Lyra's Travels

Thursday November 1st. 2012
Home at last. After nearly 3 weeks away Lyra is once again tucked up snugly on a pontoon in Clarence Dock.
Last night, after waiting a long time for the completion of our modification to the central heating circuit, Dave finally got around to cutting the hole and re-routing the central heating pipes so that the flow is through a header tank now. This allows any air to escape naturally, which it would not do before.
This morning I was finally presented with the bill and I went into town to get the money from the bank as I'd told the guys I would pay in cash.
Once back at the boat we prepared for departure and I tried to start the engine. No go! A quick look at the instrument panel showed that it was getting no power.
I dived into the engine compartment to see if I could see anything obvious. I traced the power feed and found no troubles in the main supply. The only thing I could think of was that during the work yesterday some damage had occurred in the wiring loom so I called Dave over for help.
The problem was soon found to be damage to one of the main feed cables to the instrument panel. When he had drilled through the bulkhead Dave had nicked the cable. He soon made repairs, but then we had to find the fuse that had been taken out by the grounding. it took a while, but finally he located it, and we were back in business.
By now the time was pushing on, and just as we started to leave the yard one of the sand barges came past, taking the lock.
We plodded around to the lock mooring to wait our turn. Unfortunately, after that one had gone through, there was another on its way from the other direction, so we had to wait even longer. By the time we got through Castleford Lock we had been waiting an hour and it was now 12.00 o'clock. 
Pulling out onto the river I gave Lyra some welly and off we went. The good news is that the modifications made to quieten her down have worked very well, the high efficiency silencer and soundproofing have made a great deal of difference . We can now talk easily on the back deck, even at high power settings,also the mods to our rudder appear to improve the drive and the steering
When we reached Lemonroyd Lock, once again the fates were against us, the gates refused to open and after waiting a long time, and trying many times to get the gates to open we gave up and called C&RT to report a fault. Just after that Cath tried the gates again and, wonder of wonders, they opened. I called C&RT to cancel the help and we continued on our way.
There were no more hold ups, and we finally arrived in the dock at about 3.45, not bad considering the holdups.