Getting anything on or off Lundy is a challenge, and when it is your personal furniture and belongings, it can be stressful and worrying.
We arrived on the island 6th December 2012 by helicopter. Our belongings were turning up two weeks later (weather permitting), on the Oldenburg, Lundy's supply ship and passenger ferry. We stayed in Old House North and met our first pygmy shrew which I fed crunchy nut cornflakes. Simone and I redecorated Pigs 5 (to be our new home) in the evenings after work. When large cargo arrives on Lundy, it is craned off the Oldenburg onto various trailers, and then pulled up the very bumpy beach road to the village by tractor.
Our belongings and my handmade solid oak furniture arrived, and the trailers were parked as close as possible to our property, where it was then handballed to our door by the Lundy staff. The majority of our furniture was unscathed, a few dinks and scratches here and there. The main problem we had was with a leather sofa bed. Apart from the weight, which was astronomical, the thing was enormous and wouldn’t fit through our gate let alone the front door. We had been informed by the salesman (we bought it for Lundy), that it was a matter of a few minutes to remove the ends if required. Each end took me an hour to remove, owing to the limited space for the spanner inside the sofa and the very long bolts. I didn’t reassemble it that night as we went to the tavern to thank the staff for all their efforts and to have a few well-earned drinks.
So, 8 years on and everything has to go off the island, the same way it came on. I ripped off part of the cloth, covering the base of the sofa for easier access and had both sides off in less than an hour. I had made new cargo boxes which I filled with our belongings. They were stacked in the black shed and then taken down to the beach building to keep dry. The furniture was brought down on our leaving day, and everything went smoothly. It was all craned back onto the Oldenburg and into the hold, sailed across the sea to Bideford where it was craned back onto dry land and loaded into a waiting furniture lorry. We used a firm called Nomad International who specialize in moving possessions to Italy and the Greek islands. They were awesome and delivered our belongings into our cottage 2 weeks after we arrived.
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