Our stablisers had been working just fine (important for the crew and Andrew!) When we dock, we have to fit a manual locking pin to hold the fin "fore and aft" and stop it flopping about in the tide when the engine and hence hydraulic power is turned off. On arrival, the starboard fin suddenly decided to make that hard, it was "centering" a couple of degrees off the proper position making the pin a tight fit.
On the theory that things rarely fix themselves and knowing that this could be an indication of a sick servo valve, we asked Brian to have a look. He fixed the centering issue but confirmed that it was the sign of a dying valve (a horribly expensive part of course). He had an order arriving from the USA in a few days so he added our valve to it and said he would be back locally, working on new Princess boats during the week. Hence, we decided to stay put until the work could be completed. Here is the new servo valve assembly in place:
Another one of those jobs where it doesn't look any different once completed, you just have a much lighter bank account.
What do you do when in Plymouth? Well, first of all you visit Norman and Julie who live reasonably close and give the Defender a run. That meant the captain's suffering arms would not need to lug heavy shopping back. Time for a serious top up of everything. They took us to Watergate Bay where the dogs enjoyed the little bit of beach left at high tide:
Roxy is very good at delivering the ball back to your feet as well:
Time after time after time. As an aside, Plymouth residents seem to have an interesting approach to managing their dogs - it is OK to leave poo everywhere. Most endearing.
We also started the annual cleaning and polishing routine. The external teak got a clean up first:
Then we polished the transom and starboard side of the hull. This is one of those "joy unbounded" jobs that will just keep on coming back. Still, it was nice to have a shiny hull again, albeit only on one side so far. We even managed to dig out the folding bikes and use them for some shopping - their first airing for about 18 months.
Venturing further afield, we walked around Cawsand and Kingsand on a slighly wet day. Great villages, houses kind of flung together around little higgledy-piggledy streets not designed for traffic. Nice Plymouth Sound views from there with the odd warship pottering about:
The waterfront is kind of quaint too:
On the way back, the view on the Torpoint ferry was massively improved by a stunning rainbow which the camera phone struggled to capture properly of course:
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Thanks for your ideas / cheek / corrections / whatever! They should hit the blog shortly after the system checks them to make sure they will not put us or you in jail.....