Christmas

Tuesday 21^st December

We had a lovely night out at The Swan in Stafford, the food and room were excellent.

Today I drove down to Calcott Boats and parted with a lot of money to get the new Hurricane Heater that we need to keep us warm. The trip there and back wasn't too bad but they have a lot more snow around there than we do here and the back roads that they are on were very snowy indeed. All we have to do now is wait for the engineer to come and fit the thing.

Wednesday 29th December

Christmas has come and gone and we had a wonderful time at John's place in Stafford. As you can see from the picture, Daniel had a good time as well.

Because of the ice we couldn't take the boat as somewhere to sleep so John re-arranged the sleeping plans and we took the already booked hotel room which saved us from having to drive home every night. On Boxing Day I decided that we should at least visit the boat to see how it was coping with the record low temperatures. Of course the car wouldn't start! Damon came to the rescue and drove me out to Great Haywood. The temperature inside the boat was -4 so I took the chance of leaving the electric heater on its frost setting to see if the frozen pipes could be saved.

We arrived back on Monday to find that my plan had worked and the only damage was to the shower unit's temperature control. During that evening the electric feed tripped, so I reset it and checked to see if I could find the cause. Nothing showed up, but after a while it tripped again. I started shutting things down to try to find the cause but nothing worked and the trips continued at random intervals, sometimes a few hours long.

Tuesday I drove into town to get another shower mixer and fitted that during the afternoon. The nuisance trips continued despite all my efforts and over night we relied on the batteries. On Wednesday morning I started again to check out all the systems and wires to try to find the cause. While I had the boat disconnected from the power the main feed again tripped! What a relief, it wasn't us at all, but a fault in the feed system. The marina engineer was called and had it fixed in a few hours.

Meanwhile the engineer arrived to start work on our new heater. I had already started to remove the old unit so I left him to it while I got on with installing the wiring and controls in the living area.

The engine compartment is now ready for the heater and the fitter will be back tomorrow to continue the installation, maybe even finish it.