An Interesting Encounter

While taking photos of the fishing boats I noticed some oystercatchers on the shore and thought it would be good to get a photo of them. As I approached they flew off, naturally, making quite a fuss but never went far.
The fuss the birds were kicking up and the way they were acting could only mean one thing. They were nesting. Not that they build a nest. They lay straight onto the shingle. I had no idea if I would be looking for eggs or chicks but what I did know was that they are extremely well camouflaged either way. I studied the ground carefully before every step.
As I slowly made my way across the shingle,carefully checking every step incase I trod on the very thing I was looking for, my progress was being further hampered by a common gull who had apparently decided to join forces with the oyster-catchers and was dive bombing me.
Eventually I found what I had been looking for. One of the rocks looked odd and I soon realised I was looking at a chick. It sat there totally motionless. Not only could I not discern any breathing but it didn’t even move its eyes to look at me as I carefully edged around it to get a photo. I knew there wouldn’t be just one so I searched further and sure enough there was a second, hiding with its head stuffed in some drying kelp only a couple of feet away. The temptation to pick them up was immense but that would have been wrong so having taken a few shots I carefully moved away to leave them and their parents in peace. I felt totally elated as I had never come across them before. this was turning out to be a very good day.

Catch of the day

Dried cod is one of the main sources of income for the people of Finnmark. We passed loads of fishing huts with racks of fish drying in the air like this. It's hardly any wonder that cod stocks are so depleted in the North Sea. Who knows how the local economy will fair when the cod stocks are exhausted.
Below is a photo of some cod fishing boats, you can see more racks of fish drying behind them.

Day 4 - A trip around the coast.

The next day we hired a car so we could drive around the coast of the fiord. We had a 200km limit on our car hire for the day so we drove 50km along the coast to the west of Alta first and then planned to go 50km to the NE of Alta in the afternoon. There were no other roads so a round trip was out of the question. 50km west took us to a little peninsula with a few houses called Isnestoften. It was, like all the settlements along the coast, a fishing community. We stopped and sat by the water for a while. This was the most peaceful place I have ever been. the only sounds were natural and mainly just wading birds and gentle lapping of the water. Very gentle lapping actually as there was barely a ripple to be seen. We could have been the only humans on the planet.
On the way here we were surprised by a handful of reindeer who had decided the grass was greener on the other side of the road and just ran out in front of us. I just had to stop and get a photo although I half expected them to disappear into the vegetation at the sight of me getting out of the car. I noticed that down a bank on the other side of the road there was a heard of 20 or so but they were too difficult to get to. This guy was clearly not impressed by me as I was blocking his route that would allow him to rejoin the rest of the herd. He showed his displeasure by stamping his feet. I was amazed at just how close I could get to them. In the UK you only ever get this close to deer if they are tame as in the wild they are extremely shy creatures.
This one was the biggest of the group. I'm sure once those antlers finish growing he will be a very impressive animal.

Alta

When we arrived at Alta it was a big anti climax. The town was totally lacking in character or anything of interest. It location on the wrong side of a small hill meant you couldn't even get to see the midnight sun properly, as we were later to discover, without a long walk. Luckily we didn't have to travel far to find something that more than made up for this. A short taxi ride out of town took us to the Alta Open Air Museum. It was late in the day but with 24 hours of sunlight most businesses try and make the most of the summer with long opening hours. It also meant that all the coach parties that would normally be filling the place during the day had left and the place was almost empty. The museum was set up around an extremely extensive series of prehistoric rock carvings that had been dated as being created between 4,500BC and 500BC. These rock carvings had been chipped out of the flat stones that littered the place after the ice retreated during the end of the last ice age. They show every day life, herding reindeer and elk, fishing and hunting bears.
The location of the museum itself was also as interesting as the artefacts. It was at the edge of the fiord and had spectacular views in all directions. As we walked around we are serenaded by the sounds of wading birds calling and everywhere we looked there were beautiful wild flowers of a sort I had never seen before. The place was totally idyllic.

Glaciers

The flight from Trondheim to Alta took about 4 hours. there was little to see for the first 1 1/2 hours as we were in cloud but when we broke free the views were spectacular. We flew over glaciers and snowfields, mountains and lakes, for mile after mile. Having never seen a glacier in real life before I was thrilled to get this view (above). The fissures in the ice showed up turquoise and the whole thing looked like a pale blue tongue. The image below is the same view but zoomed out a bit.

Below are some more shots I took on the flight.

Day 2 - Trondheim to Alta

The flight from Trondheim to Alta was spectacular. The first part was in cloud but after flying for about an hour we broke free of it and the scenery had totally changed from lush green to white. We are flying at 10,000'and some of the peaks on route were about 8,500'.

Day 1 - Bergen

As mentioned, we spent the first night in Bergen, SW Norway. This was a charming town with a harbour. These houses were opposite the quay and were probably fishermen's buildings of some sort. Wood was and still is the main building material throughout Norway except in towns were concrete has taken over.

Just Back from Scandinavia

We have just got back from a 10 day flying tour of Scandinavia. I took over 800 photos in all which will take me ages to sort out. Loads of deleting to be done I'm sure :-)
There were 12 people on the trip in 6 aircraft. This photo is our arrival at Bergen, Norway where we all met up and spent the first night. Didn't see much on the flight as we were in cloud for most of it but once we broke out of the clouds the scenery was wonderful. From Bergen we went up to Trondheim and then up into the Arctic circle at a place called Alta right at the top of Norway and land of the midnight sun (home of the insomniacs). After that we flew down to Helsinki in Finland where we returned to having a couple of hours of darkness each night...bliss. Our last planned stop was Stockholm but as the weather turned bad on us we had to break our return flight at Gronegen in the Netherlands for an extra night.
Apart from some nasty flying weather on some of the legs the trip was excellent. I'll tell you more about it over the next few days.

Brac's big moment...but don't blink!

This is a frame from the Morrison's ad that Brac is in. You will have to be quick to notice him when it's on as he's only visible for about a second and hidden behind the other collie. Sorry about the quality of this image but it is a photograph of my TV screen.

Taking to the Air

Now we have the aircraft back Paul is desperate to get up-to-speed again with flying it before we go on holiday in it at the end of the month. For this reason we spent the weekend going places in it. On Saturday we flew to Shoreham airport which is near to Brighton on the south coast. This is a charming airfield as the terminal building was an original 1920 Art Deco building with all it's original features. The airfield is also located so close to the town you can walk there and get straight down onto the beach.
Yesterday we flew to Old Sarum airfield which is next to Salisbury in wiltshire. We me his parents, sister, and niece Bethany there for lunch. Paul gave Bethany and his dad a joy flight while we were there. There is a large Iron Age hill fort next to the airfield that you fly right over on the approach. This was later turned into a Norman bailey and mote castle and when that fell into disuse the stone was taken to build a cathedral. You can see the ruins of both in this image. Apparently when this cathedral was built it was so exposed and cold that no one wanted to worship there. A decision was made to relocate the cathedral and so history books record that an archer fired an arrow from the mound and where it fell was where they erected the current cathedral. However, it seems extremely unlikely that any arrow could have ever made it that far. You can just about make out the spire of the current Salisbury cathedral in this photo and it's a very long way.

Major Headache

Now here is an even bigger reason for my tardyness in blogging. My PC is getting old and arthritic. OK so it's only 4 years old but in technology terms that's ancient especially when I need to run hungry software like Photoshop. Paul tried increasing the ram for me but it's already on maximum at 1GB. One thing that did seem to be slowing everything down is spurious software that seemed to be running for no reason. Then Abode bridge, a pert of Photoshop that manages files, failed. On contacting the support desk I was told it was basically my operating system that was in error and not their software. They provided me a fix that sure enough fixed Adobe bridge but messed up the rest of my operating system! Thanks guys. I finally came to the conclusion that the only way to go was to start from scratch. I didn't want to replace my PC just yet as after the aeroplane refit we are a little tight on available funds and when I do replace this PC I want to make sure it has enough spec to last me a little longer than 4 years. The only other solution was to reformat the hard drive or simple replace it with a new one as they are pretty cheap these days. That was done last Saturday and I am still trying to re-install all my software and configure my system. It took me 24 hours to get all the windows updates installed! I'm nearly finished now and hope to have it all done by tonight but I'm sure there will be things I go to use in a few weeks time that I've forgotten to re-install. One thing I have noticed though, far less space is being used up by all my system and program files than was before. Lets just hope it runs more efficiently now. :-)

Long weekend in Berlin

The weekend before last we had a trip to Berlin. It was a flying trip organised by a group called the Socata TB Users Group which is an internet based support group for owners of Socata TB aircraft. It had been planned a long time and we were all paid up for it but for one problem. Our aircraft had been booked in over the winter for a respray and refit and the work was taking longer than expected to get done. We should have had it back at least a month before this trip but as it ended up we didn't get it back until about 30 minutes before we were due to take-off as there were still last minute problems that needed fixing. It does, however, look beautiful and the flight to Berlin went like a dream. See below



There were 31 other aircraft on the trip and we all flew into Templehof airport which is right on the edge of the city and the location for the Berlin Airlift just after the war.
Berlin is a real phoenix of a place. Flattened mainly by the Brits during the war there are few original buildings standing but what they have they have restored beautifully along side the ultra modern buildings of the Chancellery and the Paul-Löbe-Haus.
We arrived on Saturday afternoon and left after lunch on Monday. We had a city tour on foot and another by boat. A group meal was arranged for us at the top of the Reichstag on the Sunday evening and walked back through the Brandenburg Gate to our hotel. Although we saw quite a bit there is plenty we didn't get to see and I would thoroughly recommend it for a city break.

Brac moves into video

One thing I forgot to tell you guys that I know you'll be interested in, Brac did another ad last Saturday. This time for Morrisons supermarket. It's a TV advert rather than a still one and if used will be shown on ITV in the next few weeks. I took this on my mobile as they were setting up. Brac's not in this shot as he is with me. The advert had a housewife pushing a shopping trolley through a farmers gate on her way to get some spring lamb. The farmer is leaning on the gate and Brac is sitting next to him pretending to be a sheep dog. For some of the shooting he has a girlfriend, a beautiful tri-colour border collie bitch but she got worried by the shooting and after a few takes wouldn't settle any more so they continued without her. If she is in the final ad will depend on which take they use. You can just see her in the centre of this image being held my Brac's agent Viv. If you look closely you can also see the guy playing the farmer holding the gate open for a woman pushing a shopping trolley. They wanted to see if the set worked before bringing the dogs in. I think you can see the image larger if you click on it.

Bloggers Catch 22

The big trouble with blogging is that when ever I have time to blog I never have anything much of interest to say. When ever I have plenty to tell you, I don't have the time to blog! It's the Bloggers catch 22. I've not been blogging lately because I've been so busy but now it's all old news. I'll tell you some snippets but I'll break them up into separate blogs because long blogs can be a strain to read. :-)I'll also space them out a bit so they won't appear all at once.

Chinese Military possibly disguising themselvs as monks?

I didn't take this photo. It was sent to me via facebook.
It appears to be showing Chinese Military donning Tibetan Monk's robes before going on to riot and cause trouble in disguised. Whoever took this was very brave.

Brac goes live on YouTube

I have now set up a YouTube account where I shall be uploading videos of Brac from time to time. There are two on there at present but I'm sure I'll soon have a few more to add. You can see them here.

Obedience - When he feels like it!

This is me in at a training session with Brac last Thursday. He looks wonderful, bless his cotton socks. We had our first obedience show of the season yesterday but what he produced in the ring bore no relation to this. He will work like this outside the ring at the venue which is usually a sports field, but in the ring, Brac has his own agenda and paying attention to me isn't listed very high on it.

Spring

More snow

It's Spring. It's April. Friday I was walking Brac in a T shirt in glorious sun shine and thinking I should perhaps have put some lotion on. This morning it snowed, and snowed, and snowed. We ended up with 2-3" but it would have easily been twice that if it had been cold enough for it not to melt. It looked pretty for a while but once the snow started to abate it melted very quickly. The sun has just appeared but it is about to set anyway. There is now just a small amount of snow left on the rooftops but apart from that it appears to be returning to normal...what ever that is. Crazy weather.

Just being a dog!

Brac takes time out after all his hard work.