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Monday 27 February 2012

February 27 March Park Moorings

We arrived at the boat about 12-30 and I immediately set to refilling the potable water system. This went very well just necessitating opening the main outlet from the tank and turning on the pressurising  pump, after that it was just a matter of waiting for the system to fill, pushing out all the air and pressurising its self. Once that was don’t listen for the pump to keep starting which would have indicated we had a leak somewhere.

The next job now we had water in the system was to light the Dickinson diesel stove, remembering to take the cap off first and putting on the chimney. Things were going well.

Next job fire up the engine, it was November 5 the last time we had her running. When she has stood for any length of time I always operate the diesel lift pump manually before turning over the engine, just to make sure there are no air bubbles just waiting to go into the injector pump and cause problems. Turned the key and it fired up straight away.

We have a pair of solar panels on the roof just to make sure the domestic batteries are kept fully charged. When I switched on the main isolators the domestic batteries were sitting at 27.5 volts. I don’t use the solar panels while we are cruising so I take them off and store them under the tug deck. the are not big enough to put a useful amount of charge in each day so I would rather store them out of harms way.

By 2 PM we were ready to set off, but we wandered down the moorings to have a chat with Anne and Olly before we left at about 1450. We moor noise it the bank and reversing straight out of the finger there is just room to swing the bows round the rudder of the butty moored to the left of us without hitting the far side bank. By doing this we are on our way to March. We met two boats just through the first bridge who both moor at Floods Ferry as we travelled to March where we moored at 1600 on the new park moorings. This is much more convenient for the dog than the town moorings, but are a bit shallow so the bows are in and the stern 3 foot out.

As I write this at 1700 hrs. Diana has walked into town to find the post office and it has just started to spit with rain, needless to say she hasn’t taken a coat with her.

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