Freesteel Blog » 2019 » September

Thursday, September 12th, 2019 at 1:52 pm - - Whipping

One of the primary advantages told to us of Brexit is that it permits the UK to instruct its own civil servants to negotiate new international trade deals, and not have the work done by the EU civil servants.

How’s that getting along?

Let’s go on the Gov.UK website to “Find out which new trade agreements will be in place if there’s a no-deal Brexit”.

We’ve got listed, in approximate order of importance, South Korea, Switzerland, Israel, Iceland and Norway, Chile, the Andean countries, Carribean, Central America (does not include Mexico), Eastern and Southern Africa, the Pacific states, the Palestinian Authority, the Faroe Islands, Liechtenstein.

There are 26 other countries or trading blocks listed as “engagement ongoing” where we’ve got nothing.

Let’s take a look at what’s actually been done in the last three years.

Here’s a bit from the UK/Chile Agreement of 6 February 2019:

Basically this says:

At moment of Brexit the provisions of the EU-Chile Agreement (including the instruments referred to in Article 206) are incorporated here, but modified so it is as if it had been signed between the UK and Chile in the first place, except for what’s written here.

One of these exceptions (Article 5) is that references to the Euro are not going to be changed to UK Pounds, even though an Agreement between the UK and Chile would have obviously used UK Pounds.

Here’s that aforementioned Article 206 of the EU-Chile Agreement:

Pretty boring. Most of these treaties are 95% Annexes listing every kind of product and material.

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Tuesday, September 10th, 2019 at 11:47 am - - Kayak Dive

The Jurassic coast has been the top of my list for a big kayak diving adventure for a while. Enough so that I invested in a copy of a 2015 guidebook called Dorset Dives (review article), which is more of a picture book with some dodgy dive site information, rather than a quality guide book with some crappy photos to break up the text.

It was not great weather at the start of September, but this is the time to take advantage of the gap between the start of the school term and the University term when the season is winding down. We’re trying to economize now that Becka is working half-time and has too many days not to “waste” being at home.

We drove down to Reading on Tuesday 3 September and then on to Durdle Door Holiday Park (via a grumpy dive cylinder filling station on Swanage Pier) with two dive kayaks on the roof, two full sets of dive gear including four tanks, three drysuits, two wetsuits, a cheap pop up tent, a trangia cooking stove and two bikes rammed into the car getting crushed by all the stuff slumping onto them. We had to return after we set off to pick up the sleeping bags I’d forgotten.

The tent pitching ground is in a crow-infested forest. Crows poop just as much as pidgeons, except it’s brown so you don’t see it on the ground. They also make a lot of noise. We walked down to Durdle Door and attempted to walk barefoot on the gravel beach to Bat’s Head. This hurt too much, so we put our sandles back on, which instantly filled with gravel and didn’t make much difference. We got changed and swam through the Bat’s Hole (natural arch) to the other beach and felt better for the cold water experience.

That evening we walked to Lulworth Cove where the chip shop was already closed, but the pub wasn’t.

Thursday 5 September was calm enough weather to kayak-dive out of Lulworth cove going west towards Durdle Door. Going in the other direction was not allowed as it’s a live firing range on weekdays.

First dive was on a promising looking reef out from Bat’s Head called The Cow. The other reefs in the same line with Durdle Door are: The Calf, The Blind Cow, and The Bull. There was nothing interesting on The Cow, so we gave The Bull a miss and went straight to the dive on Durdle Door, where the guidebook says this:

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