June 2009

Discover a Dutch company Wijma with a depot at Woolpit that specialise in large timber for marine use. They have stocks of certified Greenheart at their yard. Arrange to inspect the timber with Ken to see if it is straight enough for floating pontoons; if it isn’t pretty straight there’s a risk the pontoons will jam on the piles!

Need to decide how long the piles need to be…we have a test bore done, there’s 6metres of mud before we find any hard ground. In addition John Davis stirs the mud with a giant porridge stirrer to find out how stiff it is and therefore how much support it’ll give the piles; answer: not a lot! Add 4metres from the mud to the veranda, but the piles must go a couple of metres into the hard ground so that makes 12metres long, but the piles can’t be driven to a precise height, they must be over length and cut to the right height so we need 13metre piles. This causes 2 problems, our contractor can only handle 8 metre piles and 13metre timber may need a special shipment from the Guyana where the timber is sourced.

We decide to buy the piles in 2 lengths joined by a steel box section. John calculates the length for this at 1.5metres and specifies a fabricated Stainless steel box. This will cost over £1,500 per pile! As this is necessary only for the pontoon piles the steel box must lie below the mud level so the pontoons can easily slide up and down. John Davis does some research and confirms what everyone says, that there’s no wood rot and little corrosion below mud level as there’s no oxygen there. Decide that therefore we can use mild steel box section, drilled and then galvanised, only £500 per box!!

26th June - Order Galvanised steel from Mike Jackson who gave us the best quote and has supplied the extra railing by the side gate and the strengthening beam on the veranda.

29th June - Go sailing for 2 weeks, planned trip to Holland, even took my CEVNI qualification; in the event it was a foggy week so ended up going to Itchenor

Simon Shaw