An animal and maintenance update

For those of you with good memories or folks who feel the need to read old posts from here in the middle of a sleepless night, you will remember Colin the 747 captain chap. There were a few rumours about his cross dressing tendencies but they were quickly dispelled.

Well, he has just cast suspicion upon our our on-board boss, Patrick the penguin. Apparently he saw Patrick wearing some rather gay red shoes and hat in Kuala Lumpur airport:

This picture was taken whilst we were away from the boat and so it is perfectly possible that the little penguin was off posing. We will have to check and see if we can find a penguin passport hidden away somewhere with a few suspicious stamps in it.

What other news? Well, we have been running a kind of floating B and B with various visitors. The most important of them were those with 4 paws. You must remember Archie the Lakeland terrier. He has become a proper crew member and he only struggles occasionally with the rather steep Nordhavn steps. Photogenic - oh yes, he did the looking ultra cute thing so well again:

Our next visitor needs little introduction:

Izzy the spoodle has starred in here before and also manages the ultra cute look so well.

We have been out and about a little too. The Defender got treated to a towbar (mainly so the electrical socket can be used for battery maintenance when the poor truck has a summer holiday in Cornwall). It looked at home in the nice rural setting near the dealership:

A wander around Hereford and Castell Coch just outside Cardiff was fun too. For anyone who has seen Mount Stuart on Bute and the interior of Cardiff Castle, you will not be surprised to see what the Marquis of Bute did to this mainly ruined castle when he rebuilt it:

Shame that it was only a very occasional overnight stop for his family.

Maintenance news:

Well, we took the boat for a good burn around the bay to run all the machinery and the electronics. They all seemed to fire up and perform as expected so no big dramas so far. The local yacht rigger has made up some new strops for lifting the dinghy on and off the boat deck. The original webbing straps started to look sad and rather than have a 3.1 metre RIB and a 20HP Yamaha fall onto anyone or anything, we have nice new dyneema strops now.

What else? Well, it was genset oil change time so that got done. We are going to treat it to a new drive belt too as although the one in place looks fine, it is the original fitment and has done a few years and nearly 1600 hours now so probably deserves a quiet retirement somewhere. As the weather slowly improves (??) the polishing season approaches and that fills us with delight.