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.
