Ah yes – the idyll continues. Or maybe it doesn’t because in the UK it rains in the autumn; not necessarily in what’s come to be called biblical amounts and should really be called climate catastrophic amounts, Exxon Mobil or BP amounts; but you get the picture. The kind of rain that laughs at the equally misnamed technical clothing. Today it even penetrated my untreated and decidedly non-technical Welsh wool polo neck which still smells like a sheep but feels mercifully warm even when it’s wet.
We’re travelling extremely slowly along the Kennet and Avon canal; so slowly in fact that we learned today that we had infuriated a robustly built Welsh boater who we’d already allowed to overtake us once and who was the first of our little traffic jam to discover that the Canal is blocked by a fallen tree just beyond Dundas aqueduct. He passed us bad temperedly as he returned to Bath in sodden shirtsleeves and (so the mechanic told us) shouted at them for ruining his life. I did eventually speed up once I’d mastered the speed wobble – I didn’t confess my part in all this to my informant who was at the end of the traffic jam. It took me right back to our Morris Thousand days.
I mentioned yesterday that our induction talk was brief; very brief as it turned out when the heater failed to start this morning. The briefing hadn’t – for instance – included the important fact that the Webasto heater in the boat is designed to run on 24V and the system runs at 12V so, it’s imperative – we were told – to run the engine fast whenever we start the heater. That said, three conversations and three engineer visits later we’d discovered that the Webasto heating unit had reached the terminal care point and that the fake solid fuel fire was disconnected because of the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. In the end the three engineers on site conducted a mini Council of Nicea and they collectively concluded that it was water in the diesel and they would have to “fit a new part” . However it was also true that the posh iron stove had just been turned off somewhere in the engine compartment, and so we gathered around while it was ignited with a rolled up cigarette paper. So after a day in which we managed to travel about a mile in freezing cold and rain, with a roof that leaks like a sieve and our clothes wet through we are finally moored at Dundas and ready to move on as soon as the engineer comes to fit whatever it is .
And it was all our fault. Apparently those of us who hire boats are far too well educated but lack any common sense and insist on fiddling with the equipment. I knew it! When it all boils down most customers will back down with a bit of technical gibberish and a half decent narrative. As a founder member of the South West Awkward Squad I must disagree.
