Road trip time

After lots of boat trips, we had a road trip arranged. It felt as though we were becoming almost normal, joining all the "dirt dwellers" and doing the kind of things they do. It made a nice change really. Our plan was to head off on a Sunday and stay just outside Lincoln ready to drop the heating boiler into the Butler Technik folks. Only we then discovered that the Cardiff half marathon was on and the road through the marina would be closed for hours. Perfect timing on our part, booking to leave that day:

They suggested that the road would be open from noon but past experience was that the time dragged on as the back marker runners passed through Penarth. So, we took advantage of a voucher we had and left a day earlier, stopping at the rather swish Celtic Manor hotel initially. By the way, for a posh 5 star hotel the breakfast service is pretty dire. The drive from Newport up to Lincoln was relatively easy, perhaps the wild fuel prices had kept some traffic off the roads? The only wildly busy bit was battling through the car park at Costco in Leicester to get to the fuel pumps. Chaos.

We had booked a late Sunday lunch at a pub near Lincoln which got very good reviews, the Thorold Arms:

Amazingly, we found a parking spot outside it and were greeted at the entrance by "mine host" who happened to be taking an order from folks on an outside table. The salmon trousers and blue shirt thing was a giveaway.  He was very friendly and the menu choice for the day was not the typical Sunday roast fare. The crew fancied the Venison with some most inventive side dishes but when she ordered she was told that venison was a typo and it should have said pigeon. Er?? Undaunted, she ordered and really enjoyed it. Very good food, good service and a most entertaining clientele - the local gentry expressing themselves loudly about their travel plans etc. We felt rather out of place as dodgy boat-dwellers.

The following morning we dropped the Webasto boiler into the engineering folks and drove up to the Hamsterley Mill area to see our friends, John and Irene. We hear the cries of "where is Hamsterley Mill" echoing around. Well, you could search for it on the internet but to save you the effort, it is near Rowlands Gill. See how helpful we are.  

John and Irene have taken on a rescue dog, the rather lovely Millie:

and no, she does not have a multicoloured perm, just a toy strategically positioned. We took her a new toy as well, which was soon pressed into service and gummed happily:

All the extremities seemed to survive though, she is very gentle with her things. During our stay we ate them out of house and home, visited Hexham for a riverside walk and lunch, walked some of the Derwent Way and had a trip to Blanchford. That is one pretty little village and home to many interesting buildings:

plus the Lord Crewe Arms hotel. We forced ourselves to a coffee stop there and had a very enlightening chat with a farmer from Stamford who was staying overnight. Renting out a field to dog walkers makes way way more profit than growing any crops and at negligible risk too. Strange world that we inhabit. 

The crew helped our last day go well by giving Mollie a brush. As you can see, she rather enjoys that attention:

unlike Izzy who needs to be bribed to put up with it for long.

After a great time "up north" we headed a little further south - to Hessle near Hull. We were off to stay with Bernie and Beau the dog. You've met them in many prior blog posts but haven't learned about Bernie's home - a converted stable block that starred in a TV renovation project. Bernie wanted to keep as much of the character of the stables as possible and use reclaimed materials so go and watch the channel 4 program, it is well worth it. You can find it here  https://www.channel4.com/programmes/george-clarkes-remarkable-renovations/on-demand/68219-006.

Grab a coffee and see just what you can do with vision and determination - also see where we stayed.

Bernie gave us a guided walking tour of Old Hull, after a stop off at a garage he owns where we peeked at a Riva Rudy that is nearly ready to relaunch and use. If you are not a boating person, Riva might not mean much. Think "La Dolce Vita", elegant Italians enjoying speeding across Lake Como etc etc. Here is one underway:

courtesy of a huge Yank V8 petrol engine. The interiors are simply an elegant 1970's time capsule:

and yes, Bernie's boat looks like that. Simply gorgeous but functional too. His other boat in Hull lives afloat in the marina and if you are sad enough to have been reading our ramblings over the years, you might recall prior images of Mimosa, the Dunkirk little ship:

She looked, and is, rather splendid. 

After a busy and enjoyable day and overnight with Bernie, we walked Beau the little Coton de Tulear (in the rain) then headed south once more. Annoyingly, this was via Butler Technik to collect our heater. Why annoyingly? Well, they didn't have the test harness needed to check out the device properly after a decoke and internal check. Instead of the normal 48 hour delivery from Webasto, this was being quoted as two weeks at least. We didn't want to be back afloat with no heating so we collected the untouched boiler and will wait for a call to say they have the required harness. The workshop guys were very apologetic. The Captain just thought of more boat yoga to refit it, then remove it again for servicing then refit it again. That made him very happy indeed.

We overnighted outside Coventry, finding that the hotel car park was rather busy for a Friday. Then we discovered why:

A face and body painting event. You can imagine some of the sights walking around the hotel. We had a quick shared pizza and retired. You can only admire so many pink attired and painted folks in one evening and we got out quota well before the shared pizza arrived. One very strange event.

We escaped the carnage the following morning and on the way south stopped off at the British motor museum. Only it was carnage there as well. An event to celebrate 30 years of the Porsche boxster was taking place:

Lots of cars outside, lots of people of a certain age and type wearing Porsche club hats and identity badge lanyards, all sporting the requisite Porsche Motorsport clothing. We escaped one crowd for another. It did occur to us that there might be a slight hierarchy in the Porsche club with 911 owners looking down on the boxster lot. There were no 911s visible in the car park.

Despite how busy it was we enjoyed the museum, the captain a touch more than the crew perhaps. A great place and still plenty more for us to see:

However, it is worrying when the model of car you learned to drive on is exhibited in a museum:

No, not the offerings on the right, he isn't that ancient. Yes, the captain cut his teeth and ground the gears on his uncle's Anglia 105e. No synchromesh on first is his excuse and forced you to learn the art of double-declutching. The Anglia ws pretty elderly at the time and had the regulation Isopon and newspaper replacements for what were once steel sills that had rotted away Structural integrity in a crash - let's not think about that.

A good few days on the road except that some nice person decided to run a key down the side of the car when it was parked against a grass verge so safe from the careless door opening lot at Scotch Corner services. Words fail, although they didn't when we saw it.

Tina came to stay, boat yoga and a wireless crane again

To help us stop doing "worky" things, we had a visitation from Tina, the Isle of Wight lady. She braved the train and arrived pretty much as planned. It was good to catch up and it gave us a great excuse to go out and "do more chilled things". That included having lunch at the Bush Inn near Cowbridge where we were joined by Lorna. Nice place, lovely rural location too:

Such a shame that the overworked barmaid decided to ignore us for ages whilst busy doing other tasks. Overall, the Pilot wins hands down.

We dragged Tina to Barrybados for a bracing walk along the cliffs with Nikki. The Bristol Channel was as muddy and unappealing as ever but the beach looked very good and pretty empty. Memories of the many Gavin and Stacey episodes that featured the area came back to mind. Naturally, Tina needed a trip to the Pilot before she returned home, almost a pilgrimage thing really. All in all a very good time and it forced us into enjoying things mode again before embarking on the next part of our winter work list.

Maintenance News:

We attacked the crane controls now that we had the new wireless receiver fresh from the factory. First of all, the new wireless kit was "jury rigged" to the old Deutsch plug just to check that it all worked OK. Plenty of wires to join up temporarily:

It worked perfectly so we obtained a new plug, wired it onto the new wireless receiver and removed the undertray from the crane so we could mount it in the same spot as the one that failed. When we did so, we saw the evidence of the big failure that the old one had when component(s) inside it just overheated and exploded:

Quite a trail of burned plastic. It must have been dramatic. After a clean up, we fitted the new kit, programmed the speed of the proportional control and happily put the crane to bed. One job off the list.

A second was replacing the valve that vents the stern thruster tube which had misbehaved after our relaunch at Largs. We just put a normal seawater rated ball valve into the line instead.

The next plan was to remove the central heating boiler. We have a Webasto Thermotop 12 Kw boiler to heat the water and it has been in use for 5 years, with plenty of hours running. Although it was working happily, we decided to take it for a service / check just in case. We could have stripped it down and cleaned out the soot but the new devices have so many sexy sensors and controls that tell someone with the test kit just how well it is working and how healthy the igniter is etc. The plan is to take it back to the rather good folks at Butler Technik as part of a trip up north. 

After battling with the coolant hoses the boiler was removed and drained of diesel and coolant:

ready to deliver for fettling. The space in the lazarette where it lives looked a bit messy with hoses and control wires hanging around:

The nice dark finish above it is from when a piece of the exhaust hose failed.....

We'd noticed some rusty specks had fallen from the far end of the silencer (seen hanging in the picture above) which is really hard to reach properly. After removing the boiler and the timber piece that blanks it all off, by peeling back the insulation we could take a picture of what was going on:

This was unexpected. We were ready (but not happy) to have to replace the hose that runs up under the transom in a big swan neck and then out to the hull skin fitting. A really pesky job threading the hose through, taking out the side of the gas bottle locker etc. Proper boat yoga. However, the last thing we expected was that the special exhaust hose clamp had corroded. It was part of a batch and all the others in use are and were fine. Most odd. It had to be cut and then forced off, it looked very corroded and very sad:

The hose itself needed trimming but, most fortunately, it was still long enough to reattach to the silencer. A bullet dodged for a while at least. After a big clean up in the compartment, we boxed up the boiler ready to take it for a trip to Lincolnshire. The captain had a long hot shower but still felt a bit sore the next morning.

Back and settling in

We slept rather well after our arrival. Some much needed catch up rest. However, that could not last for long as there is always stuff to do at the end of the season and our planned maintenance list was pretty long for the coming winter. We kicked off with the regular hull polishing job, to protect the grey gelcoat from the ravages of the winter. Easy to type, trickier to do. The port side involves doing the work from the RIB which adds to the excitement a little. To make life feel better, we enjoyed an excellent post polishing lunch at the Pilot pub in Penarth, reminding us just how special this unassuming little place is:

We booked a train back to Southampton to collect the car which had been in store, planning to do the trip on a Saturday as the wildly expensive advance tickets were marginally less obscenely priced that day. Oh dear. The line between Bridgend and Cardiff was shut for track maintenance. The knock on impact was that fewer local trains were running from our station Cogan into Cardiff each hour. To add to the fun,  despite having fewer trains each hour, Transport for Wales decided to run a two carriage train, not the normal four that operate on the line. Oh, Cardiff City were playing at home as well. 

When our train arrived, it was packed like a sardine tin, a very old one too. Then we waited 30 minutes outside Cardiff Central thanks to a broken down goods train in sweltering conditions as the heating was running (not needed!)  Well, sweltering for folks who had been in Scotland all summer. Luckily we always bake in plenty of time when relying on the local trains into Cardiff to connect with anything else so we made our connection OK.

Back in Hythe, a trip to Swanwick to see Alex and Gisele on their Nordhavn 55 was greatly enjoyed. We also visited the way smaller and pretty quiet Southampton boat show after the bus journey there from hell. It felt as though it would be the last boat show despite plenty of social media advertising hype:

We enjoyed it though, meeting up with Lars and Birgit who were looking at potential longer term replacements for their Azimut. Hearing a sales guy describe the £1.5 million boat as way better value than the £1.8 million craft in their range was amusing. The desperation to sell stock boats was clear.

After retrieving the car we returned to Penarth and a sad day, going to the funeral of Simon, our yacht surveyor friend. It was a lovely celebration of his life though and that evening, we raised a glass to him:

or two to be precise, whilst enjoying a glorious sunset that must have been arranged in his honour:

Maintenance news:

The KVH satellite TV dish had started to misbehave whilst we were in Dun Laoghaire. It refused to find the Astra UK satellite for no obvious reason. The KVH app said that the firmware and satellite library were up to date, the GPS was working fine and there were no errors in the log. Despite all that looking good, the thing hunted around the sky looking for the satellite as though it had been glue sniffing. Luckily Paul from Maricom figured out that the KVH satellite library was not up to date and gave us some new settings to enter into the system:

After some typing and checking and reboots, we had satellite TV again.

Norn Iron Keith was unimpressed with the tip of our Rocna anchor which was showing some rust where use had worn off the protective galvanising. He gave us a can of cold galvanising spray so the anchor tip got cleaned up and coated:

We sent Keith a picture so he could sleep more easily.

The main engine had an oil and filter change, as did the gearbox, just so it had nice clean stuff inside for the winter period. That was quite enough for the first week back at base.

Dun Laoghaire to Penarth

Once more the weather forecasts and tides were not happy bedfellows. As we were in no particular rush to get back to Penarth we had thought that we could find a suitable weather window between the string of low pressure systems to get ourselves to Milford Haven. Well, there was something that was suitable but the "window" and the optimum tide times for the trip were wildly different. Grr. To add to the fun, trying to optimise the tides would mean arriving off Milford around 4am. Not a problem but the forecast had thick fog then together with a force 5 rapidly increasing to 6 SW airflow. How you get the thick fog and a strong breeze seems so unfair. 

Going into Milford with the radar isn't an issue. Avoiding the many pot markers as we head to anchor off Dale is trickier as thick fog renders the FLIR camera almost useless. Getting one wrapped around the prop in thick fog and darkness or even around a stabiliser would be very messy indeed.  So, plan B was hatched. We would leave Dun Laoghaire to take a favourable tide around St David's head and turn to head up the Bristol Channel before the wind really picked up. The further we go up the channel, the better the shelter would be and later on, the wind was going to drop again. This meant two compromises - around St David's Head would be bumpy (wind over tide F5 to 6) and we would have to push the tide heading up towards Cardiff, slowing down too so we didn't arrive at low water. Far from ideal given the strength of the tides up there but it was the only weather break we could see in the longer term forecasts.

We duly left Dun Laoghaire in benign conditions around mid-day on Sunday. We are a small speck on the harbour webcam:

There were plenty of local yachts around enjoying a late season sail and making us dodge around them. The sunny weather departed as we passed Muglins lighthouse off Dalkey:

which is not one of the prettiest that we've seen:

Once into the Irish Sea proper, the sea calmed down a bit, the sun tried again and the views improved a lot, although they were of open sea mainly:

Our route to St Davids took us across the tidal flow at a gentle angle so we'd calculated a course to steer that would let the South West going tide carry us down the Irish coast and then when the tide turned, the NE going tide would push us more across to Wales giving us a better angle to the SWly wind induced waves, allowing the stabilisers to counteract them better.  Only some shipping messed up that plan and we had to give up our nice angle to the building wave patterns. Dodging the shipping made things bumpier later on and caused this strange looking route showing the effects of tide and avoiding the big guys:

We arrived off St David's in the dark and the sea was pretty much as expected - a bit like a washing machine. Lots of pitching and odd wave patterns. Plenty of spray and the boat was being pushed around nicely. All very safe and well within the capabilities of a boat designed to make open ocean passages but a roller coaster ride for the humans on board. Partick the penguin took it all in his stride of course. Proper salty old sea-penguin. As we approached Milford Haven and could turn more to the east, so things settled down a lot and the stabilisers were sorting our a way nicer ride for us. The Ferry from Pembroke was departing, heading to Ireland. No picture as it was foggy but had we been able to see her, this is the "beauty" in all her glory:

They called us and asked if "red to red" was OK (ie passing port side to port side). They were assuming that we would turn to head into Milford, they didn't look at our destination (Cardiff, or GB CDF) on  our AIS data. When we confirmed that red to red was fine, they then warned us that the visibility inside Milford Haven was down to 25 metres in some areas. So glad we were not planning to head in and anchor, avoiding pot markers would have been mainly down to luck. We were happy not to test ours and we'd headed well offshore passing Milford as between Skokholm and the mainland, we've seen plenty of pots before.

As we began pushing the strong tides heading up the Bristol Channel so the fog became more patchy and a nice pod of dolphins came to play. That always makes the day look better and the crew did her usual cries of encouragement thing as they jumped clear of the water and played in our bow wave. Hard to get a decent photo or video though:

As expected we made slow progress into the tide, seeing that you are doing 2.9 knots over the ground does become a bit disheartening! We'd dropped the rpm to around 1450 from the earlier 1650 used all the way to Milford, just so we had a bit more water when we arrived in the Cardiff area and so we could take advantage of a bit of the flood tide for the final couple of hours:

The closer we got to Cardiff the less and less appealing the water was. Instead of the crystal clear blue stuff we've been cruising in all summer "up north", we had a brown silty muddy mess around us:

You can see how it resembles mud soup. Lovely. Luckily we don't suck in cooling sea water for our main engine - that stuff must wear out impellers and pump housings / faceplates rather quickly.

Here is the rest of our course, showing the long slow haul up the Bristol Channel to Cardiff:

We go away for a few months and they change things. The Aberthaw power station landmark is slowly being demolished and the big chimney has gone:

As we approached Penarth pier and seafront, a local photographer who has taken some great images of us before was out and about. He captured the muddy water and quite distinctive light conditions looking out to the islands:

Then as as we headed towards the Barrage locks:

Slightly fuzzy picture - it was taken at a very long range. We had to mess around a bit waiting for the lock time but were given "lock no 2" for the 6:45pm inbound lock by the Barrage Control guy. We duly tied up in the lock and waited. And waited, then waited some more. Just before 7 we finally called them to ask if we were waiting on another inbound boat or if there was a problem. The problem was that the barrage team had just changed shift and nobody seemed to mention that we were in the lock and waiting. A look out of the office windows would have spotted us but.... 

We had quite a while sitting like this:

then were let into the bay. A run up and down in the fresh water area behind the barrage let us exercise the wing engine and flush out the salt water sitting inside the cooling system from the last time it was used, heading into Dun Laoghaire. We also gave the main engine a good burn to help clear some carbon from the piston rings etc. That is why we have the odd squiggles in our final track:

We were very happy to berth in our spot after a tiring 32 hour door to door run. Some calm and pleasurable, some pretty rough, some very slow progress then an odd 20 minutes waiting in the barrage lock. The systems were shut down for the last time this cruising season after we'd covered around 1800 nautical miles since leaving Penarth.

Maintenance News:

As the main engine was nice and hot, we pumped out the engine oil ready to do an oil and filter swap the next day. We were not keen enough that evening to wash off the salt, that waited for the morning.

Euroland time and a bit of culture

Knowing how wildly expensive UK electricity is, we were surprised to find that Ireland can more than compete with the UK marina power prices. We went big and speculated 10 Euros on power. Extravagant we know but we were in that kind of mood.

Sometimes you arrive in a place and discover that "stuff" is going on. Well, Dun Laoghaire was hosting a female world championship sailing event. Plenty of dinghies chasing around the inner harbour area and then being recovered into a compound. It seemed unfair that the competitors had to wheel their own boat on a launching trolley into their allotted place in the compound - for a world championship you'd hope that they had a few folks doing everything for them. You can see the procession here:

and in this little video clip too:

Inside the harbour, was a sad sight. Somebody had lost their pride and joy - or perhaps it was no longer their pride and joy and had been a bit neglected?

No matter what, still a very sad thing to see. At the same time the marina staff were trying to recover a RIB that had been launched that day, later on had a tube detach and started to sink. It was one of those days where we walked back to the boat and lifted a couple of boards in the engine room, just in case.

We mentioned "stuff going on". Well, we also learned that the Orange leader of Trumpistan was visiting Dublin that weekend and then going off to his golf course for the Irish open competition.  You can guess where his priorities lay. Thanks to that, we needed to avoid Dublin and instead we took the DART train to Malahide. That place reminded us of just how well the Irish look after their properties and towns compared to some of the sad scruffy towns in Scotland. Here is one of the famous pubs:

and their wine shop:

We had a plan to visit the castle and grounds. Walking up the drive we saw that some european T20 cricket was underway with more security staff than spectators and also how to tidy up the stump of a tree that had to be felled:

Pretty impressive stuff and there were more examples too.

The castle had a bunch of tourists (so unlike us of course) who needed a picture of themselves in front of it:

In fact, it was almost impossible to get an image of the castle without somebody doing the grinning for the camera thing. We must be way too old to understand the desire to be photographed in front of everywhere you visit. The tour guide had a typically Irish storytelling ability and used it to the full although his strong Dublin accent might have impeded the humour from being understood by a few non-native English speakers. That was a shame as he was very humorous. The castle had been occupied by one family for 800 years, quite something. To learn more, have a look at this weblink.

During the days when the nasty English persecuted Catholics and wanted to prevent their worship, the family had communion in this room and behind the panelling was the required Priest's hole so he could hide if the wrong people appeared:

The castle had been handed over to the local government folks 50 years ago - the usual story of how to pay death duties on the estate. They were celebrating this with some odd artworks (again, too old to appreciate some of them perhaps) and in the great hall there was this banner :

making the rather tenuous link to the Shirley Valentine film that is also 50 years old. Odd kind of connection or have we missed something obvious? 

The gardens were impressive, one of the family travelled extensively and brought back lots of unusual plants. They had also established a butterfly greenhouse with some spectacular specimens. Naturally you would see different ones on each visit as the poor creatures only live for up to two weeks in their lovely home:

We failed dismally capturing some in flight that had vivid blue wings. You will just have to believe us when we say it was quite a spectacle. After a happy few hours there, we walked down to the marina and spotted another Nordhavn laying there, a 60 that we'd been on whilst she was for sale with the Nordhavn Europe folks. They are getting about a bit....

Our Saturday plans were thwarted - we wanted to take the DART train south to Bray and discovered that there was nothing moving south of Dun Laoghaire for the entire day, some maintenance work. Trust us to pick the one day when the line was being totally closed for our visit. Instead we stayed in Dun Laoghaire and went to the maritime museum. Very glad that we did. We learned about a ship's captain who became famous for his cable-laying activities between Ireland and the Americas and were a bit worried about how sorting out your toe nails can end up:

A centrepiece of the museum is an old lighthouse lamp / lens assembly that still rotates on a bed of mercury (carefully sealed in so as not to kill the volunteer staff or the occasional regular visitor):

You can see that the building is not a modern museum construction. No, it was originally a Seaman's church, very apt. They had one display that would have been very handy when we had a navigation bulb fail in Bangor and a second new one turned out to be faulty:

Perhaps a bit clunky and hard to attach to our modern navigation light but the idea is pretty neat. The volunteers manning the museum were helpful and friendly. A most pleasant way to spend an afternoon and to get a little education about the seafaring history of Ireland. It seems that Irish captains were instrumental in setting up many of the countries' navies in South America. There was also the sad story of the loss of RMS Leinster, sunk by torpedoes one month and one day before the end of the First World War and reckoned to be the biggest loss of life in the Irish Sea. More info on that is in this Wikipedia link. Rather amusingly, they also had a "Titanic artefact" area. Seems that everyone needs to claim some connection to the ill-fated liner. This was the most tenuous exhibit we could imagine. A light bulb from Titanic that someone had liberated before her iceberg disaster.  A bit sad in comparison to the Belfast museum and the exhibits in Southampton.

Last time we were in the Dublin area by boat, we had a visit from some customs officers who clearly needed to show that they had checked some visiting foreign vessels. All they really wanted to do was record the official registration number (we are Part 1 registered, like the bigger commercial vessels) so they had some information for their log. They really didn't care about the VAT status etc, what stores we had on board, if we had any prohibited things from the UK etc. This time, no visit, a wonderful lack of officialdom compared to visiting other EU countries with the boat, thanks to the common travel area.