Gosh, that's better...

Got some sleep last night, feeling a lot better today, though we've not been idle, and I'm looking forward to my pit again tonight.

Let's start with Friday night:

I don't know if it's relevant, but the first thing that happened was the main shoreline breaker on the power pylon on the pontoon tripped on Friday afternoon. I reset it with no problem, and put it down to just one of those things (the pylon is shared with three others, so not necessarily anything we'd done.)

It meant that the Mass Combi inverter/charger went into full charge mode, of course, and it was still running at 14.4V absorption when we went to bed at ten. I though it a bit odd, but wondered if it had decided to gas off the battery bank.

At half eleven, we were woken from deep sleep by the carbon mon alarm going off in the dinette. Scuttled through, no problems in sight, fire well banked down and sealed up, no feeling of dizziness or doziness amongst the crew. There was, however, a distinctly hot smell coming from the engine room, and the fan on the Combi was belting along at full chat. I disconnected the shoreline supply, everything calmed down, and we did what we could to get some more sleep, not very successfully.

Next morning, I reconnected the shoreline, the battery bank being discharged down to 60% and 12.1V. It went straight back into absorption mode, so after breakfast, as things were smelling bit again, I took the boards up and checked out the bank. The aftmost battery was almost too hot to touch, so presumably had gone into a dead short, hence the Combi's struggle to charge up the bank.

I've disconnected it by undoing the positive terminal clamp, lifting it off the post and wedging a bit of wood under to stop it dropping back down. The Combi eventually went back to float at 13.4V, so things are back to normal, more or less, but it's clear that I'm going to have to replace the batteries pretty soon before another one goes, and we end up with insufficient capacity in the bank to keep the Combi happy.

Apart from all that, I dried out the port side engine room bilge, and positioned some disposable nappies under all the pipe joints. We have a slow loss of coolant from the engine; it's not blowing off, because I run the overflow into an old milk container to check for that happening. There are no obvious signs of a leak, so it obviously happens slowly, and probably only while the engine is warming up or something.

The coolant will stain whichever nappy it falls on, thereby letting me work out which joint needs nipping up.

Also yesterday, we published Sheila's ebook, A Boater's Commonplace Book. As before, if you want a copy in ePub format, just email me using the link alongside. I can also supply it in PDF this time, all for the same price of £3.03. (The dollar price is $4.50, and everything else is converted from that.)

Today, we had a leisurely start, then I did the remaining bilges, under the engine and the one right at the stern. I've put an old plastic container under the stern gland, with the hope of being able to keep the rest of that bilge reasonably dry. I've made a resolution to check them all each Sunday in future.

Sheila did some boatwork, and there was a bit of tweaking to do with the way her book shows on Amazon, as well as tweeting about it.

Elanor has just been over for the second time this weekend (she popped in yesterday with our post). The field she usually uses to run Sally at the weekend is underwater, thanks to the Trent, so we've given her a run in the marina field. Sheila and I had already been for a walk, along the towpath to Stenson Lock, so I'm feeling exceeding well exercised today.