Getting away from Fradley once more

15th & 16th February

Yesterday got off to a less than enthusiastic start, despite us having had a good night, and feeling the benefit of the milder weather that has thankfully arrived. The Eberspacher failed to start: it fired up OK, but then cut out. On investigation, the problem proved to be the battery voltage, which was well down. In fact, just before starting the engine after breakfast, the fact that the fridge was running had dropped it to the danger level of below 10.5 volts. Just a little more and the inverter would have cut out, leaving us without AC power, including the fridge freezer.

A good charge in the morning, and another couple of hours in the evening meant that things were much better this morning, but I'm having an email correspondence with Peter at Braidbar about the need for either a new set of batteries or whether a shot of landline charging would rescue them. His advice is that a landline charge overnight once a month is recommended to maintain the batteries in best nick. This is no doubt true, but I think most continuous cruisers would see it as a counsel of perfection. It's hard enough finding a marina that will let you hook up for a while when you need to leave the boat for some reason.

Doing it once per month would require a good bit of forward planning. Heigh ho, we'll be giving them more charging than before now we are cruising regularly once again, but as Peter says, it won't be enough to bring them up to full charge in the way that they need.

The rest of the day was much better. We spent a chunk of the time on the computer each. Sheila is getting back into her proof reading, having recovered from her cold and the after effects of her dentistry, and I did the first post on the new blog, with a bit of history about our involvement with boating and the move to living aboard.

In the afternoon we set off to take a short walk: up to Shade House Lock, then crossing it and going along the footpath on the offside. There's a geocache along there, over the road from the canal. I hadn't expected Sheila to want to walk so far, but had taken the Garmin with me anyway. In the event, we found it quite easily (makes a change from some others recently), and so were able to return with a pleasant feeling of achievement.

Today, it was just about warm enough first thing not to need the heating on, though, as I say, the battery voltage was much better. As soon as we'd had breakfast we pushed across to the water point, and I left Sheila filling the tank whilst I walked into Alrewas to collect my prescription and the paper/milk/bread daily purchase.

By ten we were on our way up the locks in what felt like the first faint signs of Spring. It was really very good to be boating without worrying about snow and ice. We had a slight delay waiting for a single hander to come out of Shade House Lock. He was a novice moving a very well worn Springer to Coventry to have it docked. In getting off the boat in the lock, he must have just knocked it into reverse, because as the lock emptied, it went back to the top and sat on the cill. He saw it in time to avoid disaster, but it had been a real fright for him.

Apart from this bit of excitement, we had an uneventful run to our usual stop by Bridge 55 at Kings Bromley, getting there a bit before lunch. There's a fair bit of traffic about at the moment, it being half term for many schools, but we had no difficulty getting in here.

In the afternoon, we cut up the rest of the wood on the roof, and spent a bit of time nattering to the folks on The Old Bovine, tied in front of us, and had a brief word with the guy off the boat behind.

He leant us a longer, 32" bow saw, which did indeed prove to be much faster than our 24" one at getting through the logs. You wouldn't think it would make all that much difference, but it certainly did.

Since then, we've been relaxing after our endeavours, keeping up with emails, reading the paper and of course doing this blog post. Tomorrow, we'll head off for Rugeley and probably moor at Wolseley Bridge, then back to Great Haywood and onto the Staffs and Worcs, We'll have to give the planned trip to Stourport a miss, which is a shame but can't be helped. Instead we are going to head straight up the Shroppie for a few weeks.