and then it all went very wrong....

You know how you have to be flexible with plans. Well,  we have been testing our flexibility to the limits and beyond. Simon the surveyor man and Nikki came for dinner with us and the crew developed a bit of a snuffle. The next day, she was sure she had a full blown cold, the first one since the covid pandemic started so she had done well. Early the following morning we had a call from the Toddlers who needed help as Mr T was not well.  The crew explained that driving over to spread her cold might not be a good thing, then promptly passed out in the heads, luckily ending up leaning against a bulkhead not cracking her head on the granite sink surround. 

The captain made her stuff a covid test swab up her nose and the result was pretty clear:

That totally ruled out going to Hythe to help so the crew arranged for her brother and sister-in-law to go instead. Minor issue - the sister-in-law had only just arrived back in Scotland on the sleeper train after visiting her parents who live but a few miles from Hythe....  They unpacked, repacked and did the nigh on 700 mile drive south.

The captain tried a bit of social distancing on board to limit the viral load that he was getting from the sickly crew but sure enough, the following day he succumbed too. As most folks seem to have been through covid, you will know how this plays out. Even better, we were supposed to be off on a ferry to Spain / France with Tina, the Isle-of-Wight based friend. The mix of covid and a not well Mr Toddler meant cancelling that, for the fourth time and trying to move the various bookings around whilst being rather lifeless thanks to covid.

So, little got done, bar booking a food delivery from the nice Mr Asda to keep us going. However, as the captain totally lost his sense of taste and smell, Asda food was as good as Waitrose or M&S for him.

After a week of laying around, things started to improve and a little energy returned. The bikes came out to play again, initially for shorter trips, and slowly we began to "do stuff". Some of it was not too exciting - like washing off loads of black streaks from the parts of the boat we had already polished and a ton of bird poo from the flybridge that was truly disgusting. The one good part of washing the port side of the hull was that the RIB got launched on a beautiful sunny day. That enabled a burn across the bay to warm up the rather ignored outboard and put some charge into the battery:

The pier head building and the theatre looked pretty impressive, as did Malaspina, the other Nordhavn 47 quartered here for the winter:

Slowly the energy levels recovered and we were able to do more "normal" things. The captain even got a little sense of taste and smell back, enough to know that the Asda microwave stuff we bought when trapped on board was not that good. That "champagne tastes and beer money" problem again.