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.