Progress though a bit dopey

What with sausage, chips and beans at lunchtime and haggis, tatties and parsnips for dinner (no neeps available) plus thinking about having to get an ENT appointment, last night was not the best night's sleep I've ever had. No matter, things have chugged along steadily here despite me feeling a bit part worn.

I managed to write over 1,000 words about roasting meat for my book, so my brain was working moderately well.

My GP duly rang at half eleven and agreed I needed an ENT referral. Thanks to the Choose and Book system, I was able to sort that over the phone this afternoon. Your GP gives you a reference number and a password, together with a phone number. You call the number, give the magic words and they give you a choice of appointments there and then. The bad news is that it's not until the 18th March, so we'll be hanging about this neck of the woods a bit longer than we'd planned. It's not that first appointment that's the problem, it's if there are follow ups for scans or whatever that can use up so much valuable cruising time.

We'd been having some problems for the last few weeks with nuisance trips on the master breaker on the power bollard we share with three other boats; we've solved the problem for the moment by moving us onto a spare socket on another bollard and as far as I know that's stopped the original bollard tripping as well. I won't go into the ins and outs here, but there's a thread running about it on CWDF if you're into that stuff.

Meanwhile, the current gas cylinder seems to be running out rather early, after 40 days rather than 70. An investigation showed that there was a very, very slow leak from the spindle of the stop valve on top of the cylinder. The valve wasn't quite opened fully, so I've turned it hard on and that's stopped the leak according to the washing up liquid I brushed onto it.

I'd been planning for some time to get a bottle of gas leak detector spray to use routinely after I've changed a cylinder, easier to use and more reliable than soapy solution. ScrewFix have some, so as we're going over to Elanor's on Saturday I'll pop into her local depot and pick one up. Note that changing the cylinder and checking that it's not leaking is absolutely all I do with the gas system; anything else, particularly inside the boat rather than the ventilated gas locker, needs a properly qualified Gas Safe fitter.

Tomorrow, if this wind dies down as forecast, we'll go and get a pump out and diesel. It's a bit early for the pump out, but we'll have used quite a bit of fuel in that cold weather, and there's a lot more wind to come, I suspect, so it makes sense to get sorted while we can.