Still locked in - in all meanings of the word

Totally locked down indeed. Government rules stop you from going out and the locks in the barrage are closed too. Properly locked down. What to do? There is, as always, loads of boat polishing to do especially as most of the superstructure got ignored last year. So, we did some enjoying the amazingly good weather but not the work involved. Still, the red wine helped the sore shoulders.

What else? The marina wildlife seem to be enjoying the lack of boat movements and people disturbing them. At the end of our hammerhead we have a resident duck and cormorant / shag who seem to alternate occupancy of the same spot. By the way, being definitive on the cormorant / shag question could cause a flurry of comments to this post telling us we are wrong, so we are leaving both options open.

The marina swans are back to their usual nesting spot and during parent change over time we spotted 6 eggs being kept warm. Thanks to the lockdown we might be around to see them hatch this year:

The "non sitting" swan is patrolling any occupied boats for food and is very busy chasing off any intruders:

Luckily he was after food when he visited us, chasing off many tons of Nordhavn would be quite a challenge.

The polishing activity needed us to stock up on some 3M compound and of course all the chandlery places are shut. Not classed as essential for some strange reason and so we had to get some delivered instead. The Parcelforce man unlike any of the other delivery guys could not manage to ring the bell for the marina office man to come down to accept his parcel. Instead he stuffed a note through the door and we had to collect it from the local Post Office. Just what you want in virus infested times. Even better was the game in the luckily empty Post Office:

Cashier: what sort of parcel is it?
Us: It will be a box, about this tall, so wide and weighing about 1Kg if that helps.

The cashier returned with a jiffy bag style package which felt strangely soft and certainly didn't have a bottle in it.  When opened we found that our 3M bottle, as shown on the packing slip, had morphed quite amazingly into:

No idea what we will do with the monster bag of elastic bands or how long we will wait for Zorro (who are normally good) to respond to the complaint and ship us what we paid for. If anyone has an urgent need for size 10 bands (perhaps the packaging guys at the Zorro warehouse?) please let us know. We can help you out.

Still, we got on using the materials we had in stock, with the odd cockpit break to enjoy the sun and rest the aching shoulders:

We kept in touch with many folks including other Nordhavn owners like Andrew and Linda (Zephyros, N43 who have starred in here many many times), Alex and Gisele (Grey Lady, N55, again been featured here before) by videoconference to share a G and T (or two). Standards have to be maintained you know.  We feel lucky to be aboard as Alex is stuck in Belgium with his "new to him" boat in Eastbourne. Michael and Olive (Coracle, N40) are also separated from their boat. Andrew can cycle down the rather steep hill from his house to see his though. Good job he has an ebike to help on the way back up.

When you have loads of time on your hands you ponder on many things like "should we replace our main Webasto 12Kw heating boiler as it has done many many hours and is now 13 years old and that model has just been discontinued". Question is, should we fit a new to the market Webasto replacement before all the snags are ironed out? As you can see, some of these musings sound expensive. Think we need to work harder on the polishing.

We have a DBW2010 very agricultural but so far very reliable boiler:

It is a bit like Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. It drinks a bit, smokes a bit, makes more noise than it ought but keeps going. The new high tech replacement is:

Just get all those plug connections for the fancy electronic controls. Yes, decisions, decisions. Maybe the lockdown will mean that we just have to stick with what we have and the captain will give it a decoke as a treat.