Guess what, more Dartmouth time and a little road trip

You might think that we have taken root here and are about to register on the electoral roll. Well, not really. We needed to find somewhere we could safely leave the boat so we could travel back to Hythe to take Mrs Toddler to a hospital check. Dartmouth seemed the only option after being turned away from all the Plymouth marinas (bar Queen Anne's Battery, the one run by MDL - we didn't call them on religious grounds. Yup, we strongly object to giving vast amounts of money to MDL).

Our extended stay was far from boring though. John and Irene were still around in their motorhome and so we had a two dinghy trip up to Dittisham for lunch. J and I and Archie used our "rubber flubber" - the Avon rollup dinghy with the fire breathing 3.5HP Tohatsu outboard. Thanks to a covid restricted season last year, the little outboard had not been used for 18 months. Old fuel was still in the tank that must have a way higher % of oil than normal as the petrol tends to evaporate. Topped it up with fresh fuel mix, cleaned the storage oil off the spark plug and three pulls later it was running. Oh yes. It then behaved perfectly:

Archie the dog was not too impressed with his lifejacket in the warm weather and needed to escape it. He was also unimpressed that we all ordered a pizza with chilli flakes on it.

On the way back, a southerly breeze had picked up which was not forecast. This was blowing over the outgoing stream and so it made the river quite choppy. Those of us in the RIB were fine. Irene got a little bit wet but dried out well afterwards and didn't complain at all.  She is way tougher than we are.

We did a few more bits to help Simon and Amanda with the boat hire business. The captain had a moment of happiness when we took their Defender across to Kingswear on the ferry to collect a couple of dead outboards from Darthaven:

It felt good to be driving a Defender again - the original one, as the train spotters will be able to tell from the picture above, not the new electronics infested thing with automatic transmission and loads of driver aids. To be fair, Simon's Defender has mirrors and aircon so it isn't totally basic. 

To prove that the average IQ in the country seems to be dropping as fast as the national debt is rising, we witnessed Simon taking a great call on the business phone:

Simon - Dartmouth Boat Hire

Numpty - Hello, where in Dittisham are you based?

Simon - No, we are in Dartmouth, that is why we are called Dartmouth boat hire

Numpty - Oh, is there a rental place in Dittisham then?

Simon - Yes, Dittisham boat hire

As the phrase goes, they walk amongst us....

We then had a road trip. Yup, a road trip. Simon had very very kindly loaned us his rather nice VW T-Roc so we could get back to Hythe to take Mrs Toddler to a hospital appointment. The hospital folks do like to keep an eye on the battery in her pacemaker. Mr Toddler is keen on that too - if it started to go flat, his dinner might get later and later each day.

Never being the sort of folks to miss a chance for a good rant, here one comes. Regular readers might have picked up that the crew is a tad Fitbit addicted. Well, yet again hers was failing - this time some of the lines on the screen were dead and so the display was slowly expiring, line by line. For the cost, the durability of these things is appalling! After a most painful on line chat with them (how was yet another reboot going to fix the obvious hardware issue??)  the warranty process was to send the watch back so it could be checked and then have a replacement mailed out to us. This took nearly 4 weeks end to end. Pathetic. The new Fitbit was laying in Hythe when we arrived and so the crew was keen to get back into competitive step counting. Only when  the "so called new" watch was fired up, it did this:

Perhaps they thought that as some lines failed on the old one they would replace it with a device that had a large bright bar across the bottom of the display that was always visible. Yet another discussion with Fitbit support, yet another device coming. Their equipment really is not worth the sticker price.

Blog tool update:

The nice Google folks have decided to remove the "widget" that allowed you to become a follower of the blog and to get automated emails containing the details of every new post. So, we have started emailing a link to the exiting blog followers each time we add a new post. If anyone wants to be added to this list, let us know via the contact form on here - you can see it above the list of older posts and other menu options. Equally, if you want to be removed from the emails as you are totally bored with our ramblings, please do the same.