Shiralee: Winter 2012/13 # 8

Monday 31st December


Yet again we have high winds this morning but, thank goodness, no rain as yet.

This morning we will take a run out to the local Range store. Having finished my pastel painting of Shiralee and, I might add, at Wifey’s insistence, I’m going to mount and frame it. I’m not convinced that it’s good enough for displaying on the wall of the boat but, quite possibly I am my own worse critic. Emma thinks it’s very good, but she’s only seen a photo of it.

Anyway, I’ll need a backing board and double sided tape and I’ll also need an A3 mount and, eventually, a frame. But this will come after I’ve mounted it because, until I’ve done that I won’t really know what type or colour frame to use. Maybe, when it is finally framed and, assuming I am happy with it, I’ll post it here.

My next pastel project; perhaps a still life, which Emma insists I would be good at; I will do in pastel pencils. Soft pastels are just a wee bit too messy for my liking, whereas pencils have a nice, wooden barrier twixt pastel and fingers, although they do still have to be blended in. Unfortunately I only have about 15 pencils, so I’ll have to order some more before I start on anew painting.

Emma, my mentor in New Zealand, I have recently discovered, has two daughters and a son. One daughter lives in Oz and the other lives in the USA. The son, I assume, although I don’t have confirmation of this, also lives in New Zealand. On top of that nicely rounded family, Emma is still on good terms with her ex and she lives in the same house as her best friend from her schooldays. Emma will be taking a trip to the South Island, possibly around March and has promised to send postcards from her trip. Which reminds me, I still haven’t received the postcard Alan Oxley sent from China; no doubt some lousy Post Office worker has kept it for his collection.

Tuesday 1st January 2013.

How about that folks, we’ve successfully completed another year? Hopefully it will be somewhat drier than 2012.

Before anybody asks, no, we didn’t stay up to see the New Year in. Short of being struck by a wandering comet, or some such disaster, it was going to turn up anyway, and besides, at our age we need our beauty sleep. However, for those of you who did welcome it in, I do hope you had a good time.

Today, having purchased some mounting card yesterday, I will have a go at mounting my painting of Shiralee. The Range has lots of frames of varying sizes, but none that actually fit the bill in this instance, so I will probably have to take it to a framing shop. Had I given the matter due consideration before painting the picture, I could have painted it to fit a standard frame. Ah well, I know for next time.

Thursday 3rd January

We’re on a diet. We have come to the conclusion that we are both too darned fat. The realisation finally hit us whilst watching The Hairy Dieters. Not only that, we have finally realised what we are doing wrong. It’s not that we don’t get any exercise because, on most dry days we’ll walk around the marina with Rusty, and that is a mile. Not a lot I know, but at the age of 70 I am not contemplating jogging or throwing weights around.

So, having decided to lose the weight, we then went on to buy Si and Dave’s book from the series. Wow, you have got to see some of the delicious recipes in this book.

We made a start yesterday and the first thing that went was our evening snack. I should say late evening, because this usually takes the form of a scone, teacake or handful of biscuits. We’ve also bough a variety of cereals, including porridge, All Bran and Shredded Wheat, so we won’t have toast every morning for breakfast.

Wifey hasn’t weighed herself yet, but I am now sitting at 14st. 8lbs, with a BMI of just above 30, which is just inside the obese range. Unfortunately, all the charts telling you how to calculate your BMI are in metric, and I’m damn well British. So, with a bit of jiggery pokery with a calculator, I reckon that to calculate BMI in English measurements, you need to take your weight in pounds, divide that by your height in inches and multiply the result by 10.2. Well, it worked for me at my current weight and height.

Watch this space because, in order for us to achieve our goals – and I’m not sure what they are yet – I think we should have a bunch of independent observers; your good selves; monitoring our progress. To this end I will be posting my own results over the coming weeks. If Sheila agrees I will also post her results.

Today we are going nowhere, except perhaps a walk around the marina, so I’ll be attempting to mount my painting of Shiralee and framing it. I’m also hoping that my new laptop will turn up today or tomorrow, so that I can spend part of the weekend setting it up.

Yesterday we drove into Burton and, whilst we were there we called into the Three shop and upgraded the dongle, but this time for a WiFi unit. Apparently these things are far more reliable than the dongle, and they give faster download speeds. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. I’m still not sure if I have WiFi enabled on this Toshiba, but I have been assured that the Sony VAIO is enabled. So I’ll wait until that arrives before setting the WiFi unit up.

Friday 4th January

For some time now, as I think I may have mentioned previously, our water pump has been running on when we turn off a tap. This warned me of course, that there could be something seriously wrong, such as a leak somewhere, and I was right.

So, after Wifey emptied the cupboard under the galley sink, I invited our local engineer along to take a look. He soon spotted the problem, much the same as we had and said, “Oh yes, you have a very nice puddle under here”, and promised to return with a new pump later in the afternoon.

Having replaced the pump and before putting everything back in the cupboard, Sheila looked further along from the pump, towards the stern and under the actual sink, where she saw even more water.

The next step was to check the cupboard in the bathroom where, sure enough, under the floor panel was an even deeper collection of water. Fortunately we have a battery operated hand pump that we bought some time ago for just such an occasion. However, even this gave us trouble very soon after starting to suck up the offending puddle.

At first it was just the batteries running down, so we popped off to the local Co-op and bought some more, no big deal he? But, when I put the batteries in the pump simply would not work. Obviously the on/off switch was causing problems and, no matter what I did I couldn’t get it to work. In the event I had to sit there on my little stool with the pump immersed in the water and a kitchen knife shorting out the battery terminal and, by about 10pm I had taken up as much water as I could reach. There’s still a lot there, but it’s inaccessible, short of cutting holes in the floor in order to reach it, which I will probably have to do. Still, with this water just sitting there, no doubt trapped between bulkheads or some such, at least we don’t have a hole in the bottom of the boat.

We think the problem was with the outflow from the shower unit, but we’re not sure about that either. I think it was probably the leaky pump and the water has just built up over time. If you think about how many times per day that you run water, and the fact that the gasket around the middle of the pump was leaking, it’s no wonder there was such a lot of water there.

After all that today will be a day of rest, unless Andy advises us to cut a few holes in the floor, at which time we’ll probably be working on this problem for a couple of days.

Saturday 5th January

Some time ago I made an attempt at cutting a hole in the wardrobe floor, so as to enable us to pump water out from the bilge should the need arise. This was necessary because our washing machine sits atop the one provided by the boat builders. The problem with that idea was, when I came to cut through the timber floor the cutter met up with a lump of ballast in the shape of a breeze block. So much for that idea, I thought.

So, after Andy left yesterday morning; he’d stopped by due to our concerns about the pumps operation; we popped along to the chandlery and bought an Oil Extraction Pump. This comes in the shape of a 6 litre bowl and comes with a pressure pump and thin tube, which is usually inserted where the dipstick goes in the engine.

That hole would now come in useful because, even though there is a breeze block underneath it, the pump tube is thin enough to reach between these blocks. When you count the water we extracted with our other battery operated pump on Thursday evening, we have probably removed 8 or 9 gallons of water, and all because of a leaky water pump.

We now have yet another piece of useful equipment, which will probably spend the next few years under the bed, just waiting to be pressed into service.

Will you look at this, six pages already. Time to post methinks.

So, all the best to you and yours from:

Dave, Sheila and Rusty.

PS I had intended to add a copy of my framed painting of Shiralee, but that facility has been denied me. Instead, all pictures have to be uploaded from an online storage facility. I may have to change my blog address and will advise in the next one.

Dave