Visitors, more rain (of course) and a little light maintenance

Having delivered Dave the doggy doorstop to the Toddlers a while ago, we were horrified to hear from them that Dave had become Dora. We know that it is "modern" to allow children to choose their gender but letting a little stuffed doorstop dog do the same?  A worrying expansion of dog freedoms if you ask us. 

To make up for this disappointment, we collected the very female and very alive doglet Izzy for a stay:

She was joined by her human mum for a long weekend - Anne braved the train and probably never will again. Rammed full from Romsey to Cardiff on the way here and then a totally disrupted service on the way back with cancelled trains, altered routes and a way later arrival home than planned. Izzy was quite pleased that she had stayed with us.

Having a doglet in Penarth, it is compulsory to visit Barrybados of course, get a little of the Gavin and Stacey vibe and let the doglet have fun with her buddy Moxie in Barry old harbour at low tide:

The miserable weather curtailed another visit for several days unfortunately. Like the rest of the folks in the UK, we are hoping that the never-ending rain and wind will ease up sometime. However, it gave us an opportunity to do some well overdue work on the poor neglected boat.

Maintenance news:

Paul the Maricom man was brilliant. We dropped the satellite compass into his workshop one afternoon and by that evening he had soldered in a new battery and reset the configuration for us. So, it needed to be refitted. Again, Simon the surveyor man came to our rescue - the Captain should not be working above shoulder height with his right arm yet....  

Connectors replugged:

power supply being reconnected:

and the compass worked perfectly again - feeding data to all the devices it is talks to quite happily. One thing fixed.

We mentioned that it was a struggle getting the last chunk of the headlining out as the TV mount and TV were seemingly impossible to remove. Well, again Paul came to our rescue as he knew how the mount worked. One cut down allen key later, the TV and mounting bracket were removed:

 In the old days, the average TV has a power feed and an aerial connection. Nowadays:

The last headlining board was taken away by the trimmers and we hope to see them all returned and nicely refreshed soon. 

One challenge is that removing and refitting the overhead lights had caused trouble with the original Walter Cantalupi fittings. The metal casing likes to split and then the retaining springs dont work any more. Naturally they are no longer made so we sourced some LED replacements:

If anyone else has the same issue, these are what you need:

The only challenge is that our saloon, pilothouse and main heads areas have dimmer functions. The kit that does the dimming will not work with LED lights, just with the halogen originals. So, the new lights ended up in our cabin and the displaced ones became replacements elsewhere.

Ages ago, Martin (the owner of Malaspina the other N47 here) kindly brought a new exhaust elbow temperature sender for us from Canada. Way cheaper than buying one in the UK. Mad but... They now come with a fancy fixed connector which must fit to newer engines, not our old one. So, the lovely looking plug was cut off, a simple connector was crimped on and the sender was fitted to the wing engine and tested: 

As you see, it just screws into the exhaust elbow, looks insignificant and no way justifies the cost of the thing.

As the final bit of main engine maintenance needed, the fuel filters were changed and bled. Then, when the captain went to start the engine to make sure all was well, the starter gave a clunk and nothing else. Bad words ensued. The starter batteries had been on float charge from the inverters but as soon as they got any load, the voltage dropped like a stone. Paralleling them with the house bank, the engine happily fired up and ran. Time to replace the two engine start batteries - two as it is a 24v system. We cannot complain about them really, we knew that the day would come as they are the original 2007 kit. They have done extremely well! Two 4D AGM batteries needed and some tame gorillas to fit them (because they weigh 60Kg each). We will replace the wing / genset start batteries at the same time as they are also the originals. Amazing service from the original Lifeline batteries really.

Medical stuff just seems to continue (must be an age thing) but we managed some outings

Our seemingly never ending round of medical stuff continued with a dentist visit for the crew having broken a chunk off a tooth during our stay in Wadebridge. At least the return to Hythe for treatment  allowed us to catch up with Anne and the little doglet who seemed very happy to join us in a local pub for an evening meal. As Anne hadn't given her any dinner, Izzy's focus on food was even more intense than usual:

Sadly our experience was not so good - having frequented the Bold Forester many times in the past, this visit was underwhelming. The only good bit was that the staff spoiled the doglet rotten and took a picture of her for their canine wall of fame. Pity about the food and service for the humans really. 

We then went to the dental appointment that had been arranged for the crew only to find that there was no dentist in that Saturday and the receptionist had clearly messed things up. Just what we wanted to hear. So, another trip to Hythe beckoned....

After returning for an appointment that actually worked out, the crew somehow managed to unstick the temporary half-crown that had been fitted at lunchtime that very evening (not through eating either!) So, we camped out at the dentist as they opened the following morning and a little more adhesive was used. The captain had kindly offered to attend to things with some Araldite or super glue but these had been roundly refused for no obvious reason.

Since the grim weather was well set in and heavy duty boat maintenance was not possible thanks to the recovering shoulder, we treated ourselves to a couple of trips away. The first was for a couple of nights in Bath, not having been to that lovely place for many years. The place and hotel were not car friendly and as there is a train direct from Cardiff, we decided to use it. Bad choice.....

Our trip there coincided with a rugby international in Cardiff. We took an early train from Cogan to Cardiff, wandered into the city and enjoyed the atmosphere that the rugby crowds bring. After a fortifying coffee, we returned to the station and waited for the train to Bath (which goes to Portsmouth harbour eventually). First of all there was a platform alteration - just swapping sides so that was OK. The train came in, stacked behind one timetabled to leave 5 minutes after it. How was that going to work? We should have guessed. The massive plus point was that it had 6 carriages, not the normal 3 and so seating was available.  It was also way better rolling stock than the normal elderly Turbostar things. So, the delay we happily ignored (it ended up as about 20 minutes "late arrival of the train guard" - a frequent excuse) and headed towards Bath, in the rain of course. 

In Bristol, a rather customer unfriendly GWR employee climbed into our carriage and told us that it was no longer in use and we all had to move. So, from a reasonably loaded train it became a busy one with plenty of folks standing. Fortunately we found a seat in an otherwise full carriage. Why move - the train was too long for some of the smaller platforms between Bristol and Westbury. Why the carriage could not have been left in use for folks travelling further to ease the congestion is a GWR mystery.

None of that dulled the beauty of Bath and how nice it was to wander around again, even if the weather made it look a bit grey. Here is the famous bridge with shops etc on it:

and with the Abbey in the background:

We enjoyed our time there greatly, found some good food and amazingly had a Hong-Kong Chinese lady waitress who had moved to Groningen in Holland many years ago then to the UK. Groningen is where the crew's mother was born. Anyone who wants to work out the mathematical probability of that is going to find it hard and really needs to focus on more important things. Suffice to say it was pretty unexpected.

Heading to the station for the trip back things went horribly wrong, here is the live train information for Bath:

A points failure at Westbury totally messed up all the trains except those coming from London. The station announcer kept apologising for the delay of a train that should have arrived 90 minutes earlier and that was shown clearly as cancelled on the National rail system.  Another one was shown  on the platform as 10 minutes late, then as delayed when the central system showed that it hadn't left at all and had been cancelled. All a bit shambolic really and folks who didn't use the rail app were even more confused, waiting for a train that was never going to arrive. So, we got a train to Bristol that had come from London originally, waited an hour and then caught another to Cardiff. It really reminded us just how much amusement train travel can be - even on days when the drivers are not on strike. None of our recent train trips by Transport for Wales or Great Western have been much fun / on time / as planned. Encouraging folks out of their cars gets harder and harder around here.

After a brief stop afloat, we headed to the Gower area for a couple of nights. For the non-locals, the Gower is designated as an area of outstanding natural beauty, totally unlike Port Talbot and Swansea which you travel through to reach it. Here is the area:

We stayed at the Gower hotel, a small family run place with an excellent restaurant and friendly staff. Have a look at this weblink Gower Hotel Website. The room was wonderfully quirky, with a strange name:

and sure enough, it lived up to its' billing:

There was a normal bathroom too with a shower we hasten to add. Naturally it rained during our stay so exploring was a little limited but we will happily return to the same place sometime.

Maintenance news:

Many many weeks ago we had been in touch with Wayne, the excellent local upholstery man, to arrange to get all of our headlinings replaced. The pilothouse was the most urgent, having suffered from some staining caused ages ago when the wiring from the stack instruments had been disturbed. Wayne came over to remove the headlining panels so our pilothouse looks like this now:

Plenty of insulation as you can see. Then, most annoyingly, the satellite compass decided to tell us that it needed a new backup battery. Naturally it could not have decided that towards the end of last year when the Maricom guys were on board sorting out the AV kit. Grrrrr. As we have no plans to visit the Hamble river this summer (will a summer ever come?) getting the battery replaced was going to be tricky. There was nobody locally that we would trust to do it - many folks simply return the unit to Furuno themselves as it involves soldering in a new battery and reloading the firmware and plenty of pesky parameters too.

As recovery from shoulder surgery involves not working above head height, and the satellite compass processor and display are up high, we called upon Simon the surveyor friend whom you've met many times before when he crewed for us. Some of you might know him better as the dad to Moxie, the lovely fox red labrador. Anyway, he gave up some time to remove the unit from the pilothouse so we could take it to the Maricom guys during yet another dental appointment. More voids in the pilothouse now:

It is looking so tidy in there. Removing the plugs etc we were happy that the Maricom team had everything properly labelled:

and the wires too.  All in all 11 connections to the box. Yes, 11. We will drop it to the Maricom office and hope to get it back quickly.