Kathy's To The Lighthouse Diary

Production team Day 1

We’re making a lighthouse for the island of Bawe. How crazy is that?!

I go off to recce the island on the first day. We have to know what we’re going to do and where we can put it.

Damn & blast! So I’m stuck on a boat and beautiful sun-drenched, desolate island for the day. Another hard call.

No surprise - I had a lovely, lovely day. The island is unbelievable. It’s just a slab of coral  that’s been pushed up out of the sea. Only a few metres high, with scrub-like vegetation all over. It’s near empty - and pretty impenetrable. Only one place to land with any certainty. With some sandy bits you can get a boat to at low tide - if you’re prepared to get quite wet and climb a steep, jagged, vicious cliff.

Found a reasonable place to site the lighthouse. Not completely ideal - I’d have preferred closer to the shipping lane. But it was physically impossible to get any closer.

Compass and protractor helped me work out where we were on the island. It looked the same all over - so useful having the compass particularly.

An amazing sunset in a beautiful place. How lucky am I!?

Production team

Day 2

Just as with the last challenge - after a beautiful first day, I end up thinking I have a reasonably straightforward task ahead that turns into a nightmare … when there’s only a day, or a day and a half, to sort the whole thing out.

I have a maximum distance of about 3m to let a rock fall; to rotate a pole, to rotate a pulley … which ultimately has to make the lighthouse rotate.

So it needs to fall rea…l…l…y slowly.

When there’s nothing to pull - of course the rock falls really quickly. The more there is to pull - the slower it will go.

I had tried out some other options. I tried to get a heavy rock to pull down a screw on a thread … But there was just too much friction. It wouldn’t fall nicely. Thought about water falling a distance - but it felt like too much energy would be lost just getting paddles to start turning.

The catch with the stone is that you have to use a really huge, heavy rock. The heavier the rock - the more the potential energy - and the more kinetic energy can be released when it falls.

And heavy rocks start to make the axle bend - which increases the friction on its pivots - which “wastes” the energy as heat energy, instead of energy that can be harnessed to rotate the lighthouse.

Hmmm…

Production team

Day 3

Really up against it today. We’d hoped to leave by noon to get to Bawe in time to beach the boat on the sand so we could winch up the heaviest items.

We completely missed low tide. So ‘beaching the boat’ was not an option. Instead - we had to land on the opposite side of the island and schlep everything across in the heat.

Hard work - but ok.

Had spent the morning desperately trying to “marry” JJ’s lighthouse with my falling rocks. We’d been far from optimistic about how well the rock would be able to make the pulleys turn.

Our ratios were way out. Tiny, tiny cogs, meant to be driving enormous (quite heavy) wheels. Guess I should have been able to work it out beforehand … but when you’re up against it - it’s hard to think clearly.

Finally - we had to leave before it was really working. We hoped it might work if we used more rocks (more weight), and if we made the first ‘cog’ a bit bigger, using some plastic tubing.

Ellen’s candles were gorgeous. JJ’s lighthouse was beautiful. I found myself wishing it were just a bit smaller and lighter and easier to rotate. But his ‘golf ball’  ballbearings were pretty impressive. I couldn’t really have hoped for a smoother system to rotate.

We set it all up - at the cliff-edge. All a bit insane - 5 of us at a steep, jagged cliff-edge (the coral was brutally sharp), balancing a daft mechanism, which is holding huge rocks and a bucketful of water, with everything (including us) straining like mad.

It hadn’t worked yet. Why should it work here when it hadn’t worked before? We put in more water, and tied on more rocks. I tried to stop the axle from bending too much …

Huge tension when I released the rocks … but it worked! It bloody worked! The rocks fell slowly - the lighthouse rotated - and we all whooped with delight … until the rope slipped - and it all went crashing into the sea.

Enough! (“Bas!” in Swahili) - Kate declared it a success (albeit - a brief one) - and Mike, Ellen and Kate headed off to see if they could see the lighthouse from the boat.

A huge part of me wanted to keep on playing with rocks and ropes and seeing if we could get it to work, shall we say, more sustainably.

But if we messed up, we might trash the lighthouse itself. I swallowed my pride and we resorted to the trusty power-tool. How I love them! We’d known we could use it from the start - but it felt too easy.

They could see us. Or rather - our light. Completely delighted. They didn’t seem to notice how it kept turning round - with NO hands.