A little ice in sight

9th & 10th February

Winter’s final fling has been arriving rather more slowly than forecast; to which we have no objection at all. There was no ice around at all yesterday morning, and my walk down the hill to buy a paper and post a repeat prescription order was undertaken in pleasant conditions.

It was one of those days for pottering about, so there’s not a lot more to say about it; we finished sawing up and stacking our collection of firewood and most of the rest of the day was spent indoors. Sheila has been varying her work making port hole doilies for Sanity Again with phoning and e-mailing for insurance quotes for the new boat.

We haven’t come to a decision about this yet, but I’ll mention the outcome both here and on the other blog.

Today, there was just a trace of ice on the water when I got up to make a cup of tea at half seven, and by the time we’d finished breakfast at around nine a skin of it was spreading out over the canal. The Trading Post doesn’t open on Wednesdays, so we took the boat down to the shop mooring as soon as we’d finished our first thing tasks; we had an Ocado delivery booked for the one to two pm slot so it made sense to get down there before somebody else did.

Once there, we had a bit of time chatting to Barry and Annie Cooper who have just moved onto Braidbar 119, The Shouting End, and to Dave Ballinger who had come for a final design meeting about Braidbar 121, Load of Hay, the shell we towed the other day.

Since we would be refilling the water tank before going back to the mooring, Sheila took the opportunity to run two washloads during the morning. She also walked down to buy a paper; my nice new boots have given me a pair of nice new blisters on my heels, so I’m trying not to do too much walking in them for the next couple of days.

I made myself useful by taking Dave Ballinger to look at the washbasin in Just Siviting since they’re thinking of having a similar one in Load of Hay. Not only did our Ocado order arrive in good time, but an order from Julian Graves turned up as well. As soon as we had the Ocado stuff on board, we pulled forward onto the water point since the weather was looking a bit threatening.

We checked off the Ocado order against the delivery note, just managing to finish before the tank was full. Then we went down to the winding hole, turned and came back onto the mooring. By now there was a bitter northerly wind, which made reversing onto the mooring quite tricky; in fact Sanity decided to fall in love with Katalina on the towpath mooring opposite, and showed it by giving her bow a big soppy kiss.

This was despite Sheila wielding the long shaft vigorously; the canal bed around there is very muddy and she thought that she had lost the shaft a couple of times.

Once safely tied up, I took about half an hour to stow away the groceries and then we settled down to relax for the rest of the afternoon. I did take some time to check out In-Line Filters since we’ll need to do a couple more oil changes before we leave Sanity. Their prices look quite attractive, but by the time I had paid delivery and VAT the final bill would be not much short of £12 per filter. Accordingly, I abandoned the order, rang Beta Marine and ordered them from there instead.