Back in the UK, kind of

We'd left ourselves a nice gentle drive from Haro to Santander, ready to catch the 6pmish ferry. Only the weather really didn't want it to be that easy. The day before looked a lot like this:

with even bigger waves off the Irish coast. Our ship, the Salamanca, stayed cuddled up in Rosslare until things calmed down a bit then left to bring some Irish travellers over to Spain. This delay meant our departure time was changed from late afternoon to 1am the following morning. Not an ideal time really. So, we did the short drive to Santander, filled up with cheaper than the UK fuel, went to the nice bay at the north-east of the town and had a walk then a very good dinner (which should have been on board the ferry of course). Still, it gave us the chance to test the Maremondo restaurant which was way better than the 4.0 rating on Google would suggest. We then had the fun of several hours in the port waiting on the arrival of the ferry:

We were very happy to see it arrive, we kept propping our eyeballs open and luckily it wasn't too cold to simply sit in the car, tinker on the internet, listen to music and think kindly of the weather gods and how they can change plans so easily. After boarding, we just retired to the cabin and tried to sleep through the many and varied announcements that have to be made rather loudly before departure.

The trip was a bit bumpy and as the passenger load was light anyway, the Club lounge was very very quiet. We rather liked that I must admit. 

Our arrival time at Pompey was a tad tricky too - instead of late evening, it was early morning, just in time for us to clock the horrid traffic that has to fight through the never ending roadworks on the M27 as we head towards Southampton. Why go that way - well, we had said that we would take Mrs Toddler to the hospital for her eyeball checks that afternoon. In desperation, we hid in a Costa store to let the worst of the M27 mayhem subside and then braved the motorway madness.

A few days later we returned to the poor ignored boat and we discovered that Netflix had sent a slightly worrying email:

They obviously know something we don't.

As well as reclaiming the boat, taking the little Brompton bikes out for some exercise and remembering how all the systems on board work, we did a little maintenance too.

The battery to battery charger that keeps the bow thruster / windlass AGM battery bank charged up from the new domestic lithium bank had failed ages ago. This was the second one of the new generation high capacity Victron devices to go pop in that location. There were a few wild guesses from various technical folks as to why but nothing concrete, apart from the obvious "they are not very good". However, the one doing the same job for the stern thruster battery bank had been fine. The Maricom guys had provided the new charger and two new fuse holders. These were duly fitted:

together with the little black on/off switch you can see in the image. This lets us turn the device off when we might be using the thrusters or windlass in case some strange back feeds are upsetting the rather delicate device. Again, the aft one has been fine and we've not used the windlass since the original charger was fitted. A mystery.

The Xmas season loomed so work on maintenance things was suspended and we lapsed into hedonistic mood again. Such a tough life.