Coping with problems

Wednesday 30 May

After the excesses of the night before, it was a delicate start – one of those mornings where you ease the brain into gear, and apply gentle pressure to the throttle so as to avoid metaphoric mental wheel spin. The weather continued very wet, which was a pain as I want to go on to Yelvertoft today to fill up with water. The tank is down to less the 10%.

After dumping rubbish at the skips inside in the Andy Burnett Marina, I walked into the village to get a paper. Back at the boat, there was no sign of a change in the weather, so no point in hanging around. Attired in waterproofs, I set off and chugged steadily round to Yelvertoft.

I moored on the water point, and went to switch on the TravelPower AC alternator to run the washing machine. Over the weekend we’d just been topping the batteries up with the DC domestic alternator. The TravelPower didn’t come on. Cursing under my breath (hungover, it’s raining, and now the electrics are playing up) I got out the roll flat hose to at least start filling the tank. The hose reel promptly fell apart.

Some days are diamond, some days are stone.

Water tank finally filling, I called Maria at the Braidbar yard and asked her to ask Iain to call me back from Braidbar the boat, which he and Luisa are now cruising back to the yard. This he did promptly, and then called Beta Marine on my behalf. Seems it may be either an odd failure to energise by the TP, which is fixable by applying 12v across two of its terminals, or it may be the brushes. At Iain’s suggestion, I called Beta myself, and agreed that with 4000 hours on the clock, it may well be the brushes, especially as I’ve been wondering if all was well with the AC supply recently.

There’s a Beta engineer, Sam, not far from here, at the foot of Foxton Locks, so after discovering that my River Canal Rescue cover doesn’t cover this sort of thing, I phoned him directly. He suggested we meet there next Wednesday, as he’s got a guy from Electrolux (who make the TP) coming then.

That’s all fine, especially as Sheila will be back by then so I won’t have to single hand down Foxton Staircase. I can go on charging the batteries from the DC alternator, but I can’t run the washing machine, at least not the bits of the programme that heat the water. And we need a lot of washing doing after the weekend.

I rang Sheila to give her the glad tidings, and to advise her to get as much of her washing done as she can while she’s at Cathy’s, and we worked out a way of doing the washing in the machine without using it to heat the water. It would help if it had a cold wash programme, but by intervening in its cycle, one can achieve the same effect, albeit with a certain amount of having to keep going back to the machine to reset it.

Incidentally, there are two lessons to come from this (or possibly three if preventive maintenance would have avoided the breakdown in the first place of course.) Firstly, redundancy in charging systems. As a liveaboard, it’s not a good idea to have only one means of getting charge into the batteries when away from a shoreline supply. We have the TP plus inverter/charger set up that we normally use, and the DC alternator that otherwise just spins unenergised.

Secondly, more basic washing machines with rotary dial controls are better in this situation than the fancier electronic ones which are harder to over ride in the way that I’m doing now. Also, the fancy electronics don’t always get on well with the TP’s control box – we know of one boat that got through three machines in a year before they found this out.

Anyway, during all this excitement, I’d managed to squeeze onto a just about 60 foot space on the Yelvertoft visitor moorings. They are 14 day ones, so shall stay here at least until Sheila comes back on Saturday. I washed one load of stuff, and, having lit the Squirrel stove, started it drying. (I can’t use the tumble dryer bit of the washing machine, of course). I then put another load in the machine, started a programme that does a hot fill, and then switched it off. Those clothes can soak overnight and be washed tomorrow, when the first lot should be dry.

After all this, I chilled out with an episode of Blakes 7 and a meal from the freezer. I caught up with reading the newspapers that had accumulated over the weekend, and had an early night.

Thursday 31 May

Despite waking early, I loafed in bed, drinking tea and shouting abuse at Sarah Kennedy for a while. After yesterday, it made me feel a lot better. When Wogan came on, I got up, had a shower, and made a leisurely breakfast. The stove having been burning all night, the clothes that I’d left hung around in the saloon were well dry, so I put them away.

The weather being much better today, I walked into Yelvertoft village. It’s about a ten minute stroll down the hill past the church. I got a loaf of bread and the paper. When I got back to the boat, the one in front of me had gone, so I pulled forward. Since I’d squeezed Sanity into her space, her stern had been hard up against the bow of the boat behind, and by moving forward one slot, I shall give them less grief running the engine to do the next wash load.

Whilst I was doing this, moving the boat single handed on the centreline, a couple of other boats (both privateers) came zooming by, only going to tick over as they reached Sanity’s bow, as if that was going to make any difference to the fact that their wash meant I was struggling to hold Sanity steady. Thanks a bunch, chaps.

The weather was now looking very showery, if not thundery indeed, so I carried on working inside the boat, tidying a drawer in the office to make room to store the new external hard drive I got in Rugby. This left a load of stuff we’re not using – a couple of Palm type PDAs and some lengths of audio cable. I shall see if any of the kids want them.

I repeated the wash load strategy and had lunch while it was running.

A phone call from Elanor at lunch time (mainly about one of the cats she lives with) gave me an excuse to do some Internet research on a new laptop and screen for her. I’ve got a T-mobile GPRS signal here, slow but not impossible for web browsing with OnSpeed turned on.

Another lazy afternoon followed, reading and watching yet more Blakes 7. I’ve got to the episode that introduced Servalan and Travis (Seek-Locate-Destroy) for those who know about these things; though I don’t suppose many of you are quite that sad!