Saturday 11 April 2015

A "where are we ?" Moment + black sheep


Awoke this morning near the Ashby Canal Centre at Stoke Golding, still on the Ashby canal but getting closer to civilisation. With low blood sugar levels I had a genuine "where are we?" moment until Sadie and extreme cold woke Lynne and normality was restored, not to mention the central heating.
We passed a complete herd of black sheep yesterday afternoon, another first for me, although I would have preferred a colony of water voles. I guess I will have to settle for the single specimen spotted on this trip, but I'm not complaining. 
The wind appears to have dropped today and warm sunshine is forecast, thankfully. We intend buying a new gas bottle today before reaching Coventry by nightfall, another boating first ( Coventry, not the gas bottle , although that will be the new, bigger, version thanks to our recently extended gas locker.)
Health-wise this first week afloat has been a great success for me, as it has been for Tardis Two.
In the event the wind suddenly increased to gale force proportions restricting our movement to cruising a mile  or two before Karen and Steve's catch cover virtually got blown off, which, together with Tardis Two getting side-swiped by a speeding young couple's boat, made all our mind's up to moor for the day and replan our itinerary. 
Having said Tardis Two had been behaving herself an alarm emanated from her electric box when the engine was running, which we could not trace so an alarm call was made to the River and Canal Rescue people who offered to come out to check. However, before they arrived we had narrowed the problem down to an overheating engine, even though both Steve and myself had inspected the cooling expansion bottle and confirmed it contained sufficient water later to be confirmed as incorrect due to "water stains" on the bottle interior. A quick word with the engineer on his way out to us gave us a cure by topping the bottle up and running the engine with the pressure cap off to expel any trapped air in the system. Eureka. It worked,but we still opted to stay where we were for the night, having "wasted" several ( very windy ) hours and see what tomorrow brings.

No comments:

Post a Comment