Page published 12 January 2025
Thursday 9 January 2025 - Winterising!
We'd had a couple of nights with temperatures forecast to be a little below zero but Thursday night was forecast to be below -2°C so it really was time to get down to the boat and put some heating into Singing the Blues. I arrived to find the dyke partially frozen.
The bow rope looked a little taught when I arrived, but the other lines were slack so there was room for a further rise in the dyke.
Stepping aboard at the stern I found there was plenty of ice on the decking. The well was full of leaves. Once the door had been unlocked I got the dust pan and brush from the cupboard where it was stored and cleared what I could. I left a number of leaves that I found were frozen to the deck, so I didn't do as thorough a job as I might have done.
The greenhouse heaters used Last Year to heat the boat. This time I I took care to lay them horizontally as instructed in the heaters' manuals.
The electricity meter reading.
I think my brain was suffering from the cold. After almost everything I did I thought that either I should have done it differently or taken a photo first. And in some case I should have done both. For example, after I had cleared the leaves and retrieved the heaters from the shelf in the shower compartment I realised that in struggling to retrieve our shoreline cable and meter from the locker under aft deck and going to connect them to the supply post I had left muddy foot prints on the carpet. By then there was no point in taking my shoes off as any mud that had been on their soles was now spread around the cabin and my shoes appeared clean.
That was also when I realised I should have taken a picture of the meter before before stepping aboard. That way I would be able to tell exactly how much electricity we had used. We have no idea what the arrangements are for the use of electricity on this our "borrowed" mooring. It's something we need to follow up when we respond to the message in a Christmas card we received that suggested a meeting with my cousin. At least, I did manage to take a photo as I left. I recall that it showed 9.7 something when I was fitting the cable.
All is not lost, however. I do have a photo of our own in-cable meter that I took when we bought it for the mooring at Coltishall and it's not been used since I took it.
I discovered another boob made in November. When we left the boat after our Cleaning Trip, I had failed to extract the keys from both the engine and domestic battery isolaters. As a result it was no surprise to see the volt meter show over 15v when I plugged it into one of our 12v cigar lighter sockets in the saloon.
A Neater Notice!
The original gas lighter.
Warning notice with hooks.
The notice is now secured by four matching screws and the new lighter hangs neatly below it.
One of the things I have been meaning to do since we bought Singing the Blues was to remove the hooks from the Gas & Gas Appliances Warning Notice beside the cooker in the galley.
Some would want to remove the notice as it dates from the boat's hire boat days and not all of its wording is applicable to a private boat. Our view is that it preserves the boat's history. "It's only original once!", as they often say on "Bangers and Cash".
In another example of my brain operating in frozen mode, another thing I forgot to do was take a picture of the notice as inherited by us but, as luck would have it, I found two, one taken shortly after our purchase of the boat and another taken last year that show the well rusted hooks and how they were used with the original gas lighter.
We replaced the original lighter with a piezo spark igniter shortly after launching the boat in October 2023. The original gas fuelled lighter was clearly close to needing a refill and I wasn't in the mood to pay for that, having had trouble refilling such items previously. The Piezo Electric type is the one the manual recommends for lighting the stove and has the advantage of requiring neither batteries or gas. The final picture show how that is hung beneath the notice. Just squeezing the handle produces multiple hefty sparks
After locking up and leaving the boat to go home for lunch I realised I had had another moment of brain fade. I intended to take a photograph looking down the length of the dyke. While it was slightly into the sun, the glare did show areas that were free of ice and it would have made a different kind of picture to the one I usually take as we leave the mooring.
Coming soon — We're not sure yet!.