Lyra's Travels

Sunday 2nd December 2012
The end of the year seem to be rushing towards us. I haven't updated this blog for some time now as life has been fairly samey, and others have had a lot more to talk about than we have (floods etc.).
The water here has long receded, and the river is once again a pussy cat. The sun has been shining brilliantly for the last few days, but of course it's been darn cold.
One exciting (for us) thing was that last night our grandson came to stay overnight for the first time, This may not seem much to some out there, but believe me it was a big deal for us and hopefully paces the way to further visits. We had planned to go for a short cruise with him this morning but with the temperature outside below 0 we chickened out.
Our Hurricane central heating continues to produce heat, but is getting a lot noisier. I'm just waiting for it to fail completely so that hopefully the supplier will at last fit the later type of compressor which is supposed to overcome the failures of the type fitted to ours. For those not acquainted with the problem we have experienced with this heater, After about one year of use the compressor in it became very noisy and finally failed completely. The supplier fitted a new one under guarantee. That one started to get noisy after only a few months and we then found out that there was a known issue with that model, which the maker had addressed by changing the design. We took the boat to the supplier (we happened to be passing in our travels) and they said that they wouldn't change it until it actually failed. I was a bit put out about the decision, but had to accept it. The trouble is, of course, that they will always fail when you need them most, when it's damned cold, and then you have to wait for the replacement. I only hope that we don't get any hassle about replacement free of charge, because it is a known faulty part.
An interesting boat has been in the dock over the weekend. Looks like a nice design, as long as you don't want to do the narrow canals.