Things have settled down a bit after the initial surge of interest, so time to get back to work on the island and start building.

On citizenships there are some exciting developments that have delayed getting out the papers. It will now be possible to give you much more than I first envisioned. Thanks to everybody for your patience. See the Citizenship page for details. 

The flag is now up and I have a bigger tent. The turf is stripped from the first building site and I carried in about three tons of building materials. Building work starts in the next couple of days.

The South harbour is equipped with mooring lines for the boat - the East harbour, although potentially a better sheltered harbour, needs a lot more work before it can be safely used - there is also a 30ft cliff to climb!

The boat performs well. Pretty heavily built, she carries a good load - all the building materials went on in two trips. At the same time, she planes with my elderly 4Hp Yamaha with light loads. The old Yamaha is feeling the strain and let me down a couple of times, so I got a second-hand 5Hp Honda as the main engine.

I've had journalists from Japan, France, Russia and the UK actually visit and have done radio interviews all over the world. One of these was with radio Hawaii and lasted about 20 minutes. In the middle of it the police arrived wanting to talk to me. My partner answered the door and was mortified that they should be visiting - she made them wait outside while I finished with Hawaii. At the end of the interview I said 'I'll have to go, the police are at the door'. Rather than coming to arrest me on some matter of high treason, they had heard reports of explosions on the island and wanted to know if I was using explosives, or did I have a shotgun? No to both and they went away. Back on the computer to find an email from Hawaii 'Are you OK?'. they had been inundated with emails from listeners thinking I'd been arrested!

A group of Israeli kayakers arrived on Thursday, having seen an article in their daily paper. They gave me a flag and had their passports stamped. 

As you can see, Shetland is enjoying some fine, if not sunny, weather, while the rest of the UK suffers downpours! 

Now I can get on with the building.