24/06/2026
Am I nuts or are these just the ultimate pre made shelves for fossils and beach finds? ???????????????????????????
Ok so this is what I got excited about yesterday...... Earlier this month my daughter found a small section of a ships ladder washed up on the beach, we both agreed it would make some cool shelving for her bedroom. She carried this from a remote beach on the north side of the island, best part of a mile along the beach and then another mile up hill through a woods and across fields so she earn t having them. I was a bit jealous if I'm honest..... but yesterday tangled on the beach I found a complete ships ladder, it must have been 30ft long but was at a remote and hard to get to part of the coast. I thought there was no way i could get it back unless i could make it smaller. I sometimes keep an old fishing knife in my bag to cut through tangles of fishing line on the beach but I had left that at home. I saw thinking about going "caveman" on it and was thinking about finding some flint to break open and make a sharp crude cutting tool .... but there is no flint in this location then I remembered, in my fossil tool kit that day i added the tip of an old broken stanley blade to help remove shark teeth from the rocks... bingo! I could see one of the ropes on one side was already broken so there was only 1 double piece to cut. It took a good 5 mins of hacking and i felt like the back on the blade was soon going to cut my finger open but i got there and got through. I was really happy for a moment but in the excitement of the moment I did not check have far into the ladder this first damaged rope was. It turned out i had not removed a small pice I could manage, it was in the middle, about 12 steps... too big to take in one go. I made had to keep going but at this point It was hot, I was getting a bit of a headache and the sun was beating down with no breeze at this point. I selected to cut this segment in half..... I could manage to get 6 steps around the rocky coast and back to the car so I started hacking once more. 10 mins later and I was through.... I folded the steps in half and put them over my left shoulder.... the weight was not too bad but I knew it was not so much the weight it was getting over the rocks and then up the steep hill in the blazing sun that was going to make it so much harder. I looked at the other 6 steps and thought "sod it" and gave it a go, with 6 on my left shoulder and 6 on my right and a rucksack on my back I set off and as you can see i got these ones home. Not only do they look great but the timber used for the steps is not any old timber..... it's only bloomin MAHOGANY! ?? and that's why I had to get them back Even if for some mad reason they did not get used as shelves they are Mahogany so the would could be recycled to make some beautiful Megalodon display stands........ what do you think? was it worth while or is this more evidence of insanity? :) If there is any interest I might be selling some of these off....... ;) let me know in the comments... could sell as anything between 1 or 2 shelves up to 6. If there is interest I will venture off and go get the other remaining part.
