I was up at 5:45 to do the early morning car shuffle. The track from the towpath up onto the A34 at Stafford Boat Club was seriously muddy after last nights rain and so great fun was had slipping and sliding up to the road. On my return, the off-road section was down hill which made it even worse that the earlier passage due to the tendency of the wheels to lock when I applied the brakes. Just after my return to the boat , with the Di Blasi safely stowed away, the heavens opened for another short deluge. As we were preparing to set off, an Anglo Welsh boat with a Norwegian crew aboard passed us heading the same way. We had exchanged greetings with them last night just after our encounter with the gobby fisherman. At the next lock we caught up with them and I enquired about whether they were pleased with their boat. They were but had a problem with the boiler which would not stay alight to heat the water. It was an Alde Comfort, like Jannock's, so I had a look. It lit OK with a nice clean blue flame but would go out after about a minute. I suggested that the thermocouple was shot and told them to ring Anglo Welsh to get a service engineer to fit a new one. We caught up with them at every lock until Penkridge where they stopped just past the water point to meet the engineer. Later when we were moored up they passed us again and proclaimed the new thermocouple a success. After lunch we took Simon back to his car at Aston and then had to return to Jannock to resolve three little problems. 1. We'd left all the frozen food in the freezer section of the fridge that we had switched off. Doh! 2. We had forgotten to remove the rubbish bag from the kitchen bin. Doh! 3. Remote interrogation showed that the alarm was not operating correctly and so needed re-setting. OK, that one's worth it. It's amazing what happens when normal routine is amended to cater for additional crew.
Graham www.jannock.org.uk [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
