Thursday 28 March 2013

Keeping busy

After a bit of a lazy start this morning, recovering from the excitement of the last two days, we've been keeping reasonably occupied. Following the usual morning chores, I set out to check the state of the batteries and bilges. I wasn't expecting to have to do much with the former, they're not doing anything whilst we're on the shoreline, but the continuing cold weather would have led to condensation wetting the nappies in the bilges, I thought.

In the event, I was right in the first case but wrong in the latter. The only damp was in the enclosed section of bilge under the engine, which worryingly had coloured water in it; some engine coolant had found its way down there. Sure enough, the header tank was empty; after a bit of dangling upside down and groping about with paper towel in hand, I identified a weeping joint just on the aft end of the tank.

It took only a moment to nip up the clip, after which I topped up the tank and started the engine. Letting it run up to temperature reassuringly failed to start any more weeps, so hopefully that's it. I suspect that the steel stub on which the hose fits had contracted just enough in the cold to let the joint loosen a shade.

Obviously, I'll keep an eye on it whilst we're cruising. The coolant is a 50/50 mix of water and antifreeze and glycol is notorious for finding any little crack to ooze through.

Having put the engine room back together I had a belated coffee and a bit of a sit down.

After lunch we had our usual walk round the marina and called in at the office, where we bought some WiFi access. Our T-mobile contract only gives us 1 Gb per month of data; this is usually enough for our purposes, but not to update the software on two machines. By buying two 1 week/1.25 Gb accesses we can do both easily.

In the event, the location of my Mac Mini meant that the connection ran very slowly and finally gave up altogether. I'll run it again tomorrow having taken the Mini apart and reassembled it on the dinette table just for that purpose. The desk needs a good dusting anyway. Sheila's MacBook, sitting on said dinette, ran very quickly indeed. She downloaded about 500 Gb of various upgrades, so the one access would have done, but at £7 a time it's not exactly a fortune.

If we didn't have other forms of internet access, we could have a year of 5Gb per month for £95, which seems like a reasonable price.

We've got one evening and a lie in tomorrow on our own before Elanor and Sally come to stay for the weekend, meaning that morning tea in bed will be accompanied by a snuggling hound.

2 comments:

Chris Trotman (Black Swan) said...

Just reading your blog for today and wondered whether you had spotted the '3' dongle option where for £10 you can have 3GB spread over 3 months. It is sold by Amazon. See NB Percy blog of March 19 which is where I saw it.

Bruce in Sanity said...

Thanks Chris: yes, I'd spotted that, and it's an option for when my current 3 modem contract runs out next year, assuming that they are still doing it then.

All the best

Bruce