Purple Kite reaches new heights

Here you can see the progress of The Purple Kite from scraps of plywood pulled out of a skip, to the proud craft bobbing down the river below.

Like many projects, it's the result of a random turn in a conversation. Simon was talking about beavers and streams, then someone said it would be great if we had an inflatable canoe for surveying wildlife in ponds and rivers. After that someone came up with a challenge: to make our own boat in one day using only recycled materials and anything we could find in the office and then row it across the River Medina and back.

We set to work in our small inventions workshop in East Cowes which SEEDA let us use specifically for making interesting and unlikely creations.

Well, we failed to make it in a day and cheated by buying a box of screws, but as it took shape over the next week our confidence grew that it really would stay afloat with us in it. It started to feel more and more like a proper boat.

The more organic lines can be explained by the fact that there weren't any plans and there wasn't a lot of measuring either.

This picture shows Simon ceremonially rubbing down the boat in whiskey prior to painting.

There are two port-holes in the bottom for observing fish, rocks, seaweed and submarines passing beneath us.

At this point the boat had no name, but by means of a democratic process, we arrived at The Purple Kite. The Island 2000 logo is of course a purple kite and it is also, by sheer coincidence, the rarest species of sea-bird to be found in the British Isles, never having been observed or recorded.

Launch day - a last minute attack of responsibility makes us leave behind our recycled life-jackets and ask Offshore Challenges next door if they can lend us something more reliable. They hand us two very swanky-looking flotation devices which, we understand, deploy automatically as soon as they get a whiff of sea-water. Simon instructs us that if it looks like we're going down, we're to throw them back onto the land to avoid the punitive cost of recharging the gas canisters.

Luckily, this isn't necessary as it turns out to be the driest rowing boat we've been in. We launch from the slipway just next to the car ferry, waved off in a cloud of sherbet by well-wishers and curious staff from Red Funnel. The oars are on the long side for such a small boat, but The Purple Kite is easy to row and very manoeuvrable, sitting surprisingly high in the water.
If you'd like to see the cross-Medina escapade for yourself, take a look at the Youtube video below.

We're now planning to produce some commentaries on the wildlife of the Isle of Wight's rivers, viewed and recorded from the water. The Purple Kite is available for other water-borne tasks or challenges. Any suggestions?