At last, bilges drained and engine protected.

 You may recall we had a breakdown on the way to Cropredy, losing all our engine coolant.  I was anxious to get the gallons of spilt antifreeze out of the bilge and to get the engine refilled with proper antifreeze as it's currently sitting with plain water in it.  With the weather turning colder I was fearing a heavy frost might do some damage. I really didn't want to tackle it myself as getting all that water out without a bid wet vac is a right pain in the wotsit.  I'd rather pay someone else quite frankly.

I had put in a call to Matt at Tooleys asking if he could come and sort it out but a couple of weeks had gone by without a response.  I was starting to think that he wasn't interested in doing it. So I was glad this morning to get a call from him to say he was at Herbie at Cropredy and had redrained the engine and was dealing with what now must be quite a few gallons of fluid in the bilge.  The whole issue was caused by one of the calorifier hoses being too tightly stretched and breaking loose, so Matt is returning in a couple of days to fit a longer hose before he refills the engine.  He's also seeing if he can wrap some better lagging round the calorifier tank, as being out under the rear deck, any hot water loses it's temperature overnight.

I seem to have a list of things to fix at home at the moment so it's a relief to have the boat problem sorted. One less thing to worry about.

Meanwhile my Zoe experiments and lessons are going apace and I'm already getting some interesting results.  If you're interested head over to my herbieneilzoe.blogspot.com