Birds, Boats and Bramble Cutting

12th, 13th & 14th March

Made it! It's been a seriously hectic week, with highs and lows alternately, though the highs well out ranked the lows, starting with our session with the Masons on Monday, our night out with the Comlines on Tuesday, and then our trip to the Cheshire Falconry Centre on Thursday.

Regular readers will recall that this was the kids' 60th birthday present to Sheila, and it proved to be everything we hoped. Peter (Comline) picked us up from the Salt Barge at half eight, so we were at Blakemere Craft Centre, where Cheshire Falconry is based, in good time.

The morning was taken up with being introduced to various species of raptor, and then two sessions of flying them in the display area. There were ten of us in all, including two spectators, so just a nice sized group for Rob the leader to cope with. In the course of the morning Sheila flew an African Spotted Eagle Owl (explanation by Rob: "It's called an African Spotted Eagle Owl because it's an eagle owl that's spotted and comes from Africa. Bird names are really not difficult!"), an American Rufous Tailed Hawk, a Common Buzzard, a Harris Hawk, a Ferruginous Buzzard and a Kestrel.

I was able to get some half decent photos which I'll sort out and put in a gallery on the website as soon as I can.

After lunch in the restaurant, the afternoon consisted of a "Walk on the Wildside", taking two Harris Hawks to the Cheshire Scout Camp Site which is about a 15 minute walk away, and flying the birds in the hope of catching a rabbit. In the event, the score was one mouse and a possible frog, but none of us seemed to mind. Rob's explanations were superb, full of insights into the mental life of the birds (yes, they do have one) and salted with entertaining comments.

It would have been worth the money just to hear him as a stand up act, so all the contact with the birds was a bonus. Well done, Elanor, Cathy and Graeme, a brilliant present.

We got back to the boat just on five, and promptly took a call from Peter Mason. He'd already offered the use of an oil extractor (technical name the sucky thing) to get the remaining water out of the well deck bilge after our little water pump mishap. The call was to say that Susan was in the area and could drop it off to us straight away, so that we could return it on Friday.

This was so obviously the way to go that we said yes, but it meant that we had to forget our weary feet and set to with this fiendish bit of kit and extract the last of the water from the bilge. It certainly did the job, and this afternoon I was able to use a sponge and then a disposable nappy to remove the final traces.

Yesterday, Susan collected us and we drove over to Braidbar for the planning meeting for Sanity Again. As was to be expected, this went extremely well. Five years ago I wouldn't have said that their work could get any better, but it has, with an even higher standard of joinery, engineering design and flexibility of approach. I'll save the detail for next week's post on the other blog, obviously, but the plan is to collect the shell at the end of September, and the build will then take around four months, so Sanity Again should be ready by the end of January. So far Peter has met every delivery deadline – an unusual boatbuilder indeed.

We got back to the boat by five and had a very quiet evening: Chicken Tikka Biriani and a couple of beers, basically.

Today it was back to boating. We got away in reasonable time on a very bright and breezy day, Sheila steering. A brief stop at Bridge 183 in Broken Cross let me pop along to the handy Spar in the local filling station to get a paper and a litre of milk, then we plodded on through to Bramble Cutting again, arriving well before lunch.

This afternoon has been for pottering. Sheila did some proofreading, and I sorted the accumulator; the new pump runs at a higher pressure than the old, so the pressure in the accumulator needed adjusting to suit. The water system now works between 25 and 45 psi, which makes both the Seagull IV water filter and the toilet perform just a tad better.

I've also made another attempt to make the bow fender work, but it's really most unsatisfactory. I would take it back and demand my money back, except that I made the thing myself.

Tomorrow we go on through Middlewich, aiming for Wheelock by the end of the day.