Settling back into Penarth, then not cruising the river Thames (again)

Being back in our second home was pretty good. A chance to dig out the folding bikes and use them, some boat washing and hull polishing to protect it a bit for the winter too. We took the horrid train to Southampton (we've moaned about the grim rolling stock used on the Cardiff to Portsmouth service before and it hasn't improved one little bit) and recovered the car from the summer store. We returned armed with a little brown furry dog too.  Things then looked up even more dramatically when Julia (a friend who was at university with the crew) arrived for a few days. She timed things perfectly, hitting the sunniest spell possible. Julia seemed happy to sit in the aft cockpit and check out the gin options on board:

Izzy on the other hand, was being tortured. A very high value treat - a piece of cheese - was cruelly  balanced on her paw and she was told to leave it. You can see the focus this needed:

We took Julia to St Fagans (the museum of Welsh life with all the old buildings), the doglet had some ball and barrage fun:

and then a high delight time on the beach at Barrybados with her Fox Red Labrador friend, Moxie.  Julia hadn't seen any episodes of Gavin and Stacey which shocked us. We thought that it was such a cult series that everyone in the country (and a few beyond it) would know about Barrybados, Nessa's slot machines and Marco's cafe. To help Julia get the full experience, we forced her to watch a couple of episodes before allowing her to sample the delights of Barry.

Whilst our visitor and the crew were enjoying the beach, the captain had driven back to Hythe, to take Mrs Toddler to the hospital for an eye check up. Somehow sitting in Sainsbury's car park in Southampton was not quite as appealing as watching the dogs have a great time chasing balls on the sand although to be fair,  there was quite a lot of "wildlife" in Lordshill shopping centre.....

After Julia left us (on a very delayed and very full train) we headed back to Hythe as it was root-canal treatment time for the captain. Only that didn't work out too well. The dentist gave the usual injections, things felt numb but the tooth was far from it. More anaesthetic, a few minutes in the waiting room and still the pesky tooth would not desensitise. The dentist had to give up and say we would try another time. Brilliant, when we'd driven over especially to get it fixed. 

Undaunted we returned the doglet to her owner and set off for the often postponed Thames hire boat holiday with Tina. Those of you with scarily good memories or a vague interest in what we do, might recall that the original plan had been the Camargue. A hire boat there had been booked, then postponed twice thanks to covid lockdowns, then once more thanks to the crew having a bad back. Last year it got swapped to the Thames as we were recovering from getting covid and Mr Toddler was not well so we opted to "stay close". Only the river was in flood so we could not leave the hire boat yard and then the workshop caught fire and gave us a spectacular if slightly worrying fireworks display, warming up our hire boat nicely. Have a look at this weblink for a refresher 2023 blog post

Well, lightning does strike twice - we arrived at the yard after a day of very heavy rain and the river was in flood. Instead of cruising along the river in the "Calypso" hire boat like this:

we were stuck in the boatyard once more. The holiday seemed fated. The rain thing then got worse as you can see:

and by the end of our first day, this ominous status of the Thames locks was on the Environment Agency website:

which overnight turned into this:

Red boards means river closed. So, undeterred (apart from a couple of rainwater leaks into the boat and a truly feeble heating system) we decided to make the best of it. Tina wasn't arriving for a couple of days, by then we hoped the yard guys would stop the leak into her cabin that liked to soak the mattress, and we hit Oxford by bus. A good day, dry amazingly too. The following day, after another night of rain and hence leaks, we visited Hughenden house. It was the home of Disraeli the ex Prime Minister and as well as being a nice stately rockpile:

it had a fascinating WWII background when it was requisitioned for use as a map making location - producing maps mainly for bomber crews from aerial reconnaissance photographs. We learned planty about Disraeli too - seems that he was a lot like a latter-day Boris Johnson but Disraeli seemed to manage passing many more useful acts of parliament.

After our third night afloat and more torrential rain overnight, the river level was rising rapidly and the stream was flowing very fast indeed. This little video just shows it gurgling around the well trussed up hire boats:

We were too late to video a huge clump of riverbank that was being carried downstream but this little clip gives you the general idea:

After a chat with the boatyard manager who was pretty sure that the river was going to flood over the quay heading and try to get the boat to float into the car park, we agreed that the time had come to abandon ship. Luckily it was sunny and dry as we emptied out all of the stuff we'd brought and phoned Tina to tell her to get off her train and head back to the Isle of Wight. You can see the ropes tied between the mooring posts by the yard guys to try and stop the boats from floating back onto the car park area:

Anyway, this is the boat we spent three nights on being readied for the river overflowing onto the land:

It felt so much like the situation we had last year, only this time there was no boatshed to burn down. The space has temporary steel containers instead and they look a bit more fire resistant:

Fate does not want us to revisit the Thames it seems. We will have to live with the memories from when we had a boat moored at Bray and regularly pottered up and down each weekend

Milford Haven to Penarth - last proper trip of the year perhaps?

After our trip down from Troon, we had an excellent night's sleep and then a day at anchor too. There was no real need to rush back to Penarth and as the day had a strongish easterly wind forecast that would make it a bit of a bumpy trip, we opted for the extra day at anchor. It was a good call, a nice relaxing time, some admin and generally relaxing. The following day we were going to be treated to very gentle winds that would mainly be astern of us so why not make things easier. 

Arranging to work with the evil Bristol Channel tides kind of forced us to an early departure. One of those alarm clock setting things. So, we were up and ready to retrieve the anchor around 5:20 am. It was a bit foggy and the gas terminal looked a bit fuzzy thanks to the fog and a shaky hand holding the mobile phone for a quick picture:

As some light filtered through, you could more or less see the fog / mist and not too far ahead either:

The FLIR doesn't work as well in rain / fog and so when we departed in the dark, we were busy carefully inspecting the FLIR screen to see if any pot markers were around, much harder to spot them than usual. The main engine alternator was very busy replenishing the overnight use of the domestic batteries and the forward battery bank that had to run the anchor windlass and help drag up the nice Rocna anchor and a fair bit of Milford Haven mud too:

154 amps at 24 volts is quite a lot of power! The alternator was getting a good workout, luckily in a nice cool engine room to help keep the thing at a sensible temperature.

The trip up the channel was pretty uneventful really. Amazingly calm, a bit misty and almost no other traffic. Two fair sized pods of dolphins though, one of which just carried on swimming past us but the second came and spent a long time playing in our bow wave. No matter how many times you see them performing in the bow wave, it is always magical.  We also saw plenty of gannets which was encouraging after all the worries about bird flu wiping out the population.

As we approached Cardiff, we were getting nice rocket assistance from the incoming tide and hit 10.7 knots at times. We only managed to get a picture doing a more pedestrian 10.1 though:

Note the wind speed of just over 4 knots - lovely for motorboating. The prediction was for 3.1 knots of tide helping us:

and that was about right and happily enjoyed. We had left Milford a bit earlier than planned and thanks to a lovely smooth trip (no speed loss pushing through the waves or from the stabilisers working hard to keep us level) it went quicker than normal, just over 12 hours from Milford entrance to the Cardiff barrage lock:

It sounds a bit sad to be happy that what might well be the last sea trip of the year went quickly, but quite honestly this felt more like a delivery run than a summer cruising trip. The Bristol channel is not the loveliest area, visibility was not great, the water turns more brown and muddy the further east you get and we'd kind of accepted that "this was it"  for 2024. Yes, this was it:

The big move towards the south when we left Milford was to avoid a shallow area but also to get far enough south before the firing range to the east of Milford was active. They want boats to stay 5 miles south of the land.

As we entered the barrage lock at Cardiff Bay, we did a very neat job of coming alongside the floating pontoon and the crew secured the centre line nicely, then a stern one. Out of the barrage control office appeared Phil - he used to be a dockmaster in Penarth marina so we knew hm and started to chat. At the same time Steve and Rhiannon arrived on the bridge across the lock and started waving. Quite a welcome back. The crew then threw a bow line onto a cleat on the floating pontoon and somehow managed to get a turn around one of the end of the cleat. No idea how but it involved climbing onto the pontoon to free it off, watched by everybody of course. The throw was a one in a million thing that you could never repeat - or want to.

We called Penarth on the radio to gain entry and were warmly welcomed back., Yes, back in our second home. Despite the best efforts of plenty of weed in the marina we spun the boat around and berthed in our usual spot, with a nice view astern again of our sister boat, Malaspina which now has new owners:

It felt good to be back. 

Maintenance news:

Nothing really, We didn't even blow a navigation light bulb. However, one of the new LED downlighters that we fitted  into the headlining of our cabin, had failed. Way more expensive than a navigation bulb but hopefully a warranty job as it was purchased in the spring. An email to the supplier is needed.