Jobs done

In a burst of activity, Peter and Andy have finished all the outstanding jobs on Sanity Again. First off, Peter did the fuel filter changes I'd asked for, including the fiddly CAV 296 filter/agglomerator. All seemed well there. There was no water or nasty black stuff in the bowl of the CAV and just a bit of rubbish in the filter after several thousand hours. The Wasp filter in the Hurricane feed was sparkly clean, too.

Meanwhile, Andy looked at the top of the toilet tank – Sheila and I had stripped the bed off the top ready for him. The original plan had been to fit a new 6" square inspection hatch, but what we'd all forgotten was that the boss for the MSC gauge sender had been mounted on a similar but larger plate. We decided that it would be fine to remove this plate to look in and to rinse out the tank.

Accordingly, I pulled the boat out of the yard, winded her and put her alongside the shop mooring ready to be pumped out. After spreading polythene sheet over the bed base, we ran a hose in through the Houdini hatch, Peter supplied me with a long narrow flexible strip of steel and I put the gauntleted pond gloves on. As the level of black water in the tank went down, I plied the scraper along the sides and bottom and sprayed water around in the tank.

After a few iterations of this, we had light brown water emerging from the pump out point. I cleaned off the tank gauge sender and moved the boat back into the yard. Here, Peter refixed the plate to the tank with sealant and the bolts. When we reconnected it, the gauge was once more showing just one bar rather than the two which has been the best we could manage for some time.

Meantime, Andy had replaced the weed hatch having welded in a new bit of threaded rod in place of the one with a stripped thread. Incidentally, the fact of me being able to move the boat with the weed hatch out demonstrates the virtue of the Tyler/Wilson design, with the weed hatch access trunked right up to the stern deck. There's no risk of sinking the boat because the weed hatch has come loose.

After much washing of hands, we had lunch, leaving a large fan blowing fresh air through the bedroom. The afternoon has seen us putting everything back together and getting Sanity Again into cruising mode. We're going out to lunch with Peter and Susan tomorrow, so will stay one more day and leave on Thursday morning.

Oh, one more thing to report. CRT are halfway through repairing the hole in the bridge approach. A piece of piling has been inserted at the uphill end, sandbags full of concrete mix strategically placed round the sides and the hole half-filled with more mix. I guess the final phase will be to fill up the hole completely and reset the cobbles over it.