Still Dartmouthing

Wandering around Dartmouth you see so many lovely old buildings:

with plenty of character and the odd leaning wall... At this time of year you also get plenty of coach tour people. They certainly have character but it is way less appealing than the buildings. Somehow the "Saga coach tours" lot believe that they own the pavements, can walk in the roads, don't have to queue and expect everyone else to get out of their way. The best bit is that they all get taken away around lunchtime back to their hotels (perhaps for a little sleep?) and the town becomes much nicer again. Yes, before you remind us we are indeed old enough to go on a Saga holiday, however we have not developed the necessary behaviours yet.

John and Irene arrived in town with their motorhome and set up camp in Stoke Fleming, the one remaining site this side of the river. They walked into town and joined us on board for lunch and dinner. Archie the Lakeland terrier was suitably tired and so a makeshift dog bed was assembled on board for him. Cue one happy snoozy dog:

The rather busy social activities continued when Millie, the yacht that you have met in this blog before, pitched up returning from a good break in the Scilly islands. They joined us for dinner on board, as did June's old boss Bernie and his friend Paul a day later. Yup, lots of cooking. We escaped from that when the Millie crew invited us to join them up at the anchor stone for a pizza dinner. Millie looked good anchored just downstream from Dittisham:

and Richard looked good and perhaps a tad smug in his new T shirt from Quba. Spot the slight error:

We took the RIB to the Ferry Boat Inn and ordered four of their rather lovely pizzas to take back to the yacht and eat in the aft cockpit. Whilst waiting a beer was needed - it was a beautiful sunny day after all. The view as the sun was dropping , the pizza and beer made all of us rather contented:

Maintenance news:

The Captain got a bit busy and setup the "hot spare" autopilot computer with the same configuration that had been working well in the primary one. Then we swapped over to use the second computer and pump for a change just to check it was all working OK.

We also did a few bits to help Simon and Amanda who own the day boat hire business here. After their nasty Quad bike accident, Simon is in recovery mode at home so we tried to get a genset going for the guy who pumps out the boats and checked one of them for water in the fuel. Luckily, there was none despite the filler cap being left off. If you are boatless and in Dartmouth, have a look at their website, book a boat and go and enjoy the beautiful river.