Finally the rain has stopped, and now....it's really hot again! The time for heading North is approaching even quicker than the reality will allow.
The river is very busy, yachts are steaming up and down past Mario's Marina. Each one going down river elicits a sigh from me as I wonder where they are going and look forward to when it will be our turn to let go the docklines.Not too long now.
TBH is in to the second day of fridge repair, our new clutch arrived on Monday, amazingly right on time! I am sat writing this in the only small corner of the boat that has not been turned upside down, well not yet anyway. The compressor has been removed from where it is bolted to the engine. Sounds so easy doesn't it? But it is yet another of those depraved acts of contortion where the thing is virtually inaccessible...Poor TBH's forearms are black and blue with bruises as he forces them in to places that seem to fight back at every turn.
The old clutch is off and the new one installed, yes it was even the right part. You cannot begin to imagine how amazing this has all been so far. I sit here waiting for 'the big problem' to rear its head, but so far so good. Now he is assuming a very strange position on the sole of the cabin as he wrestles to get the repaired item back in to place. Fingers crossed that when we fire then engine up we will have lift off, or at least a cold cooling plate!
For the technically minded amongst you we have an engine driven refrigerator, a Frigoboat. We love it. By running the engine about 30 minutes a day we can cool the large, two compartment, icebox to a temperature low enough to even freeze the stuff that lays alongside the cooling plate The beauty of this set up is that we never take a big draw on our batteries thus enabling them to have a much longer life. In fact our last set lasted seven years and we only replaced them as we were about to cross the Atlantic, they probably still had a year or so left in them.
We have ordinary lead acid batteries, nothing fancy. In keeping with our philosophy of keeping everything as simple as we can.For a forty foot boat we do well on power consumption. No solar panels just a superb KISS wind generator.
So I am off to make a cold drink, and hope that by tomorrow I will be able to report that we are cooling our own wine again rather than relying on bought in ice!
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