It's A bit Windy

Sunday 27th November 2011

 Well, winter has arrived with a vengence. This video was taken last Wednesday of The Varagen, one of the ferries that go to the outer north isles. She is a reasonably large boat about 160 feet long and weights 321 tons although the video makes her look small.


After that the weather started to get worse and we have had gales and hailstones which tend to sting a bit when they hit you. This morning it excelled itself and the wind was classed as class 1 hurricane.
It was about 100 mph with us at about 7 this morning although in other parts of Orkney it got up to 133 mph so I suppose we are lucky.
Everything up here is built to survive the wind and we had no damage, even the chicken sheds were still standing where I left them.

I did notice this morning though that on the road to the village some big round straw bales have been blown out of the fields and across the road. It looked quite puzzling at first as the bales must have run over the fences out of the field and broken the fence posts but the fence had then sprung back and I couldn't see how the bales had got out.

I had to go to "The Balfour" last week to see the anaesthtist before they have a go at straightening my finger.
Once again I was impressed by the efficiency of the health service up here. If you have an appointment to see a doctor at 09:30 then you see the doctor at 09:30, something that seems to be unheard of down south. I was in, checked and booked in for the operation within 15 minutes. They would have booked me in for the operation in December but I said that I was going south for christmas so it had to be delayed until January. None of the 18 month waiting lists being the baseline.

All this was in spite of me offering my urine sample to a consultant surgeon thinking that she was a nursing assistant.

I have just seen a graph from EMEC at Billia Croo that shows wave height this morning. It is running along nicely at about 12 metres then it registers one huge wave at about 42 metres. I have heard of rogue waves big enough to sink tankers but this seems a bit extreme. Perhaps the wave recorder made a mistake. No doubt we shall hear in time.