Up the hill.

Hello Dear Friends and Followers.

What an eventful day we have had.

We are now moored in the dry dock near the top of Hatton locks, already for dry docking tomorrow morning and then we are blacking for the next few of days. We share our lovely trip up the locks with our friends Mike and Lynn Bassett on their narrowboat Diamond Sissy Jupe. Some fun was to be had on the way up. Firstly Keith nearly had his head knocked off by a branch, which had a mind of its own. On reaching lock 30 Keith had noticed the temperature was off the gauge, so we pulled into the bank and moored up. Lynn made us all coffee, whilst Keith and Mike tried to figure out what the problem was. The 1st thoughts were we had an air lock from where we had added the spare skin tank in series, but having rebled both tanks it wasn't this. Checked the water pump, the impeller was fine. Suspected the thermostat so took that out. None of these things improved the situation with the gauge. As there was no steam coming from anywhere which, if the gauge was correct, would have been coming out everywhere we carried on to the dry dock. In Lock 30 we then discovered we had picked up something on the prop, it was a huge curtain.

Thankfully there were no more dramas to be had as we climbed our way to the top of the Hatton Flight, where we said "Cheerio" to Lynn and Mike, who were off for a few days R and R on the Stratford Canal. I made us dinner and a coffee and we sat outside enjoying the last of the days sunshine. Whilst sitting here on the dockside relaxing Keith suddenly remembered the over hanging and how it hit the pigeon box, it had lifted and moved the pigeon box, in which the temperature gauge sits, so he checked the wiring and 1 wire was pulled out, refitted and all now sorted. Sometimes it pays to check the simple things first I know, but we had both forgotten about that darn branch :-)