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.