Penarthing and the summer in numbers

The boat has settled into Penarth quite happily it seems. As have we. Mind you, the bilge pump was running rather too regularly for our liking and when the captain investigated, we found a fresh water leak into the bilge. Of course, tracing it was going to be a nightmare as the water was pooling under the diesel supply tank (forward of the engine) but clearly was not coming from there. If only the Lugger ran on tap water....

After some investigation and head scratching, one fitting on the heat exchanger that was installed last year in Ardrossan was leaking:

Some gentle tightening of the left hand one (hot water supply out to the boat) and it behaved luckily. All that was left was to dry out the areas that the water had been tracking through. That, will be a longer and trickier job......

We did enjoy the unexpected Indian summer though, walking Lorna's dogs Pip and Poppy a little:

and of course delivering lots of cwtches.


Some numbers for those who are numerically minded or terminally sad:

Since leaving Gosport on April 1st, we have notched up 300 main engine hours, 86 generator hours and a huge 6 for the wing engine (over many shorter runs)  just to keep it running and happy. That was a total of around 2015 nautical miles (we timed many trips to get maximum tidal help hence a higher average NM/hour than our normal cruise speed!) That is about 2320 land miles or for the continental readers about 3730 Km.

What else of note? Well the fuel burn will have to wait until we top up again as the nice and basic mechanically controlled genset and wing engine don't record fuel burn. Guess what - the two Webasto heaters don't either. We did use one 6Kg propane cylinder so we must have eaten and drunk a bit too.

We visited 17 islands in our travels:

Isle of Wight, Guernsey, Skomer, Lewis, Harris, Bernera, Scalpay, Shiants (count them as 1!), North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, Eriskay, Barra, Vatersay, Mull, Skye, Gigha. We won't count the little ones in Strangford Lough that we visited by car or Northern Ireland or Anglesey. There are plenty left though, many of which we just cruised past like Egg, Muck, Rum etc etc etc. We have absolutely no desire to anchor off one and go ashore in the dinghy in pouring rain just to say we have "been there".

The main engine, the big Lugger behaved well - just an annoying oil weep from the pesky turbo oil drain pipe that was "one of those" jobs to fix. We could have left it until we returned as it was far from a problem and it wasn't going to fail on us. However, better to have it right. We also treated it to an oil and filter change mid summer.

The wing and genset were impeccably behaved, we cannot blame the genset for sucking up jellyfish. Saying that they were "impeccable" is inviting disaster of course.....

The Furuno gear and navigation PC also seemed very happy. We still have a strange and very very intermittent issue where the Simrad autopilot loses communication with the plotters / PC for a second or so and then resets itself perfectly. This happens on perhaps one trip every two months or so. It has a simple NMEA cable interface and the cable is fine. It doesn't seem to be an issue from the Plotter / PC end as the error has happened when the autopilot is being fed from either of them. No pattern to this or obvious reason but it has been like it since we bought the boat and happens so infrequently that we live with it.

The 20HP Yamaha on our RIB needs a new part - the cold start enrichment thing (a strange heated wax pellet design) is playing up. The engine starts fine and then will cut out if you don't give it some throttle to help during warm up. Apparently these are known to misbehave and fail over time.

Damage - well one snapped mooring line and one burst fender from the Dunstaffnage battering.

Not a bad season all in all