Upgraded to IC5!

Having left the Alde gas stove on low all night, we were plenty warm in bed, but disturbed from time to time by the thudding, grinding noise of the hull moving against the ice that envelopes us.

The wind was gale-force, battering the boat with mighty gusts. I ventured out first thing this morning, and conditions were arctic. The snow is very fine, but it's actually hard to know if it's falling or being swept off the drifts by the wind. Or both!

I was out in it because I wanted to empty a toilet cassette, but I found that the Elsan disposal unit is unusable. Frozen. I wanted also wanted to fill our 10-litre drinking-water container, to reduce our use of the boat's water tank, but none of the running water in the marina is actually running. Also frozen. And it's not just the water that's frozen. After I'd changed the cassette, I found that the replacement one, stored in a hold on the well-deck, wouldn't open for use because the mechanism was... frozen stiff! Fortunately, that didn't take too long to thaw once it was inside the cabin.

So, our situation is now a firm IC5. We watched it enter IC4 yesterday afternoon.

We're happy to sit tight and weather this out (what a strange expression!) We won't starve, we won't get cold, we won't get bored. There are folk around the country who are in far worse straits then this, and my heart goes out to them. And it'll all be over soon. Won't it?

PS Grace and I have just come in from helping friends to get water into their tank. The marina manager has contrived to get access to an outlet under a manhole cover, and the idea was to attach hoses to this and thus run it to the boats that need it. It failed miserably. The water froze instantly in the hoses!

PPS I seriously thought I'd got frost-bite in my (foolishly) ungloved hands. I haven't.

We're at IC3!

On Monday morning, Grace declared herself well enough to go back to look after Kantara through "The Beast from the East" that is our current weather. So back we came.

Truth be told, St Albans was looking more likely than Yelvertoft to get the snowy, chilly blast they've been forecasting for days, but it was flipping cold back on the boat, I can tell you! The max/min thermometer sitting on top of the calorifier told us that the lowest temperature it had sat through since we left in the first week of December was just minus .1° Celsius, and the highest had been 14°. All was dry, all was well. And after a couple of hours of running the stove, we were warm and snug, too, and Grace was feeling much better after her lurking lurgy.

We woke the next morning to snow lying on the frozen marina pound, and ducks doing their obligatory skidding-around-trying-not-to-look-stupid routine. They were denied that opportunity by mid-day. The ice had gone, the snow had thawed. Social media were full of tales from boaters for whom the conditions had only got worse. And desperate times call for desperate measures!

But we're snug in the boat. The water taps on the pontoons are frozen, so there's no tank-filling for those who need it, but we did that pretty much as soon as we arrived yesterday, so we're okay for several days. We don't have a lot of food; that is, we don't have the ingredients for many conventional meals, but we have plenty to eat if we dispense with convention, and we're happy to do that. "Experimental" has been the label on many of the meals we've eaten on Kantara over the years! 

We're only here for a couple of weeks. March has a lot in store that I'll blog when the time comes. After that... well, let's see if any other Beasts raise their icy heads.

We're currently at IC3 on the Canal Ice Scale.