Tina came to stay, boat yoga and a wireless crane again

To help us stop doing "worky" things, we had a visitation from Tina, the Isle of Wight lady. She braved the train and arrived pretty much as planned. It was good to catch up and it gave us a great excuse to go out and "do more chilled things". That included having lunch at the Bush Inn near Cowbridge where we were joined by Lorna. Nice place, lovely rural location too:

Such a shame that the overworked barmaid decided to ignore us for ages whilst busy doing other tasks. Overall, the Pilot wins hands down.

We dragged Tina to Barrybados for a bracing walk along the cliffs with Nikki. The Bristol Channel was as muddy and unappealing as ever but the beach looked very good and pretty empty. Memories of the many Gavin and Stacey episodes that featured the area came back to mind. Naturally, Tina needed a trip to the Pilot before she returned home, almost a pilgrimage thing really. All in all a very good time and it forced us into enjoying things mode again before embarking on the next part of our winter work list.

Maintenance News:

We attacked the crane controls now that we had the new wireless receiver fresh from the factory. First of all, the new wireless kit was "jury rigged" to the old Deutsch plug just to check that it all worked OK. Plenty of wires to join up temporarily:

It worked perfectly so we obtained a new plug, wired it onto the new wireless receiver and removed the undertray from the crane so we could mount it in the same spot as the one that failed. When we did so, we saw the evidence of the big failure that the old one had when component(s) inside it just overheated and exploded:

Quite a trail of burned plastic. It must have been dramatic. After a clean up, we fitted the new kit, programmed the speed of the proportional control and happily put the crane to bed. One job off the list.

A second was replacing the valve that vents the stern thruster tube which had misbehaved after our relaunch at Largs. We just put a normal seawater rated ball valve into the line instead.

The next plan was to remove the central heating boiler. We have a Webasto Thermotop 12 Kw boiler to heat the water and it has been in use for 5 years, with plenty of hours running. Although it was working happily, we decided to take it for a service / check just in case. We could have stripped it down and cleaned out the soot but the new devices have so many sexy sensors and controls that tell someone with the test kit just how well it is working and how healthy the igniter is etc. The plan is to take it back to the rather good folks at Butler Technik as part of a trip up north. 

After battling with the coolant hoses the boiler was removed and drained of diesel and coolant:

ready to deliver for fettling. The space in the lazarette where it lives looked a bit messy with hoses and control wires hanging around:

The nice dark finish above it is from when a piece of the exhaust hose failed.....

We'd noticed some rusty specks had fallen from the far end of the silencer (seen hanging in the picture above) which is really hard to reach properly. After removing the boiler and the timber piece that blanks it all off, by peeling back the insulation we could take a picture of what was going on:

This was unexpected. We were ready (but not happy) to have to replace the hose that runs up under the transom in a big swan neck and then out to the hull skin fitting. A really pesky job threading the hose through, taking out the side of the gas bottle locker etc. Proper boat yoga. However, the last thing we expected was that the special exhaust hose clamp had corroded. It was part of a batch and all the others in use are and were fine. Most odd. It had to be cut and then forced off, it looked very corroded and very sad:

The hose itself needed trimming but, most fortunately, it was still long enough to reattach to the silencer. A bullet dodged for a while at least. After a big clean up in the compartment, we boxed up the boiler ready to take it for a trip to Lincolnshire. The captain had a long hot shower but still felt a bit sore the next morning.

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.