Easing off a bit

18th, 19th & 20th March

We’ve made a conscious effort to slow the pace down a bit over the last three days, although Friday morning got a bit out of hand.

On Thursday we spent a quiet morning on board after I had been for a paper. There was a fair bit of reading to do, and catching up with emails and responses to peoples' comments on the blogs.

In the afternoon, we got a bit more exercise, or rather Sheila did, cutting up some wood. This was a mixture of the old gate post we had resurrected from under a shrub, and bits of the laburnum we had trimmed back. I found a website which rates the burning qualities of wood and which was quite negative about laburnum, but the bits which are fully dried seem to be burning OK in our closed stove.

Yesterday morning, we went over to review progress on Sanity Again, which is now approaching completion. Things got a bit complicated because Islay, the new hire boat, was a shade late returning; a source of concern to Peter since she needed an oil change before going out again.

We helped out with refilling her water tank and then taking her down the Deeps to wind her and return to the shop mooring for a pump out and diesel. After a bit more discussion with Peter about Sanity Again, we helped move Islay into the yard for her maintenance.

There’s the usual blog post about Sanity Again, and a set of pictures on Flickr. Sheila has today composed a post about our choice of insurer for her and that’s up there as well.

Apart from that, today has been another quiet day; we had a very slow start after a bad night. This was at least partly my fault for serving us a glass of wine from the wrong bottle yesterday evening; I picked up the cooking wine bottle and gave us a glass of rather rough stuff with the result that we both woke in the early hours.

It’s not about having a hangover; as we get older we seem to be more vulnerable to the higher tryptophan content of cheap young wine, with knock on effects on blood levels of serotonin.

The weather is very wet today, encouraging us to have another quiet day. Apart from getting a paper, my principle exercise has been putting an eye splice in each end of a nylon anchor warp for Barry Cooper on The Shouting End.