Pay Day and Czech Xmas things

A trip back to Hythe to see the Toddlers and then return the little dog to her owner was needed although Izzy seemed quite at home in Hythe. Perhaps because Mrs Toddler likes to give her treats?

 

We were in Hythe for the momentous big round birthday of the crew. She was given some cruel cards including this one by Izzy's owner:

This level of cheek could seriously jeopardise us getting the little dog groomed at our expense in future.

We tended to call the day "Payday" though as the crew now gets a little pension from her time as the UK  Personnel Manager for Toys R Us. We hasten to mention that she left many years before the American arm went bust and took the whole business down.

Xmas was most different this year. We celebrated it on the 24th in proper Czech style, thanks to an invite from Simon and Nikki. Here is what the Czech government say is "typical" :

Christmas Dinner Customs

Czech Christmas dinner (December 24) is connected with a great number of different customs, rules and superstitions. Very few of them are still observed today, and for good reason. It must have been quite a challenge to put the dinner together and go through with it without a mistake if all the customs were to be followed! Here are some of them:

- No lights should be lit in the house before the first star comes out. After it does, dinner is served.
- The table should be set for an even number of guests. An odd number brings bad luck or death.
- An extra plate can be used to even out the number of guests. An extra plate should also be prepared in case an unexpected guest or a person in need comes by the house at dinner time.
- The legs of the table can be tied with a rope to protect the house from thieves and burglars in the coming year.
- No one should sit with their back to the door.
- Christmas dinner should consist of nine courses including soup, bread with honey, carp, potato salad, fruit (dried,
- fresh or canned), dessert (apple strudel or vánočka - Christmas bread), and other foods.
- No alcohol should be served on Christmas Eve.
- No one should ever get up from the Christmas table before dinner is finished. Doing so brings bad luck and death
- in the family.
- Everyone should finish their dinner and leave nothing on the plate.
- The first person to leave the table after dinner will be the first one to die in the coming year - that is why everyone
- should get up from the table at the same time.
- Any leftovers from dinner (crumbs, fishbones, etc.) should be buried around the trees to ensure they will bear lots
- of fruit.
- All household animals should be fed after dinner so that no one goes hungry on Christmas Eve.

Luckily Nikki hadn't told us that we had to fast all day before dinner. She claimed to have enjoyed only a little yoghurt which was to settle her before her booster jab. Why she also consumed cider and then sloe gin was less clear. 

We tried to find the first star to let us switch on the Xmas tree lights but the cloud cover was 10/10ths. A Barry streetlight had to do:

 Then we found the golden piglet:

which allowed dinner to be consumed - very good it was too but not the 9 courses suggested by the Czech government thankfully. A great evening and introduction to the Czech customs was had. They make ours seem very tame indeed. 

Post Xmas the weather was dire. Wet, windy and unappealing. The one good thing was that Cardiff was just about the warmest place in the county:

At least it didn't rain all day, every day so we managed some walks but washing the boat off and taking her for a run had to wait.

Maintenance news:

Well, the captain was considering doing some of the annual ritual of fuel filter changes when he discovered a new and more urgent little challenge. The huge Edson manual bilge pump had a little leak from one of the fittings. Close checking revealed a possible issue with a second one too. Glad that the pump was checked (we are pretty good at doing that regularly as it is our last line of defence when out to sea should we have a water ingress issue) but this might not be a simple fix. We have an overhaul kit of diaphragms. valves etc that Andrew (Zephyros, the N43 that you've seen in here before) procured for us. 

However, the realist in us suggests that this could be corrosion of the pump body which is aluminium. Yup, powder coated ally. Edson make a bronze version of their pump - how we wish that had been fitted during the build, rather than the significantly cheaper aluminium version. Ironically our owner's manual says that a bronze version is supplied. Maybe some oriental chap has it at home all polished and looking lovely.

Here is the offending pump:

And this is how the blanking plate seal looked when removed:

Nicely corroded - you can see the gasket being pushed away from the plate. The problem seems to start from the hard edges of the plate where the factory finish will be thinnest allowing the corrosion to set in and then spread onto the mating surface.  Ditto on the pump body: 

Quite a clean up job to do before the rebuild and some areas will need to have the surface built up too so there is a good seal. Aluminium and salt water do not play happily together but the $ cost of a new bronze pump encourages us to fix this one:

That eye-watering price is without shipping and import duty of course....

North Norfolk in the storm

As an escape and in place of the much preferred trip to the sun by plane, we booked a week in a cottage in North Norfolk - Hunstanton to be precise. It is locally known as "Sunny Hunny" only in early December that is not a good moniker. Especially when one of the winter storms comes through and you get sand-blasted on the beach.

However, a great time was had by one and all. The one being Izzy the doglet who had such fun on the huge empty sandy beaches and in the forests that she needed a bath:

That look says it all but she is very good and just stands there whilst the indignity continues. You can get an idea of the windy conditions at the tail end of the storm from this little video clip:

and how little it upset the compulsory digging from this clip:

This was the stunningly beautiful beach near Wells-on-sea, known as the Holkham beach. After some serious ball fun we all needed refreshment. There was a most impressive bar for Izzy:

she sniffed at the Carlsbark and licked up some Pawroni.

The only drawback to the week was the total lack of decent coffee from the dog friendly cafes along the coast. It is sad when you walk past a Costa and think "one of those would be nice". For such a busy touristy area with some very posh places like Burnham Market, we expected way better. However, the Rose and Crown pub in Snettisham made up for that by dishing out some stunningly good food. A must visit when in the area. At least the beaches were pretty empty:

Hunstanton itself is a stony area, not that it put off the little dog. The temperature was less than inviting for humans as you can guess from the attire:

but that was an excuse for poor coffee and cake afterwards. The return to Penarth was via a stop off in Toft Monks (look it up!) to catch up with Ian and Mary after a walk around Wittlingham country park. This was the first time we'd seen their lovely new house and Izzy disgraced herself, eating a huge amount of their dog Paddy's chew bone. It contained some peanut extracts and the resulting poo was "interesting" in the extreme. Most colourful.

Maintenance news:

When we got back to the boat we were greeted by another little opportunity. The voltage gauge for the air conditioning system had decided to give up:

We knew it was getting sickly as the "off" voltage was showing around 11v rather than zero and it was starting to run warm. The normal failure mode is for the reading to fluctuate and then the gauge can perhaps be rescued by replacing the big smoothing capacitor in it. Sadly this one was a terminal failure but luckily the Nordhavn Europe folks had one of these in stock that we could collect on our upcoming trip to Hythe. This sickly one was unplugged to prevent any serious overheating.

A little doglet and visitor time

Since we were planning a trip to North Norfolk and all those tempting beaches, we inherited a little dog who wanted to join us. That meant a trip to Barrybados with Simon and Nikki where the best dog-gobstopper of all had to be administered to quell the excited barking:

She just adores the beach. We put up with it for her sake of course.

The social activities continued when we hosted some folks who had driven all the way from Portavadie in Scotland down to Penarth. Google will show you just where the place is but not how stunning the views from Niall and Sheila's lounge are as you look down the Loch towards the Isle of Arran. Niall settled into the "life afloat" thing pretty quickly and Izzy settled into the "he has breakfast and I might get some of it" look:

Sheila had her own lapwarmer (they brought Penny, their little Cavapoo with them)  and when they were both eating Izzy struggled with the difficult question of "who should I  stare at and will into feeding me":

The two dogs were very well behaved together luckily, double ball trouble during a LONG walk around the bay, into the city and parks then back:

It was great catching up with our Portavadie friends, albeit briefly this time. We are threatening a longer stay with them "up north" in the New Year, Covid restrictions permitting.....

Maintenance news:

Well, the heating system continues to run OK as long as the captain pops out to the lazarette and manually turns the boiler on / off as required. There hasn't been time to dismember the control box and look at the relays etc in there to see if any have failed. To get to the box there is rather a lot of stuff to move out and on a wet day, leaving that in the cockpit is not ideal.

A new manual pump was fitted into the black water tank outlet system despite the captain's original plan to just by-pass it with some stainless tube. Why - because the pump was not that expensive:

Then another "opportunity" appeared. The float switch in the grey water tank that triggers an "automatic" operation of the discharge pump stopped working. Experience suggests that it has not failed (they are amazingly reliable bits of kit):

You can see the holes in the bottom that allow water in and out of the float tube. Well, we reckon that these are gummed up - we had exactly that issue with the same switch that controls the main bilge pump. That one was simple to fix. Remove the switch from the bilge area (lots of bending over and reaching down but all do-able), clean it out and refit. Getting the switch out of the grey water tank is mission impossible as the access hatch which holds the floats for the level indicator is way smaller then the captain's fat hand. Even if you could reach inside it is totally unclear about how you could release the float switch it or refit it afterwards. We would have to remove the larger metal panel that is "gooped" down and bolted to the top of the tank. Messy and tricky job that we hope to avoid. 

So, we are relying on some "Bio-Blast" grease and fat remover stuff to clean it up. We give the grey water tank a clean out every 6 months or so with similar products but it looks like we didn't disturb the gunge in the float switch sufficiently. More Bio-Blast is on order:

Off in the mud then back to heating system fun

Ages ago, pre-Covid if you can remember that far back, we had booked an off road driving day with Land rover. Well, it finally happened.

We drove to Honiton via a brief stop in Bridgwater for lunch which was a strange place. One side of the river had lovely buildings and a few nice shops. The other was sadder than a sad thing and well behind the times. How far behind? Well, this car dealership sign just about summed it up:

Reliant cars stopped production around 2002!

Our off road day in the forest area around Honiton was excellent. Anne (Izzy the dog's owner) joined us and unlike before, the instructor could not travel in the car with us thanks to Covid so he was ahead in his own vehicle and linked by radio. Some of the specially constructed obstacles were fun. Here is the inclinometer built into the Defender showing a 27 degree tilt to the side:

and here is how it felt to the crew in the back seat:

Somehow it felt more than 27 degrees. Fun was also had on the "bumps" that allowed us to see just how the car would still progress with two wheels around a meter and a half off the ground. To help you appreciate what was happening they had rigged up a mirror and getting the car onto the balance point allowed the instructor to have some fun with the crew who was driving:

We were astonished with the capability of the Defender especially as it was on normal road tyres. We could drive up a forest track that was too steep for the instructor's discovery to conquer with ease thanks to the car and the electronics controlling wheelspin and grip. The same stuff got us down slowly and safely too. An amazing car and a great day.

After the mechanised fun, the crew needed another animal fix so it was off to the local donkey sanctuary - kind of a re-run of the visit to the Isle of Wight version. Some grown-ups just seem to struggle with the whole growing up concept:

A wander around West Bay and Beaminster concluded a most enjoyable weekend. No boating at all but.... 

Back in our "reality" afloat, we needed to give the rather neglected boat a run out so we did the usual trips up and down the Cardiff bay area, making our track look as boring as it is in reality:

However, the weather was kind:

gentle winds and no rain. Upon return to Penarth we headed for the fuel berth to splash some in to keep the generator and heating going over the winter. 1,400 litres later we berthed again, happy in the lucky timing because there was a new tanker delivery due the following day and of course the price would be going up.

Maintenance news:

All to do with the heating system again. From the last post you can figure out that the system had been misbehaving. A chat to Toby the expert guy from Keto who are based in the Hamble river gave us a hint that it could be the motor valve in the system playing up. This valve apparently defaults to the "air con" position when de-energised, circulating the coolant around the system and through the air con compressor:

Manually swapping the valve position seemed to enable the 24v "on" feed to the boiler and it duly fired up. Then the system ran perfectly all evening. Happy days. Well, not quite. Happy day maybe. The captain woke up early(ish) the following morning and suddenly heard the boiler firing up. The system was totally turned off but the boiler had a mind of its own. So, at stupid o'clock, the lazarette was unlocked and the captain used the physical switch on the boiler to turn it off.. Why did this happen? No clue at all. More investigation needed.

Dental fun, Aussie invasion and more fixing things

You can only have so much fun in one month. Ours was centred around the dentist telling us that we didn't need any fillings (or worse) and then a visit from Hazel and Tom. Seeing a 30 year old that you have known from birth does make you feel rather old. Yes, in case you hadn't spotted it, we probably are rather old now.

It was great catching up with Hazel and meeting Tom who are over from Australia and working in London. They took the coach to Cardiff on November 5th. We foolishly went to collect them from the coach stop not realising that Sophia Gardens is a mecca for folks who want to watch the fireworks display in the park. It was manic. Still, we managed to meet up and escape from the wildly busy gardens afterwards. The touristy bits followed - Castell Coch, a walk into and around Cardiff and a traditional Welshcake purchase. Lunch was more Germanic thanks to the start of the Xmas market and the "Bavarian sausage" offerings:

To be fair, the sausage was OK in comparison to some that the Captain had consumed during his many stays in Munich.

As Poppy the little fluffy white dog hates fireworks and her owner was going to be away one evening, we hosted her and Pip on board. Poppy was fed a special tranquiliser tablet whilst Pip just enjoyed cuddles:

The trickiest part was opening a bottle of Prosecco - to ensure the "pop" of the cork did not upset Poppy. Tom our visitor played music from his phone quite loudly next to her ear. It seemed to work well, as did the Prosecco.

The tranquilisers certainly worked:

Maintenance news:

The pesky leaky fitting that couples the outlet from the manual bilge pump to the backup electric pump has been replaced with a  lovely piece of stainless steel that Chris the nice guy from Food Quality Engineering fabricated for us. The before and after pictures show just how much of a better job this is. Here is the rubbish plastic screwed together version (with blue gunge fingerprints on it after an attempt to seal the leaks):

and the stainless replacement:

The old plastic fitting has been given a decent burial in a recycling skip. One step forward and all that. The step backwards was when the heating system seemed to be allowing the boat to chill off too much one evening. Upon checking we found that the boiler was not firing up and there were no error messages being flashed from it. Oh good. A little checking of the wiring showed that there was no "on" 24v signal going to the boiler from the Webasto Blue Cool system. Something that had worked perfectly well for many hours. Giving it a 24v input the boiler duly fired up but closed down after a short time with an overheating message. Strange as the circulating pump in the system was working. More investigation needed but as we were leaving for Devon the following morning, it got parked. Grr.

A couple of little excursions and maintenance frustrations

Settling back into Penarth life seemed pretty easy really. The bikes were pressed into action again and several trips (on the unexpectedly dry days) around the area followed. One of the favourite spots is through the city and out to Pontcanna. Nice trip, 95% on cycle tracks too. Oh, it also finishes up at a nice Coffee #1 place too:

Must have been cycling into the wind heading there as the coffee seems to be intact but the pastry has taken a pasting..... The area really is good for cycle paths and routes along the rivers. Ideal, at least on nicer weather days.

A little escape followed, three nights in the rather lovely Aberllynfi B and B  (see https://www.aberllynfi.house/ )  which we have stayed in before. A very Covid secure operation too. Whilst there, we wandered around Hay-on-Wye and found this in a window:

Seemed like such a quiet place to have a "BLM" debate going on. Further excursions to Ludlow and then Hereford with the lovely buildings followed:

A good break in a beautiful part of the country. Back in Penarth, we resumed the bike exercise knowing that a few days of truly grim weather were forecast. The new Pret a Manger next to Cardiff central station was a handy stopping off spot although this time the crew was not keen on having her likeness taken:

We were truly horrified at the number of people spilling out from the station and heading into the city. Seeing bouncers on the doors of pubs (including Wetherspoons) at 11am was not edifying or, perhaps, contributing to an improvement in the local Covid infection rate.

As the dentist was beckoning and we needed to be around the Hythe area for that, we took advantage of the trip back to Hampshire and spent some time on the Isle of Wight, invading Tina's life for a weekend. Owing to a horrid miscalculation (we have no kids and so half term dates are not often in our minds) the ferry over was manically busy:

Having somehow survived the madness known as a Red Funnel ferry, things got way better. The crew was in a happy place:

visiting the Isle of Wight donkey sanctuary with 118 different donkeys to admire / pet / mark off on the sheet she is clutching. Somehow she resisted the "donkey twitcher" approach and we left before seeing all of them. Quite fortunate really or we might still be there hunting for the slightly shy inmates.

Walks around the coast at Bonchurch, an excellent lunch at the Albert Cottage in East Cowes and generally catching up kept us very happy indeed.

Maintenance News:

Sometime ago, when using the electric pump to empty the black water tank, we noticed a little weep from the manual pump that is in the same outlet line as a backup in case the electric one fails. Only this time, it was the manual one that was giving trouble. 

An overhaul kit was procured and then we had the fun of dismantling the pump, trying to ignore the odours and interesting sludge that accumulates inside it. The rebuild was totally unsuccessful as the case seemed to have been butchered before with one of the screws that holds the casing together having been re-drilled for an unknown / unfathomable reason. The gloop that someone had used to seal it was no longer working and the damage to the case meant there were three options. Either bodge it again, replace the entire pump or just bypass it and rely on the electric one or shore pump out stations. The third option won and the captain measured up for a nice stainless steel piece of tube to bridge the hoses. That way an new manual pump could always be refitted if needed pretty quickly (if messily).

Here is the offending article:

Many bad words might have been used about it and the bodger who messed up the casing during the first couple of years of the boat's life.....

Penarth, cars, fuel shortages, holed boats and furry dogs

Back in Penarth, settled onto our new berth (a different hammerhead) and enjoying the lovely bad weather, we pondered on why we had headed here and not followed Capt Rae to Portimao. He was reporting beer for 3 Euros and sun. The challenge for us is now the 90 day post Brexit restriction on staying there. Heading back to the UK across Biscay in January was not tempting although Capt Rae would certainly do it if needed based on his past exploits. 

As the rain gently fell, we opted to do a few inside maintenance jobs. One was putting a new CMOS battery into the navigation PC. This is a 24 volt special bit of kit with lots of USB and COM ports, the kind of things you just don't get normally now. The COM ports are real old technology but allow the PC to get inputs from the satellite compass, depth sounder, GPS, AIS etc independently of the normal ethernet network. So, if the Furuno black box failed, we could still navigate very happily using the PC. If it was behaving.

You can see how many connections there are from this forest of wire attached to it:

After careful labelling of the 5 COM connections, 4 USB, two ethernet and remote control panel plus power connections, the PC was dragged out and dismembered:

Can you spot the backup battery on the motherboard? Nope, neither could we as it was hidden below another circuit board. Tricky to access to say the least. After raiding Tesco for a new battery, it was fitted and the PC reinstalled. At least it can tell the time now.

When the rain stopped, we did a little catching up, with Simon the yacht surveyor and Nikki his lovely lady. They brought along Luna - they were dogsitting and she was most interested in our cake:

We needed to get back to the New Forest to collect our car and that worked out rather well. A lift from Simon to the motorway, a lift from Anne's friend Liz to her house, then a lift from Anne back to Hythe. We felt like hitchhikers. After borrowing the Toddlermobile to collect our car from store we faced a dilemma. Our car didn't have enough fuel in it to get back to Wales and the local panic buyers were busy draining the filling stations. We passed two empty ones on the way to the storage place. So, the captain did a loop round via the local Morrisons who had fuel and (only!) joined a 10 minute queue to fill up.  They had jacked up their price rather a lot which annoyed us so it was a one off visit, no plans to go there again in future.

Liberated, with around 400 miles in the tank, we celebrated by taking the Toddlers to a garden centre (alien environment for us, full of strange things that we would find no use for) and then collecting Izzy the goddog before heading back to Wales.

Izzy was VERY furry and desperately needed a groom. The VERY wet weather and VERY long fur meant that after each walk we had a long drying off process to contend with:

You can see how much she likes her onesie. The walking hearth-rug enjoyed playing on the barrage:

although the wind made it even harder for her to see out, as per the picture above. Relief came in the form of Paula the groomer who transformed that furry girl into a way smaller dog who was then treated to the beach at Barrybados:

After returning a smaller and tidier Izzy to her owner, then the flybridge cushions and bimini cover to our lockup we took Mr Toddler for a hospital follow-up visit which all went well. Reasonable weather was forecast  so we returned to Penarth - time to get a few bits sorted on the boat we thought before the really bad weather sets in. Upon our return we saw this rather battered yacht on our pontoon:

Yes, the damage was as bad as it looks and being an elderly craft she was pretty substantially built too. Luckily she had a proper chain locker bulkhead so only the "nose" area flooded a bit. Some yachts might have struggled to keep the waves out with that kind of damage.  We subsequently found out that the boat was motoring along with the tide, on autopilot, when it hit a navigation buoy. Buoy 1, yacht and owner (who hurt his ankle in the impact) 0.  No comment needed or made.

Maintenance news:

Pretty normal stuff really, the RIB outboard had an oil and filter change, plus fresh gearbox oil (always a nice messy job). Most of the exposed parts of the hull got some polish / sealant to help it survive the ravages of the winter and the exterior teak was treated to some Boracol to stop it going nice and green during the wet weather that is bound to come. All very unexciting  but necessary.

Falmouth to Penarth - winter must be coming

Falmouth proved to be a bit of a mixed bag. A lovely walk around the headland to Gyllyngvase beach for coffee and a rather good carrot cake was a high point. Ditto an excellent lunch in a foody pub in Truro (the Rising Sun) with wonderfully friendly staff. However, a walk along the river to Penryn planning to visit our favourite Muddy Beach café was a dismal and annoying failure. When folks close for a week why can't they update their web and Facebook pages?  The little notice on the door was not what we wanted to see after a warm walk there which was followed by what seemed like a longer warmer walk back.

Knowing that the weather was going to break and that the usual series of Atlantic lows would be coming in, we spotted one nice weather window for the trip to our winter berth in Penarth. One calm(ish) day that would let things around Land's End settle down then another with slowly increasing SE - S winds which would mean plenty of shelter as we headed alongside the northern coast of Cornwall. 

We needed just over a day for the trip (180 nautical miles or so) and the forecasts for the following days were not nice. This is from Windy, showing 6 metre waves for a fair bit of our route a day later on:

The only drawback was that we were going to have fog but the radar is pretty good at seeing through that although it messes up the FLIR images.

We headed off around 8am with patchy fog. Leaving the berth you could see for about 20 metres, then as we passed the commercial port area it cleared so we could see some of the ugly stuff parked there:

Not the greatest of farewell views but all we got as the visibility closed in again. Here is the first part of the route:

Anchored off the Manacles (the "sticky out bit" just south of Falmouth) were a couple of tankers, as usual. One had been there for well over 3 weeks. It just feels so inefficient and such a bad use of huge capital expenditure seeing so much shipping laying around for so long in these "global recovery" times. Naturally we make an exception for Cruise liners who would act as little floating Covid factories, they can lay to anchor for many more months.

As it was calm, we cut inshore and fairly close to the Lizard, an area that can get bumpy with overfalls in strong winds and tides. We got to see the lighthouse and outbuildings through a gap in the fog banks but as they were just grey and shrouded in mist, no pictures for you this time. We did enjoy the company of plenty of dolphins though, with the crew standing outside and giving them plenty of encouragement for all of their tricks, jumps etc:

Things were pretty quiet passing Penzance and heading towards Land's End until this little fishing boat decided to change course (they were not fishing) and come across our bows. In theory he had to give way. Don't you love theory and fishermen:

The fog cleared from the surface of the sea by the time we reached Longships light house, so much so that we could also see Wolf Rock at the same time. However the land itself still had a little white / grey blanket over it:

It was pretty calm really, a little swell left and some small waves on top of it making the sea a bit confused but our timing was spot on. We took the tide with us along the south coast, caught a back eddy heading up to Longships and then the tide turned to help carry us around Land's End and up the first part of the north Cornish coast. Even the weather played ball as the wind did just as forecast:

True Wind Speed = 1.5 knots. Wow. 7.6 knots speed over the ground and about 6.4 speed through the water @1640 rpm. Yes, all was going well. There was no traffic about until we encountered this ugly thing which was surveying and also trying to avoid the pot markers left by the Padstow fishing boats. He called one up on the radio to check that they were just pots and not nets and got a real sloping shoulders reply of "I think so". Since the fishing boat had been chucking them over the side you would have hoped that he knew what he was throwing over. 

The ugly orange thing then decided to head in our direction and annoyingly he was showing that he wanted at least half a nautical mile clearance:

So, we had a small diversion from our course - this is how the camera saw 0.7 miles:

As night came in the tide started to turn against us but after nearly 12 hours of favourable streams, we could not complain. Timing for this trip always means that you have a slow time passing Hartland Point headland. Overnight we had a few fishing boats to keep us company, you can see a couple that the ARPA function on the radar had picked up and was tracking:

You also can see how the FLIR picks up the wave patterns. Sorry, but again we failed to get a picture of the dolphins on the FLIR - they are quite impressive at night too. 

As it started to get light so we were steaming along thanks to the next tide change towards Cardiff. A few ships were anchored mid-channel waiting for the high tide to go into Barry / Newport:

and we enjoyed a nice red sunrise and calm sea conditions:

The old saying of "Red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky at morning, sailors warning" was most accurate as some nasty stuff was forecast for that evening. If you want to be a geek and understand why a red sky in the morning is a warning, look at Wikipedia link.

The barrage locks into Cardiff bay run inbound at 15 and 45 minutes past the hour. We arrived just outside the entrance channel at about 17 minutes past so we had a little bit of going in circles, some wing engine exercise, a wide open throttle burn to help the engine / exhaust and then headed in. As it was a pretty calm Sunday morning, all three locks had been used for the outbound 9am traffic. A small flotilla of fishing boats and yachts headed out and we then headed into the barrage area all alone. That was rather good:

A warm welcome from the duty dockmaster at Penarth followed - he said that he had been stalking us on AIS all the way from the Lizard peninsular. You are never alone with AIS it seems. All in all a great trip, the fastest time ever for that run thanks to the tides (25 hours) to do just about 190 nautical miles with diversions / getting out of Falmouth Harbour. For continental readers that is around 352 Km. Once more happy to see our favourite "home town" of Penarth, sad that the boating season is effectively over.

Maintenance News:

Nothing at all, pretty boring really. As the big Lugger was nice and warm, we treated it to an oil change shortly after arriving so it has nice fresh stuff in it for the quieter period ahead. Also as a thank you for looking after us this season.