Back in Mercia

There’s no rhyme or reason to our sleep patterns these days that I can see, but as one of our fellow Braidbar owners is fond of saying, “old age does not come on its own.” Despite a ropey night we were both up and about in reasonable time. I nipped round to the Co-op for some perishable supplies whilst Sheila got the boat ready, and then we were off at around half eight.

We were doing what would normally take us two days in one move, all of five or more hours boating. Pleasingly, the weather was indeed much more clement than yesterday, though I still needed a fleece over a warm jumper for much of the time. Alrewas, Wychnor and Barton locks went by in their familiar pattern; as so often, we were almost keeping up with the traffic on the A38 alongside, which was stop/starting through sheer volume.

We’ve seen quite a few familiar boats too, including Kate Mogg, Braidbar 104, and fellow moorer and lodge owner at Mercia, Esmée. Later on we passed Muleless and Keith’s son’s boat Pied Piper.

Rather than boat and lunch at the same time, we actually stopped on the towpath at Shobnall (the visitor moorings on Shobnall Fields were pretty full, not least with Festina Lente though there was no sign of Scooby and Rita) and ate sandwiches.

After working down Dallow Lane, I handed over to Sheila for a bit. I wanted to check out the shoreline connectors before plugging in for the winter. Sure enough, one of them was a bit gungy inside. It looked as if it had got some condensation in there at some point and the grub screws had rusted. There was iron oxide spread about inside the case.

Now iron oxide doesn’t conduct electricity itself, but it can trap moisture which does, so I took the whole connector apart and applied WD40 on a cloth and used emery paper on the pins until all was bright and shiny again.

By this time we were approaching Willington, so I took over the steering once more for the final run through the village and turn into the marina. Once tied snuggly on our pontoon, the new isolation transformer was deployed and connection made to our right power post again.

We’ll see how things go.

We’ve now visited all the various offices and shops, getting our new discount card, ordering newspaper and coal and buying kindling.

Tomorrow, we go off to nu-trend to order a three piece suite, hopefully. This post is a bit late, I know; just I’d finished typing it, Lloyd and Helen turned up so we’ve been having a serious catch up natter.