Whether the weather be fine, or whether the weather be not...

...Whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot,
   We'll weather the weather, whatever the weather,
   Whether we like it or not.
   (John Ruskin)

If I told you how strong the wind was last night, you probably wouldn't believe me, so I won't tell you. But whatever the weather, it's good here! It was a very noisy night, with the wind bouncing Kantara around a lot - well, that's what it was doing throughout the evening and when we went to bed, was doing when I woke up in the night, was doing when Grace woke up in the night, but, apart from those two brief awakenings, we slept well. We did wake for the dawn chorus. The opening bars from a beautiful avian voice I didn't recognise. Sadly, I'd recently deleted the Bird Nerd app from my phone. It would have identified it for me. My bet is on the Song Thrush, but the Nature Watch website tells me it could have been the humble Dunnock. It was a fabulous song, whichever it was.

(photos courtesy of Nature Watch)

I'd been postponing putting in a new bottle of gas. There are two in the front hold, and one had run out a few days ago. Since you don't want the second one to run out before the empty one is replaced, and since it's easy to forget it if you don't do the job straight away, and since the office is closed for the next three days, I had to do the job today. It's not usually a big deal. The full bottle is a bit of a weight (26 Kg) to manoeuvre into the hold through a hatch only just big enough and with the other bottle partly in the way. But it's do-able without too much fuss. Today, however - and this was the reason I'd been putting it off - the wind constantly threatened to knock me off the front deck. It failed, but it was a bit iffy.

I can't really write a blog post without mentioning the one thing that's dominating the news and everyone's conversation at the moment. It used to be Brexit (remember?), now it's Covid-19. We're not overly anxious about it. We're the wrong side of 60 according to somebody's statistics, but we're generally very healthy, and living here on the boat in the marina we stand far less chance than many of contracting the illness. At this time of year, there's not many people around. The number who actually live aboard has decreased over the years, so days go by without us meeting more than four or so people. So we pretty much keep ourselves to ourselves, we eat well, we take a few useful supplements, and we keep our alcohol consumption low - it's bad for the immune system. Oh, and we wash our hands frequently!

A downside to that is that we've decided not to go to Cineworld in Rugby to take advantage of the vouchers we have that would give us free seats for a couple of films. There are seven that we want to see, being screened over the next several weeks.

• Little Women
• Emma
• Dolittle
• Cyrano de Bergerac
• A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
• Military Wives
• Misbehaviour

 We'll have to wait for the DVDs. We may be over-reacting, but it'd be a risk we don't have to take. At least we're not stockpiling toilet rolls!

We're drying up!

And I'm not talking about what we do after washing up.

The weather has been interesting since we arrived back. At nights we've been rocked to sleep by the waves under the boat, stirred up by unrelenting, gusting wind, often with thrashing rain. Last night and most of today we have experienced unbelievable wind speeds. It's really quite fun in a strange way.

But these extremes have abated from time to time, leaving us with beautiful days that would be quite warm if the wind were to drop altogether. I spent an hour under such a sky as these washing the algae off the roof, dumped there by the soggy ropes that had grown the stuff over the past months. The trouble with spot-cleaning like that (though "spot" doesn't adequately convey the actual size of the green patterns that snaked down the length of the roof on both sides) is that it shows up the dirt on the areas you haven't cleaned. The job will have to be done the next time we have a dry, still day. I'm in no hurry.

Meanwhile, we find Kantara's suffering, not from the wet, but from the dry!

Who would expect that a boat, sitting on the water, in weather that frequently pours rain over us in large quantities for prolonged periods, can be too dry inside? About a year ago, we bought a combined thermometer/hygrometer to monitor the humidity inside Kantara. Too damp is obviously not good for furniture fabrics, books, and other things that shouldn't get too damp lest they get mouldy. Too dry isn't good for the woodwork, nor for people, though it's only the wood that shrinks. 60% is where you might expect mould to be thriving. Around 50% is good.

We have a dehumidifier that we leave running while we're away over the winter, and we run it overnight while we're here in the sort of weather we're getting at the moment, too. But during the day, come rain or come more rain, our Bubble stove keeps us both warm and dry. Yesterday, however, we saw that the humidity was down to 43% - far too low. (The picture above is not of our device. We wouldn't want 56% humidity, and 25° Celsius is rather too hot!) And that happened with a window open, mushroom vents in the ceiling, grilles in doors and various other gaps where the air gets in. How can that be?

The problem was simply solved by putting a pan of water on the stove.

And at last we're back!

We awoke this morning in a very cold boat. 8° cold, in fact. No matter! We're here, come storm or coronavirus! And it's good to be back. And 8° is soon remedied with a fan heater in the bedroom and the Bubble stove lit in the saloon.

It was cold and damp when we arrived at the marina yesterday afternoon. The boat was fine, but I did have to spend an inordinate amount of time persuading an in-line power connection (to the water pump) to connect, and investigating a slow leak from around the immersion heater in the calorifier. After that, the rest of the day was spent off-loading from the car and putting away in Kantara.

We were treated to one of those Yelvertoft sunsets. What a welcome!

So we're back. We have no plans at the moment. We're certainly going to wait until the storms are past and the various waterways closures are over before venturing forth, but we have plenty be busy with here, and today's to-do list is pretty long! But I'll be blogging regularly again, and posting on Twitter and Facebook after an almost-total-absence over the past six months or more.

Good grief, it's hot in here! 20°!

Hints and tips...

We've been away from Kantara for around six months now, so we've not really had the opportunity to pick up new hints and tips, but readers of "Hints and Tips for life with YOUR feet under water" can find a new addition to the book's Addendum Blog - "Update to Chapter 1 - Hardware".



It does now look as if we might well be returning to the boat at the end of this week! Watch this space!!

Emerging from the depths

The depths, that is, of realising that we're half-way through February, and most of the UK inland waterways are closed due to the departing Storm Ciara or in anticipation of the impending Dennis, or for maintenance and repairs. My visits to Twitter, far fewer now than at this time last year, have revealed almost no Tweep excitement about cruising, only tales of deluge and gale and blizzard and freeze.

Sunny St Albans has had little of such weather. We're still here. There are still jobs to do around the house that we'd like to have had the verve to do - largely interior crack-filling and painting - but I don't think there's anything else we can do to help Steve and Karolina now. Steve's more than capable of the cabling, plumbing, wall removal and rebuilding on his own or with Karolina or any one of numerous helpful friends. I think we can best serve them now by returning to Kantara and freeing up some space for them while they're still in our house. It gets a bit crowded at times! Returning's still out of the question, though.

Having taken the car into Marsh Motors (who have been servicing/repairing our cars for over forty years) with an intermittent but not dangerous fault with the steering, and having agreed with bossman David that we might as well wait for the intermittence to become a permanence before forking out the £1300 it'll cost to replace the offending component, the flipping engine control unit started to send us messages that it wasn't feeling very well. David sent it off for repair. He's now had the car for nearly two weeks, and hopes we'll have her back by the end of Friday. So do we, needless to say!

When we do get back on board we at least have the assurance that Kantara is ready to venture forth. We'll be able to head off at a moment's notice, that moment being the time it'll take us to stock up with food. Everything else is raring to go - fuel tanks, batteries, engine oil and coolant, Bubble stove and Alde boiler. The lot.

I can't remember if I've said this before, but this year we're being entirely selfish and not having any visitors travelling with us. We really need the freedom to go where we like, when we like and at a pace we like, without having to take anyone else's needs into consideration. And we've not planned anything. Decisions on the matters of where, when and how will be made as needed. Freedom!!

A new year, and new covers for my books!

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