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.