Thursday 9 May 2013

The world has been saved!

The UK weather forecaster must be congratulated for the accuracy of their prediction.  Today it was grey, cloudy, overcast, cold, windy, warm, sunny and rainy!  One might be forgiven in thinking they were in Melbourne!

Jan woke at her usual 5.30am and snuck away leaving me to continue cutting firewood with the chainsaw.  Actually I’m fairly certain she’s exaggerating about the firewood as there’s no sawdust and I’m reasonably confident I was busy counting sheep!  No… Aussie readers…. counting them… not chasing them!

We had some good news when a phone call was received advising our Australian debit card had arrived in the UK and could be collected.  We need to do this very soon and ‘activate’ the card otherwise it will automatically expire.  So we’ve booked a car from Enterprise.  Not the smallest class as we need elbow room to work the gears and steering wheel.  Actually the thought of driving at more than 4 mph seems quite daunting!

Paul (nb Piston Broke) tapped on the roof this morning and then came on board for a chat about boating matters…. mostly electrical!  He mentioned using the Victron combi to ‘equalize’ the battery bank.  I know the Victron has this functionality but it only produces 15.4V during the process whereas we need 15.8V for the Rolls batteries.  We purchased a CTek charger to get the required 15.8V and the Rolls manual states the batteries should be equalized every six months. 

Jan had baked a loaf of bread for lunch.  This time she had added pumpkin seeds to the brown flour which has resulted in a slightly different taste.  The girl left me the hot crust which I love when covered with a slice of butter. 

There was another knock on the roof in the afternoon.  This time it was Judith from nb Serena.  Judith is one of those strange people who somehow finds morsels of interest in the ranting and ramblings found on this blog.  She and John had cruised past and seen Waiouru so pulled over to introduce themselves.

Judith & John of nb Serena

After the usual boaters introduction…. “We’re pumpout!”…… “Oh… we’re cassette!”

We moved on to more general boating issues. Judith & John have been living aboard for a number of years and have covered much of the inland network.  Listening to them was most informative and we now need to do further research into NABO (National Association of Boat Owners) and Cutweb (Internet Boating Club).   After solving all known inland boating issues we turned to identifying (easy part) and resolving the myriad of problems currently besetting the UK.  Where were David Cameron and Ed Miliband?  They could have learned so much…….. It was all free advice and only took an afternoon! Think of the billions in consultants fees that could have been saved…….

Judith and john are off to Braunston tomorrow whilst we will probably start heading towards Rugby.  Nice to meet you both and no doubt our paths will cross again.   Our move to Rugby will either be a one or two day cruise, depending upon the weather!

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