Torbay

As we'd not been to Torquay for ages and ages (more than the entire lifetime of the 10 year old doglet), we wondered what had changed. Well, like many seaside town places there were a fair few sad empty shops (we had also seen several in St Peter Port which was a surprise). The general air of a coach tour holiday place remained though, with all that is good and bad about it. In the marina we saw that one swan had decided to take up residence on a floating dock originally planned for a RIB:

 

and had left it suitably poo infested too. Wonder how much per metre per year he / she gets charged by MDL? The town still has some serious quality shopping opportunities. This kind of LGBTQ+ shop offered an interesting lines in personalised fans:

We were not tempted inside and no, that isn't because they were not dog friendly. 

One of the night dockmasters told us that the SW coastal path was a nice walk and that it led to a suitable spot for ball throwing to amuse the doglet and a rather good lunchtime stop, He was right in all aspects except he hadn't mentioned the number of steps uphill that were involved on a hot day. However, it was well worth it, we had a rather good lunchtime with a rather excellent "curried quiche" and salad followed by equally good cake. Have a look at Mr and Mrs Jones Deli weblink to explore the rather quirky place:

After the walk and more than adequate lunch, we relented and got the bus back to town. 

Finding Izzy friendly beaches was trickier than in Guernsey. One shingle strewn offering  nearby and a second a good walk away, around Torbay. Of course, we visited both and on the way back did the tourist thing, sitting outside a beach café for refreshment. Their coffee looked like it was going to come from a Nescafe jar so we avoided that. Nice view from the table though:

We had forgotten how nice the bay area is, if you can kind of ignore the "kiss me quick hats" horror of  Paignton and the rather run down bits of Torquay. All very UK seaside holiday town like.

A must visit for us is Totnes so we headed over by bus, walked down the river Dart and Izzy had a great time paddling in a stream, chasing stones and generally living a dog's life as in this video:

 

We also visited Brixham on the way back, for yet another beach and stone / ball chasing time and a refreshing ice-cream for the humans. It was busy, way busier than Torquay seemed to be and justifiably so - there is something way more authentic about Brixham with the working fishing port area. 

Our last day there was a bit more like hard labour. We'd used the marina washing machine thanks to our dead one, dragged back the laundry to our working tumble dryer and then gave the neglected boat a serious wash off. We are amazed how a little dog that loves paddling, ducking her head under the water to retrieve stones and generally splashing about is unimpressed when she gets some water on her from the hose. 

We planned to head around to Dartmouth but finding a place to stop there is tricky for us. Dart marina never has any visitor space that they can confirm in advance and often say "no chance". A shame as they are TransEurope members so we get a discounted deal there! Our preference is the harbour authority mid-river pontoon but we not allowed there now - apparently we have suddenly become too big despite many years of using the facility. The lovely visitor buoys at beautiful Dittisham that are big enough for us have shrunk in number to only 1 and the harbour folks let little yachts go on it even when there are plenty of smaller mooring buoys nearby empty. Not great. The only harbour authority option would be to see if there was space to be strung between two mid-river buoys just off the town. We tried Noss marina who said they were full. We tried Darthaven in Kingswear who said the same but suggested we call early on the day of our planned arrival in case things had changed. They have a dedicated visitor berthing area but that was full and it is "first come first served". We love Dartmouth but it is a tricky place to visit unless you anchor and then they expect you to be on board for each change in direction of the tide to make sure that anchor has reset OK.

We decided we would head off the next morning, when our 5 day MDL deal expired, in optimistic mode.

Maintenance News:

The main engine was treated to around 100ml of coolant. The level seemed to have dropped a bit - that might have been imagination of course. Perfectly possible though that the remaining tiny air bubbles from the coolant change we had performed had finally all arrived in the surge tank. We will see if the captain has overfilled it and the big Lugger decides to spit some out on our next trip.