hope that helps.

In answer to one of the posts above, when we went to Aberdeen to have our second child we thought it would be far easier for us all to go on the boat. The doctors/Northlink advised seriously against this and said that if we did travel that way at an advanced stage of pregnancy and the eventuality of early labour/complications/airlift arose we would be liable for the costs they estimated a hefty 3-4000! So we flew!

Well I think the rule be aware of everyone on the roundabout is the best one applied to Shetland as there are older drivers who haven't been trained in roundabouts specifically so WE all should be aware rather than slagging them off. I met an old guy stuck in the traffic in the middle of the Sound roundabout yesterday and no one was stopping to let him through, seriously shame on you all - what if it was your grandad who just got a bit confused for a second or two?? I patiently waited for him to leave the roundabout whilst the guy next to me (who had only stopped because I had) spent the 20 seconds of extra waiting time he had to endure gesticulating at the old man. Shameful is all I have to say.

Just Finished 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' yesterday too. Best crime novel I have read in ages, can't wait to get my hands on 'The Girl Who Played with Fire!' Last week finished 'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun' by Peter Godwin It is a very good true life about the lives of white nationals in Zimbabwe under the rule of Robert Mugabe. A non fiction book but a page turner all the same. It really opened my eyes.

Does anyone know how the Pelamis wave farm off the coast of Portugal is coming along? I sailed past there this autumn after having got really excited to see the huge sea snakes and there was.......nothing! Only a few cardinal markers showing where it had been, It turned out it had been taken ashore to have problems with internal bearings fixed and whilst ashore some financial problems arose during the 'crash'. Has it/will it be redeployed? Will it be the same models used to the West of Shetland? On another note we saw thousands of windmills up and down the coast of Spain, (not so much Portugal) and now we are sitting in a marina in Spain underneath a seriously huge solar panel.

We got our hands on an aerial photo of our house for free a few years ago. The guy had been around selling the photos and we hadn't bought one. Then when he had left the house he was staying in he left ALL the unsold photos so the owners of the house gave them out to everyone that they recognised the houses of. Now that was value for money!!

The energy from the windfarm will supply Shetland first then the surplus (nearly all of it) will go 'South' Scottish and Southern are as we speak drawing up the plans for the new high voltage lines through Tingwall and Stromfirth to supply Lerwick, Scalloway and the South end. Some lines which are fairly close to houses will be upgraded from 33,000 volts to ~130,000volts. These extra bits of information are what we want to know know and we are being completely kept in the dark. If Scottish and Southern are drawing up plans for the converter supply to the local grid then surely all the plans for the other power lines connecting the turbine fields to the substations and finally the converter must already be drawn up. Why cant we see these? Is it because it is so bad that there will be an outcry or if they released the plans would it put our minds at ease? That is one of the things that has me worried about the project is the seeming need for keeping the details under wraps. It just makes me worry about what they else are hiding.

Was anyone at the Sustainable Shetland meeting last night, I couldn't make it and so would like to know what those of you who attended thought.

This is very true I myself found a used needle in a Bergen park whilst playing hide and seek with my daughter (':shock:'), needless to say that was the end of the game.... Also a Norwegian friend saw a man with a needle still protruding from his arm wandering through the market at the end of the pier. She told him that she thought he had forgotten something pointing to said needle!

The thing that really infuriates me about Viking Energy hiring (at our expense) "image consultants" is that they were saying on the radio that some people just don't know very much about the project. That is only because they are not telling us anything about it. We know they have detailed plans of where the roads through the hill are going and where they are double (most of them) and where they are single track. They already have plans of which already existing roads they will be widening to get the huge lorries and cranes up to the tops of the hills - why aren't the people who live next to these roads being told what will be happening? The lack of information is what breeds 'scaremongering' to use VE's very own words. They know where they will be putting the substations and which routes the overhead cables will go back from the turbines to the converter also what voltage each line will have capacity for. This especially is information that people need to know. What about the poor people of Voe they willl be surrounded by turbines and probably high voltage overhead lines will be criss crossing the village too. The only answer that you ever get from VE about the overhead lines is that Shetland has a no pylon policy and so there will be no pylons. Well maybe there should be as these lines may be of such a high voltage that they should be suspended way up high or buried. Then again maybe not but how will we know unless they tell us? All we have got from them so far are a few bubbles on a map and photos taken on dull days when you wouldn't be able to see the windmills very well. Why cant the Shetland public see the detailed plans now is it a publicly owned company or not? The only reasons that the information hasn't been made public is either that Viking think we are too stupid to understand or that it is not as favourable to them and will be shocking to the rest of us and that it may actually spur more people into objecting to the whole proposal. Why can't we see the partnership agreement? Is it so obviously stacked in SSE's favour that there would be an uproar? Is it so dodgy that there would be an outcry? The whole project is so murky I think that the image consultants will certainly earn their £10,000 if they can convince us all not to be very worried indeed.

Hi Njugle All that I know about the cable(s) is that SHETL were aiming to go up the East side of the Weisdale valley but when they were doing their 'consultation' SEPA came to the Weisdale hall and told them they would be very against the cable crossing the Kergord burn. Therefore they are investigating the West side of the voe instead. This is less favourable mainly because it has far more houses and landowners to get permission from the smaller landowners being more likely to object to them crossing their land than the bigger three that own the land on the East side. They are also investigating Sandsound because they have to because it was brought up at the consultation. Just the same protocol that they have to investigate putting the massive converter station at Setter in Weisdale because again the said landlord 'offered' them his ground! It turns out even though they probably wont put the converter station there but it could be the site of a huge laydown yard. Just another example of how this whole project will impact severely on the lives of people living in the once peaceful countryside. Also an example of how it will rip communities apart when landowners and their neighbours fall out over the sites of turbines, substations, powerlines, quarries, widened roads etc,etc..... The other point that will need to be cleared up is that there still hasn't been a decision by the regulators whether there has to be one,two or three cables to the mainland. I believe Viking Energy are campaigning for one because that will reduce the cost of transporting energy down the cables therefore making it more profitable, but leaving us in a more financially vulnerable position in the case of a break. It also means that we will not be able to get rid of the power station because the population would be a risk of a winter long blackout if the cable broke in bad weather. There is still so much information that is not in the public domain (partner ship agreement terms and conditions for example) that should be and Viking Energy are supposed to be going for planning later this summer. What can be done to stop this or at least make the councillors forget the pounds for a while and really consider whether this is really as 'green' as they think it is. If wind energy was 100% reliable and didn't need 100% backup then it would be a lot easier to swallow as you at least try to convince yourselves that Shetland was doing its bit for climate change and the rest of Britain.

Hi guys, first post although I must admit I have been reading this forum for ages now! There have been two survey boats active to the west of Shetland and in Weisdale Voe for the last few weeks. The larger of the two the Franklin is doing the deep sea survey and the smaller boat Ping is doing the surveys in shallower areas that the big one can't. The reason that Viking energy has been very quiet about this is that this piece of the whole project is run by SHETL the SSE power distribution team. Who incidentally have not been shouting it from the roof tops either! Viking Energy have been extremely quiet ever since a very provocative letter in the Shetland Times a few weeks ago which got a large response from some of the people it was berating. One wonders if the author of the letter has been told by higher powers to keep it zipped for a while? It almost looked like he was a Sustainable Shetland double agent for a while!