Island life, fuel and beaches

Well, when you are on a lovely island with loads of dog friendly beaches, what do you do? First of all you try to explain to the doglet that tides make a difference. The beach at Havelet Bay, one of Izzy's favourites, vanishes at high water. Despite that she insists on dragging us all the way down the slipway so she can look over the edge, see deep water all around and then turn to us with an accusing "what have you done with my beach" look:

She struggles with the concept a lot. Luckily a few hours later, normal service can be restored and the crew can be forced to throw a ball for her:

We had some nice walks, hours of beach time for the dog, a great lunch in a local pub and a couple of super coffee breaks in Coco - handily positioned next to the Havelet beach so Izzy could dry off a bit and drop some of the accumulated sand on their floor, not ours. Well worth the cost of a couple of flat whites. Continuing the food theme, we had to visit Anni's terrace at Moores hotel for the famous Apfelstrudel.  It would be so wrong not to test it out. Happily we can report that it is as good as ever, despite the sad passing of Anni herself a couple of years ago.

It was not all gastronomy though. We tortured the doglet by taking her to Pets at Home for claw clipping, pad fur removal and an attempt to remove the fur from inside her ears which was wildly knotted. Poor girl. She forgave us pretty quickly though. We then took her by bus to St Sampson so we could raid the rather good M and G chandlery. It was too hot for little dogs and humans to walk the rest of the way there and back.

The little beach come mooring area on the other side of the harbour had a few strange resident craft. This twin outboard powered dinghy amused the captain no end:

Two elderly British Seagull outboards that brought back memories. Many many moons ago, you could hire one to go with your dinghy when renting a cruiser or yacht on the Norfolk Broads. The captain had the fun of showing the hirers how to use them as part of the handover and trial run. Explaining to a rather "well to do" chap. who arrived in a rather lovely Inspector Morse style Jaguar, that the infernal beast of a 2 stroke outboard ran on a 10:1 fuel to oil ratio and so would smoke a bit (!) was bad enough. Showing him how to flood the carburettor until fuel was running out of it into the river to get it started when cold was tricky. Then letting him see the evil notch on the flywheel whizz round all ready to take the skin or fingers off your hand if you were not careful was the icing on the cake. 

The clouds of blue smoke and distinctive noise then became a minor issue,  As did the 1.5HP trying to push a loaded dinghy against the stream in the river when it was in full flow. How some hirers ever managed to start the things was a mystery. For a demonstration of the noble art of Seagull operation, see this video link You Tube Seagull start-up

We needed to top up with fuel so we contacted the nice Rubis folks and arranged a time slot around high water to meet Gary the tanker driver in St Sampson. As we headed off to rendezvous there, we admired the folks paying well over 15% more for the benefit of using the Boatworks fuelling facility in St Peter Port. OK for the yacht taking on tiny amounts but for anything >300 litres, Rubis wins hands down:

The huge (20 minutes) trip there and back looks like this:

The big looped approach to St Sampson is because there are all sort of nasty rocky bits and swirling currents around there. Since it was neap tide time, and the harbour pontoon we use for fuel dries out, we only had just over a metre and  a half under our keel when we berthed, an hour before high water. Fuelling took the best part of an hour including adding some Stanadyne additive to help preserve the fuel and we sneaked out with not much more clearance. Well worth it though.

As it was a baking hot day, we then chilled on board until early evening when the dog had a run on Havelet beach again. Only the tide was well out and there was an abundance of weed laying on the compacted sand. A couple of people had driven down the slipway, onto the beach and launched their small boats from a trailer. The trailer gives you an idea of how much weed was around:

as does the front of this van:

Particularly amusing was the way that weed was poking out of all the holes in the front wheels too:

One of the tow tricks was an elderly Nissan Navara. They were renowned for having failed chassis legs due to corrosion. A bath in salt water and a coating of seaweed cannot be helping this one much. The weed didn't bother Izzy much, she was so happy to be back paddling again. Or digging:

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or both.

On the same slipway as the twin Seagull powered dinghy, was this strange landing craft:

Sad cases. who have read and remembered all of our blog posts, might recall this as the work barge for the Guernsey Oysters business. To see the beds on Herm where they grow, look at this video link Oyster farming on channel 5. We seem to remember that the work barge had a famous background too. If you look closely at the side of the barge, you will see several small plates welded onto it. They are to cover up ports that oars were shipped though as this barge was made for a film and was mocked up as a rowing craft, Strange to meet a film star on this particular little stony beach.

Although the weather was good (sunny, warm / hot) the harbour continued to be a bit quiet:

Hopefully you can spot the Nordhavn on the far pontoon. 

Maintenance News:

Well, sometimes life is just like that. We were smugly enjoying the rather wonderful new battery capacity that we have one lunchtime when we decided to fire up the genset - not really to charge them but to run the oven . Since we will have plenty of AC power from the genset (52 amps) we also decided to do some washing, only the washing machine had other ideas. Having worked happily a few days beforehand, it just would not fire up. No light, no nothing. So, we emptied the cupboard from hell that is behind the washer and the dryer, removed the rear panel and got access to the power sockets. Of course, the fuse in the plug was fine. As was the power to the socket itself. 

Everything pointed to a failed board inside the machine - as it is now elderly and has been heavily used since 2009, we guess that we cannot complain too much. Is it worth trying to fix an 18 year old Miele washing machine, even if you can get the parts? We reckoned not. Lots of fun to come sourcing and fitting a replacement. In the meantime we will have to join all the other folks who use marina laundry facilities, and bring stuff back to the tumble dryer which still works. Mind you, removing the panel was a bit of a shock.....

You get to see the rather boring  back of the tumble dryer:

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and that was very messy indeed, loads of fluff around. It looked like the exhaust hose was not sealing properly at the bottom - some nice factory person had put loads of sealing goo around it but that wasn't doing the job either. So, a massive clean up was needed. The flexible pipe was removed from the three little plastic clips that are supposed to seal it in position, a ton of fluff removed from inside the cabinetry and the hose refitted with a couple of cable ties to hold it more securely. It was tempting to break off the three plastic clips and use a huge jubilee clip around it but the ridged hose would not have been that simple to anchor in place. Here is a slightly cleaned up and refitted hose:

and you can see the remaining grot in there. Cleaning out took ages, kneeling in the locker and working through the hatch. At least we found another problem and could try to fix it.

Below this lives the errant washing machine. Plenty of fluff had found its way down behind that too so when we get  to remove the  dead device, it might be very very messy indeed. The question is - will the hoses be long enough to allow the machine to be wrestled out forwards? If not then the whole job is going to  be a real PITA. It will have to wait until we are back at base and have time / help to check it out. Grr.