June 2015 – waterfrontblog.co.uk

A break from engineering – life is for the birds

It’s Sunday morning and I am going off for the day to a scale plastic model show. Just before I left, Valerie called me to see two families of Canadian Geese that were promenading along Orwell Quay.

Maybe the geese would ignore the sign – everyone else does. We get regular parking and fishing but no swimming since last year. Mind you, the weather would have to become summery for anyone to jump in the water! It has been more like October here than June.

When I came home later in the day, we got a little visitor onto our balcony.

This little pigeon seemed quite content to sit on the chair and look out over the waterfront. It seemed completely oblivious to me being around. I went out onto the balcony and had a little chat with it.

You can see how close I was able to get and how it ignored me. It then tried to fly off but was confused by the glass and kept crashing into it. Finally, I had to pick it up – again, that shows how tame it was. I held it over the edge of the balcony and gave it a little throw and it flew off very nicely down to the wood yard.

Monday to Wednesday on the Quay Wall rebuild

They have been very busy. The strange construction was built to make a secure place to mount the four walkways that they needed. They then used the electric pile driver to insert some girders at the other end. This created a very secure platform, on two levels, to enable them to start the piling proper. They got eight piles in but then found a problem – I would guess that they were slightly off upright – so they took them all back up and re-inserted them.

The pile driver is very noisy when at full throttle and the shake can even be felt through the floor of our living room! I have made a short video of the events. Turn the sound up for the full effect.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FEd6LsNFiM?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0]

Now, we have something new. I have been trying to find a way to get a slideshow directly into this page. Although the Lightroom slideshows that I put on the last post are very good, they need to be on a separate page and that means faffing about with links and page changing which is not good. WordPress has a Gallery function that I have just found. It does show all of the included images as thumbnails, as you can see below. However, clicking on any one of the images gets you into a much better sized image included in a slideshow. To get out of the slideshow, you just click on the cross X at the top left hand corner.

They are now in the process of moving the walkways further across so they are un-welding and welding. There was a new delivery of the steel piles this morning. I guess that this will be a regular occurrence. They have 45 metres of this to do and it is supposed to be finished by the end of the month. Remember that when they have all the piling in place, they will still have to back fill it and grade the to level.

Orwell Quay works – a new perspective

We had a wander down the quays this morning and had a coffee at the Cult cafe. It’s a great place to go for a snack or breakfast. It is always thronging with families and has an eclectic collection of tables, chairs, sofas etc. Try it sometime. On the way back I took the opportunity to take some ground floor images of the works. I only had my phone on me so I couldn’t mess about with the exposures to get rid of the fencing. Still it’s better than nothing. First off, though, I want to apologies to all of those unable to see my Flickr slideshow yesterday. To make up for it, I have re-done the show using my old favourite Adobe Lightroom. As I normally do for the model club shows that I put together, I have done two different versions. One uses Adobe Flash. This makes a great slide show but Flash doesn’t work on iPhones and iPads so I also provide one using standard HTML which DOES work.

The Flash version is available HERE.

The HTML version is HERE.

OK, that done, here are today’s images. Firstly, I have taken one of the mysterious construction that they put together on Friday. If anyone has a notion what this is for, please tell me – although I expect it to become obvious as the weeks go by.

Orwell Quay new works Part 1.

There is lots of activity going on. They have started putting some guide pilings in. There as been a lot of sorting out of steel girders. They have been painting 1m marks on a few of them – obviously to get a good level across the quay. First off, they dropped one girder in and established the depth to the bottom – it seems that this is about 4m. They then took a much longer girder and drove that into the bed for a long way. The pile driver is electrically driven rather than using a dropping weight so it is nowhere near as noisy as I expected. All you get is a quiet electrical force sound as the girder moves in. They have also constructed a girder framework on the left hand end of the quay – to what end it is not apparent! We shall watch this with interest. As there are loads of photos, I will put together an album in my Flickr account. Here is the current state of play.

here is the current Flickr Album:

Orwell Quay Part 1

A different crane for Suntis

I wonder why they don’t use this one all of the time? We expected to see two cranes today as we assumed that Anglo-Norden would like to see Suntis gone quickly to avoid getting in the way of the quayside works. However, apart from some rolling out of the gravel covering, nothing seems to be happening on that front.

There is only one crane working on Suntis so they are obviously looking to see it leave on tomorrow evening’s high tide. The only interesting thing to say is that they have a different type of crane in use and it is surprising that they don’t use it every time. It doesn’t have a regular cab like the others but the cab for driving seems to be the cab for running the crane. The cab can be raised and lowered so when they are in the bowels of the ship they don’t seem to need a third person (or a waved bamboo pole) to give the crane driver instructions. As you can see, the cab can be lifted up so that he can see without help.

I have included a wide angle shot of the whole crane just for my friend Dan in Connecticut. He has a thing about cranes;_0

The work really starts of the dock side upgrade

This first week has been solely to do with protecting the block paving along the quayside. Firstly, they lay down sand. Then they create a wooden surface using shuttering plywood. This is then covered over with some type of gravel. It has taken all week to do this. We expect the real work to start in the coming week. Here are some images which show the work and the results.

As you can see, Anglo-Norden have also laid out some of their wood to keep the parking away from the quayside at their end. This means – yes, you have guessed it – Suntis is due. Well, it arrived this afternoon.

Let’s hope that they clear the boat in one day as I am sure that the workmen won’t want Suntis in the way and it is playing merry hell with the parking!

As you can see from the above images, the weather has really perked up and it is starting to feel like summer. For goodness sake, my 89 year old mother-in-law has even spent some of the afternoon sitting out on our balcony and she isn’t one to suffer anything less than a warm day! Yesterday was livened up by the Sea Cadets from their depot just down the quay. They were out in their outboard craft and their rowing boats.

It was still very windy yesterday (it has died down today) as you can see from the surface of the Wet Dock yesterday afternoon. It was really being cut up. This effect is solely due to the wind.

And so it starts – rebuilding the dock wall.

It is all change down below. They are starting the work to provide a new dock wall along from Patteson Road to the Aurora. We thought that they might leave a little room for parking but, no, they have blocked off all down one side and just left an access route into the restaurant. I expect to overload you will photos of the progress as it goes.