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: