Not a lot happened

Jan’s blackberry & apple jam has now been placed in the back of the pantry.  There’s still a few jars of Damson jam from 2013 so it might be some time before I get the the 2014 jam.

Jan has picked up on an idea of Sue’s (nb No Problem) and writes the picking location on the labels.  In a recent post Sue also mentioned she adds some ginger to the fruit to give it that little extra “bite”.  I’ve found that provided you pick at least 30% of the berries down low the dog wee has a similar effect!   Just joking folks…… you actually can’t taste the wee!

A couple of days ago Jan pointed out the saloon switch for the TV aerial (actually the 12V powered amplifier) wasn’t illuminating.  This wasn’t an immediate issue because almost everything in the boat has built in redundancy.  There’s a second switch in the bedroom.  The weather has been drizzly for much of the day so I decided to the replace the switch.  It Is part of a three gang wall plate so the first task was to take the cover plate off the switch frame and then remove the frame from the wall to access the individual switches.  This enabled me to remove the affected switch.  I have some spares for this type of eventuality and used one to replace the existing switch.  The LED backlighting was reconnected and the switch reassembled.  The switch mechanism is “momentary” (like a door bell switch)( rather than conventional on/off.  Pressing a switch sends a pulse to the node which activates the consumer.  In this case the 12V TV and amplifier.  It also lights up the LED until the switch is pressed for a second time.

To my surprise the backlight LED was red.  Then I remembered I’d been working on (playing around) with some of the switches back in Australia when Waiouru was just an idea. I had fitted a couple of them with red LEDs.  So this must be one of my originals.

All the other LEDs are blue.  I then disassembled the defective switch and repaired the mechanism before reassembling it and returning  it to storage. 

The last job for the day was to apply a second coat of gloss varnish to the rear doors, tiller handle and the rear cabin door step.

I (almost) feel guilty about doing so little today.  It was too wet to make another attempt on the bow hatch painting so that will have to wait for another day.  Tomorrow will probably be an early start as we want to reach Leeds.