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Pentle Bay, Tresco If you’re heading to the Isles of Scilly, you’ll soon see why people fall in love with this remote archipelago. Just 28 miles off the Cornish coast, Scilly offers white-sand beaches, flower-lined lanes, and an easygoing pace of life. We have listed what we think are must do’s on your stay. Wander the White Sands of Tresco’s Beaches Tresco is famous for its bright turquoise shallows and powdery sands. Walk from Pentle Bay to Appletree Bay and you’ll often have the beach almost to yourself. Watch Seals & Seabirds on St Agnes Circle the island’s coastline, pausing at Beady Pool where wave-smoothed glass still washes up. Grey seals are regular visitors here. Explore the Ruins of Cromwell’s Castle Step back into the 17th century at Cromwell’s Castle on Tresco’s north coast. Climb to the top for sweeping views across New Grimsby Sound. Picnic on Gugh Bar At low tide, a golden sandbar links St Agnes to tiny Gugh. Spread out a picnic blanket and enjoy your own temporary island escape. Walk the Coastal Path of St Mary’s Follow St Mary’s nine-mile perimeter path. Highlights include Peninnis Head’s rugged rocks, the sheltered beaches near Old Town, and views across to Samson. Discover Prehistoric Scilly History buffs shouldn’t miss Bant’s Carn burial chamber, Halangy Down Iron Age village, and the standing stones near Innisidgen. Climb Up to King Charles’s Castle On Bryher’s wild north shore, this ruined fort gives panoramic views of the Atlantic rollers below — dramatic on windy days. Swim in the Clear Waters of Green Bay Green Bay on Bryher’s sheltered side is ideal for a calm dip or a lazy afternoon with your toes in the shallows. Take a Wildflower Walk on St Martin’s In spring and early summer, St Martin’s lanes burst into colour with narcissi and wildflowers. Carry on to Great Bay for soft dunes and heather. Stargaze Beneath Dark Skies With almost no light pollution, Scilly offers spectacular stargazing. On a clear night you’ll spot the Milky Way, planets, and countless shooting stars. We would of course love it if you choose to stay at Reculver as your base for exploring these beautiful Isles, check out the availability .

Early this year we had an interesting approach from Isles of Scilly Travel asking if we would like to be involved in promoting Scilly as a stand up paddle location. With our connections to California we jumped at the chance to find out more. Fast forward to May and the Red team came to the islands to shoot the footage. They created some stunning photos of the islands. The spent a great few days exploring the Islands and trying out the best spots for paddle boarding. The team launched a competition in early June, with full details on their site at https://red-equipment.co.uk/pages/isles-of-scilly-competition They created a great video There will be content dropping until the closing date on Red and Isles of Scilly Travel social accounts https://www.instagram.com/p/Cs8hdDgO7Cv/ https://www.instagram.com/islesofscillytravel/ https://www.facebook.com/RedPaddleUKandIreland

The season typically starts to wind down at the end of September but this is when nature kicks into another gear. Scilly is great for bird watching in October and this year the Scilly festival of nature runs 13 to 16th October, more details of this are on the Visit Scilly page at https://www.visitislesofscilly.com/experience/whats-on/festival-of-nature-p3241783 Bird watching is big on Scilly at this time of year and we have lots of visitors who come to see the migratory birds stopping off in Scilly. There are lots of organised tours to go birding on Scilly at this time of year and typically accommodation providers are stepping don prices from the busy extended school holiday season. Reading a report from a trip last October the group saw a variety of birds, listed below and it was generally termed a good days birding ! Pomarine Skuas Balearic Shearwater Manx Shearwaters Meadow Pipits Black-tailed Godwit Greenshank Redshanks Curlew Sandpiper Whinchat Swainson’s Thrush Wryneck Swallows Radde’s warbler Greenshank Gannets, and Stonechats Pied flycatcher Chiffchaffs Common Rosefinch The Visist Scilly and other organisations supporting travel to the Islands are promoting visits in October to lengthen the season a little. We go into maintenance mode for the winter in November and get all the jobs done that are impossible when the Islands are buzzing through the summer. To support this we are offering a 10% discount with the same visit scilly code of WTFN1023. So if you are interested in Scilly in October mention this code on your enquiry for the discount. The first week of October sees the Dark Skies Week, a celebration of astronomy, which takes advantage of the very low light pollution Scilly enjoys. Details of this week are at https://www.visitislesofscilly.com/experience/whats-on/dark-skies-week-p2988053 It's hosted on St Martins but the afternoon events are accessible using the tripper boats from St Marys. We hope you choose a stay in October its a very different vibe to the summer with wildlife taking centre stage.

With 3 weeks in the tank May has delivered some great weather over the last couple of weeks and early season visitors have been seeing the islands at their very best. Our weather station is telling us its gradually getting warmer. to get up to the minute weather from the Reculver garden, go to our weather station at https://app.weathercloud.net/d4951177181#profile the islands have been bathed in sunshine, we keep adding some new photos to the google profile so you should see them on our google business profile. May and June are typically a little quieter as it's outside most of the school holidays. We are looking forward to bringing people over this year to stay with us and questions we always get asked is what's the best way to get there. We typically fly from Lands end but in previous years have been on the helicopter, the big old one from Penzance and the new one from Penzance Helicopters. We prefer flying as the boat leaves around 9 and that can be a challenge to get to ! What happens if the flights don't go is a common question. You have a couple of options in here, you can normally opt to transfer to the boat the next morning, if its foggy its likely calm seas or you can try and get on a flight the next day. You have to figure out your own overnight accommodation, the airport staff are normally helpful but it's not their responsibility to find accommodation. If you're stranded on the Islands then you may be able to negotiate to stay in your accommodation if the changeover guests are delayed. Looking forward to the rest of May there is the Scilly folk festival 25-30th May and then we are into June and the school holidays just around the corner!

It's been a busy few weeks on the island with what feels like the start of summer. We have had a few glorious days of sunshine on St Mary's and the solar has been doing its thing. The back end of this week has seen wall to wall sunshine and the islands really do look beautiful in full sun. We have had an exciting few days with a film crew in Reculver putting the finishing touches to a joint venture promotion we are launching in June. More on that in a couple of weeks but its going to be a cool promotion with some free stuff and a competition to win a free trip! It was the scilly60 run yesterday and we are looking forward to seeing all the footage from that over the next few days. It's a 60KM jaunt around all the 5 inhabited islands with tripper boats in-between(of you are quick enough to meet them). Details are on their site at https://scilly60.co.uk. It was a really hot day yesterday which was very unkind to the runners but great for spectators! The creative Scilly festival is running, it's 9 days of Scillonian inspired arts and culture taking place from 12th-20th May, including a weekend Festival of Nature in partnership with the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust. More details on this one are at Creative Scilly Festival. Hot on the heels of Creative Scilly is the Scilly folk festival. This all kicks off on 25th May in the Scillonian club and is a long weekend of music, song and dance is in store, featuring some of the best folk music from Scilly and the South West. A full itinerary is here. We are looking forward to bringing friends over towards the end of June to stay in Reculver and hopefully not break too many wine glasses! With all of our experience of shipping all manner of items to Scilly during the renovation and constantly seeing the trials and tribulations of the most experienced locals getting the most mundane of items delivered it haas us thinking.....I am a bit of tech nerd and have been thinking what we can do to share the collective wisdom and knowledge of the locals. I am going to explore if it's possible to build some kind of database of retailers and their couriers so we can keep an up to date list when deciding where to buy from. It sounds trivial but the courier makes a massive difference from both a competence and cost perspective. I really envisage that as being a resource for locals. We always seem to get asked the same questions as well so we will be putting up an FAQ shortly. The top question this season is currently, is it worth getting a Tesco order for when we arrive? The answer to that one I think is no, its quite the process getting the delivery setup and if there is any disruption to the travel then you end up with either no shopping, no frozen items or something else. Whilst there of course isn't a superstore or Waitrose on the island we have always found the Co-op ok, just make sure you get in before the pleasure boats come back and the Store is another good place to go and is generally less busy. If you have any questions you would like to be part of the FAQ just put them in the comments.

Another year of WGC wrapped up over the weekend and the sun finally came out to give the crews those distinctive red arms and faces. Some wonderful images circulating on the noticeboards. It brings a few days of chaos and busyness not seen for the rest of the year. I got to thinking how did we end up here, crews coming from all over the world to race in heavy wooden boats 28 miles off the mainland! What is a gig? Wikipedia tells us The Cornish pilot gig is a six-oared rowing boat, clinker-built of Cornish narrow-leaf elm,[1] 32 feet (9.8 m) long with a beam of 4 feet 10 inches (1.47 m). It is recognised as one of the first shore-based lifeboats that went to vessels in distress, with recorded rescues going back as far as the late 17th century. The first recorded use of the boats was in 1666 the crew of the Royall Oacke were rescued by a St. Mary’s gig after being wrecked on the Bishop. That traces the heritage of the gigs all the way back to when the Mermaid fire was lit ! It's become a popular sport in the south west and further afield and we regularly see a gig in the docks in the harbour in Bristol. The world championships were first held in 1990 snd since then have gradually grown in scale to what we see today with tens and tens of boats. It's a gargantuan effort for the week before and after the event to get all the gigs across the sea and into place on the various beaches. This years event was pretty foggy until the sun finally broke through on Sunday. It stretches the islands resources to the limits over the long weekend with all concerned working tremendously hard to make sure everyone is accommodated, fed and watered appropriately! Of course the locals pubs and restaurants look forward to the weekend and the mermaid floor gains its legendary status from the nights entertainments. It's often difficult to find accommodation on Scilly during gig weekend so I would recommend booking early if you want to compete or just experience the one of a kind event. Let us know your experiences of gig weekend and get booking for 2024 which will be in its traditional slot across the first bank holiday of May. Check out all the details on https://www.wpgc.uk. Particularly well done to the Zelda crew of St Marys and to Helen who has won this more times than we can remember. Helen has one of the best work views on the planet down at Rat Bags, check it out next time you are on St Mary's https://www.ratisland.net/shop.

After spending 8 years living in San Diego and enjoying the beach life we moved back to our home in Bristol in the summer of 2020. We have family on Scilly and have been visiting regularly for 4 generations. It had long been our dream to be able to have a place to spend more and more time as we grew older and have a place our children could eventually bring their children. We were lucky enough to buy Reculver in December of 2020 with visions of creating a family home. We had built this home in San Diego so thought we had a good understanding of how a large construction project would unfold, or so we thought ! We had an architectural designer assigned to the project quickly and away we went with some drawings and into the planning process. Here is where it started to move from what we knew. First off was a bat survey, all good, we need to be sympathetic to wildlife. What we didn't plan on was the fact that when the survey came back with no indications of bats we would not be able to continue until roosting season confirmed that bats didn't like our house. So that was it we had to put the program on hold from Feb - August until we paid for a second survey to confirm what we thought we already knew, which it did, no bats ! The planning process could now continue and we could choose a builder from the thousand or so local builders on the island. There were really only 3 potential builders on the island, all of course busy and eventually we managed to shake hands with one for a start in October 2021, no talk of a JCT or other such contractual nonsense, a firm handshake and a hard stare and away we went. We were lucky enough to have family, Derek and Nathan, on hand to start us off by knocking the house to bits pretty much. Nathan keeping the hospital busy with his various escapades and Derek filling his beard with soot and debris. Derek had already built his own house, with massive help from me holding 2 windows at one point, and managing to shred my soft IT hands. By the time the builder brought in the machines there wasn't much left. We steadily peeled back the layers to reveal we needed to keep peeling back the layers and we ended up at this! When we built in the US we had a contractor that seemed to have access to an inexhaustible supply of skilled labour and the whole program took us 8 months to build a house about twice the size of Reculver. This wasn't the case on Scilly of course and we were making slow and steady progress with all working extremely hard but there just isn't the access to enough people to go at pace, thats island life. The building stage went on for the next 14 months where we learnt a whole lot about which companies ship to Scilly, which don't have a clue and what the difference is between a straight through carrier, a freight forwarder and how hard it was to generally deal with the logistics of building on a rock 28 miles off Cornwall! My best tip would be don't order the wrong water heaters and have to send them back ! It was amazing to get some photos sent when big items like staircases and bifold doors somehow made it from a warehouse on the mainland to the quay in penzance across on the Gry (whose schedule is committed to memory) unloaded on the quay in St Marys, picked up and dropped off at the house. The process just works and being a small island everyone gets involved and people have multiple skills that they bring to the party! We finally finished in March 2023 about 18 months after starting the journey and then we had to get all the furniture, which had been piled up in spare rooms of our house in Bristol for about a year to the island. We had shipped it early and it was in storage on the trading estate near Porth Mellon and then one morning it arrived on the Strand along with about 2 gig crews worth of people who unloaded it all in about 30 minutes. All the tech then went in and we now had a functioning house. We had a great soft opening when I went with my school friends and then with my mother and father in law in March. I managed to squeeze one last piece of tech in, which you can connect to at https://app.weathercloud.net/device/sticker/4951177181 My new hobby is now monitoring my solar panels and letting everyone know how much they are producing and saving. We hope you will choose to stay at Reculver and enjoy it as we are hoping to over the years. Its actually gig weekend now and Reculver couldn't be in a better position looking out onto the chaos that is currently town beach. If you have any questions about the process of building on Scilly feel free to contact us!