Friday, April 17, 2009

Were on our way !

Well we woke up this morning to a poo smell coming from the engine room and leaking into the bedroom...how nice was that!
The gauge on the waste tank was showing just under nine and it goes to ten, but when we checked the bilge there was a definite leak from the tank. This may have been caused by the steep ramp when Derwent6 came out of the water.
So we set off to get a pumpout at Braunston. The weather was damp but dry and Derwent6 was quite fun to steer with the new propeller fitted yesterday. We arrived at the DIY pumpout station and we were surprised it was empty. We already had a token and the tank drained very easily, but when we checked the gauge again it was showing past the zero mark. It had never done this before, because when we had emptied the tank before, the lowest it had gone was just below one.
Anyway we then went round to the water tap and filled up with water and while we were doing this we cleaned out the bilge with disinfectant. This is not an easy task, as the waste tank is under the tumble drier and washing machine. We will see if that improves things!

Well, we were full of diesel, empty waste tank and full with water so it was off we go......


We set off towards Rugby seeing both n.b Piston Broke and n.b Moore2life with their new blacking again, and it was lovely to see three other couples on the way shouting "we follow your blog" We are so glad you're all enjoying it as much as we are..........
We got through Hillmorton locks, watching some of the hire boats struggling.The new prop performed great in the single locks, but we still haven't mastered reversing yet. We got used to reversing Derwent6 with the old prop using the 70 degree tiller technique but on the Axiom prop there is more flow past the tiller, and it's easy to lose the bow, and hard to get it back again. Time will help here!
On getting into Rugby we could feel more rubbish in the canal being picked up by the prop as we had various noises on the way, once nearly stalling the engine. We had never had that before!

Just a quick blip in reverse seemed to clear it very quickly luckily.

One hire boat had come off it's moorings as they were in the pub...they are in for a nasty shock when they come out. We managed to just get by it.
And this lot were having so much fun! How many can you get on the front of a narrowboat!


We arrived in Rugby at 5.00pm and sorted ourselves out before going down to Frankie and Bennys for something to eat and then to see the film "The Boat that Rocked" which we thought was great and the music was fantastic. We think our age group helped!

4 comments:

Derwent Gnome said...

Forget the party in the park, it looks more fun to party in the cratch.
Glad you liked the trick but did you get it first time.

Love
DERWENT GNOME

Anonymous said...

Sounds like, NO SMELLS like you need some more tumble dryer sheets.

Steve

Del and Al said...

Hi Derwent Gnome
Yep.....1st time lol

Del and Al said...

Hi Steve
lol....luckily the smells gone!