Huge lighting storm seen from Rye, East Sussex

Amazing lightning storm just went past Rye in the English Channel, brilliant view from our garden! Here's a video slideshow of the stills, do put it in full-screen and 1080p HD!

Here's one of the stills:

You can view the rest on my Flickr page.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Freak storm in Rye, and a first responder call!

On Friday a freak storm hit Rye, and while we were outside videoing it with my GoPro we got a first responder call to go and help people injured by the storm! Lots of wind and lightning, and the start of our drive to the incident, are in the video:

There's some photos of the damage on Rye News, and Knoops has a good photo of the storm before it hit.

First time we've done a first responder call in the middle of a large thunderstorm!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Rough seas and a flooded woodland

With the weather over the past couple of months, it's not surprising that parts of the wood are under water, such as this bit just the other side of the wayleave:

Over in Chestnut Coppice, the stream is in full flow:

The sump before the culvert has a proper little waterfall:

Although the water was all going through the culvert on this visit, the strip clear of leaves shows that it has gone over the top at times too!

Down in Rye Harbour Nature Reserve today the sea was pretty rough (for our part of the English Channel at least). Nothing like they've had in Cornwall thankfully!

Looking forward to some nicer weather, whenever that arrives... even snow would be better than what we've had I think!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Clearing up after the storm - again!

Before we'd even done all the clearing up from the storm in October, the woodland got hit again on Christmas Eve. No oaks down this time, but plenty of big sweet chestnut stools over:

Quite often, one knocks another over. And in this case another, and then another!

We spent a couple of days between Christmas and New Year sorting some of them out, removing the stems and tipping the stools back into the ground where possible:

As there's so much, we're cutting it to 2 or 3m lengths (according to what it might be used for) and stacking it:

As some of the stems are pretty large, they'll be used to make benches or stools rather than just firewood.

I came up with a neat way of stopping the logs rolling off their bearers without having to build a rack:

But that's just one of the piles of logs, here's another (with plenty more still to come behind it):

And yet another, this one located near the base of this fallen stool simply so I don't have very far to move the heavy logs!

The wood also got very wet - this was how it looked on Christmas Eve, just after all the rain.

I unblocked this bit though, and the water subsided a little as the water flowed under the bridge instead of round it:

Of course, the wildlife carries on regardless - we've added a second bird feeder now, as we've not been in the woods as often with all the bad weather. Here's a Coal Tit feeding...

And a cheeky Pheasant admiring the view from the top of our firewood store...

The wild boar have been active too, with a new mud bath created:

And a muddy trail leading away from it into the trees...

We've also started to bring back logs to top up our firewood store at home. This is 2-3 weeks later than in last year, which is probably partly due to the mild weather and partly the improved draughtproofing at home.

Anyway, looks like it *might* be colder by the end of January, so maybe we'll get some snow pictures again soon...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Clearing up storm damage while avoiding a hornets' nest!

Meet the European Hornet...

We had to work around a nest of them today, as they were in the storm-damaged oak tree I mentioned in yesterday's blog post. You can just see a couple of them going into the crack in the tree that was probably what weakened it and resulted in the storm damage.

Fortunately they look much more scary (being an inch long and noisy!) then they are, and are actually quite timid and if they do sting it's no worse than a normal wasp sting (see Wikipedia).

Here's how the oak tree looked after the storm:

It took us a while, but after some chainsawing and winch work, we got the broken section down on the ground:

To get it down we looped a 4-tonne sling round the branch near where it attached to the tree - this effectively doubles its strength to 8 tonnes, see the table on this page. We attached a 10-tonne pulley to the sling using an 8-tonne bow shackle - using a pulley doubles the power of the winch:

Through the pulley was a 20 metre 15-tonne steel rope, with one end anchored to a tree with another sling and bow shackle:

The other end was attached to the steel rope that went through our Tirfor T516 winch - this can pull 1.6 tonnes, so all the other components in use are stronger, eliminating the chance of unexpected failures.

That's an awful lot of gear to push through the woods on a wheelbarrow, but it got the job done with us stood at a safe distance from the tree! We even managed to avoid damaging the hornets' nest, so they can carry on living in the trunk of the tree and the cracked bit of the branch which is now on the ground.

We cleared up some coppice stools that had been blown over too, and there are still a few more of these to do before we've finished clearing up from the St Jude's Day storm which hit the UK on 28 Oct 2013.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Clearing up after the storm, October 2013

As you might expect, we had a bit of storm damage in the woods after the 'St Jude's Day Storm', which hit the UK in the early hours of Monday 28 October. Nothing too major fortunately, some coppice stools and one oak that kind of broke in half...

Quite a few coppice stools are leaning, and will be dealt with in the next few days:

Some have come right down:

while others had a 'domino' effect:

Note - this is why you have to be TWO tree-lengths away from a person felling a tree...

Some of the stools I cleared up yesterday, after the wind had died down:

There was also a branch in the path by Sweep Wood:

it had come from this oak tree:

Here's a quick video of me using a chainsaw to clear the fallen branch and also a coppice stem that was leaning over a path, taken using a chest-mounted GoPro camera:

The oak tree that split up the middle was up the top of the hill in Chestnut Coppice:

It's made a bit of a mess and I need to go back up there to sort it out with a winch...

Still, could have been much worse, we're thankful this is all that fell!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Cool thunder clounds in Camber

We had a great thunderstorm this week. Not great because of the lightning, but because of the impressive clouds that rolled over:
I took a short video to show how fast and low they were, and then had to duck inside as the rain came down!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Nov 2009 storm at Camber Sands

As you may know, the south of England and Wales have been hit by stormy weather yesterday and today. I thought I'd take a walk on the beach and get some video and photos of the sand storm that is always a result of a wind day here. So, here's the pics, and a video at the end - all taken with my mobile phone, as there was no way I was taking my camera out with this much airborne sand and salt water. Don't forget you can click on the pictures to get a bigger version.














And now for the videos - I nearly got caught by a wave near the end of the first one!


Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.