Back and settling in

We slept rather well after our arrival. Some much needed catch up rest. However, that could not last for long as there is always stuff to do at the end of the season and our planned maintenance list was pretty long for the coming winter. We kicked off with the regular hull polishing job, to protect the grey gelcoat from the ravages of the winter. Easy to type, trickier to do. The port side involves doing the work from the RIB which adds to the excitement a little. To make life feel better, we enjoyed an excellent post polishing lunch at the Pilot pub in Penarth, reminding us just how special this unassuming little place is:

We booked a train back to Southampton to collect the car which had been in store, planning to do the trip on a Saturday as the wildly expensive advance tickets were marginally less obscenely priced that day. Oh dear. The line between Bridgend and Cardiff was shut for track maintenance. The knock on impact was that fewer local trains were running from our station Cogan into Cardiff each hour. To add to the fun,  despite having fewer trains each hour, Transport for Wales decided to run a two carriage train, not the normal four that operate on the line. Oh, Cardiff City were playing at home as well. 

When our train arrived, it was packed like a sardine tin, a very old one too. Then we waited 30 minutes outside Cardiff Central thanks to a broken down goods train in sweltering conditions as the heating was running (not needed!)  Well, sweltering for folks who had been in Scotland all summer. Luckily we always bake in plenty of time when relying on the local trains into Cardiff to connect with anything else so we made our connection OK.

Back in Hythe, a trip to Swanwick to see Alex and Gisele on their Nordhavn 55 was greatly enjoyed. We also visited the way smaller and pretty quiet Southampton boat show after the bus journey there from hell. It felt as though it would be the last boat show despite plenty of social media advertising hype:

We enjoyed it though, meeting up with Lars and Birgit who were looking at potential longer term replacements for their Azimut. Hearing a sales guy describe the £1.5 million boat as way better value than the £1.8 million craft in their range was amusing. The desperation to sell stock boats was clear.

After retrieving the car we returned to Penarth and a sad day, going to the funeral of Simon, our yacht surveyor friend. It was a lovely celebration of his life though and that evening, we raised a glass to him:

or two to be precise, whilst enjoying a glorious sunset that must have been arranged in his honour:

Maintenance news:

The KVH satellite TV dish had started to misbehave whilst we were in Dun Laoghaire. It refused to find the Astra UK satellite for no obvious reason. The KVH app said that the firmware and satellite library were up to date, the GPS was working fine and there were no errors in the log. Despite all that looking good, the thing hunted around the sky looking for the satellite as though it had been glue sniffing. Luckily Paul from Maricom figured out that the KVH satellite library was not up to date and gave us some new settings to enter into the system:

After some typing and checking and reboots, we had satellite TV again.

Norn Iron Keith was unimpressed with the tip of our Rocna anchor which was showing some rust where use had worn off the protective galvanising. He gave us a can of cold galvanising spray so the anchor tip got cleaned up and coated:

We sent Keith a picture so he could sleep more easily.

The main engine had an oil and filter change, as did the gearbox, just so it had nice clean stuff inside for the winter period. That was quite enough for the first week back at base.