Banished!

 For the second time in 6 months, no wait, 8 months, (times flies) we're prevented from going home.  Banished! Locked out of our own gaff! Last time it was because Jacob was staying in our house and he had got Covid and this time it's because our Claire's partner Gary is refurbing our loo/shower downstairs and had found a leak in the soil pipe and the wall was wet when he took the old tiles off and so he had to reline the walls and the job is taking longer and there is no water in the house because it had to be turned off because of all the disconnected pipes.  Did you get all that? He hopes we can go home on Monday.  Ah well it's just as well we can stay on Herbie isn't it?

We'll just tootle up the canal a bit (no locks) and potter about doing little jobs I suppose.  There are plenty of them to do on Herbie.

Up the end of the marina where we used to moor the dreaded blanket weed seems to be thriving. I think it's shallower up there.

Lucky we moved to our present berth then, because the water is clear here.  Blanket weed is a real pest.  When we used to more down the dear old Slough arm it became nigh on impassable in August.  Five yards and the prop would be clogged with green cotton wool. You'd be lucky to get out of the arm without going down the weed hatch several times.

Yesterday I was driving the car and got caught in a downpour which caused a flash flood.  Quite terrifying how quickly the road flooded. Of course not much of it ended up in reservoirs so the current batch of lock restrictions looks like staying for quite a while.

One of Herbie's fluorescent lights failed today, so I'm going to buy 5 metres of 12v sticky backed LED strip    (£6.99) and replace all the tubes in all the fluorescent light fittings (7 I think we have.  We don't use them much, preferring to use the little LED spotlights). What can possibly go wrong?  I expect something will  but a 6.99 it's worth a punt. Of course the main thing is that a boat's 12v circuit is rarely if ever really at 12v. I start panicking when it drops to  12.4.  When we're cruising the alternator gets up to 14.4 or more, but in the evening we we use the lights we're normally down to 13 or less. We did the spotlights with LEDs years ago and they've been fine.  I'll either be able to do a triumphant blog post about it or you can enjoy the schadenfreude when I describe how it all went wrong or the leds overheat and fail after three weeks.  It's always the bad news that sells the papers.

Goodness, I just noticed it's 7 minutes past midnight.  Sorry to keep you up so late.

Bye for now.