Yippee! The generator is up and running. The water separator (home made) is not 100% effective yet but there is plenty of room for modification. The machine itself provides the output required, and promised, and is remarkably quiet. We can hardly hear it at all in the wheel house or on the back deck with the engine room hatch closed and the only room below which really suffers a mild thrum is the bedroom which is right next to the engine room, but who goes to bed with a generator running? The rest of the rooms below are totally unperturbed by it!
What a relief though – the mishap has probably ONLY! cost about £330 and of course a lot of hard work, but for us retirees that is for nothing. And we are now self-sufficient where electrical power is concerned. The fuel to power it is, of course, another story, but diesel is a bare necessity of life for us.
Another plus is that the free-sat dish and other paraphernalia which we brought across with us appears to work. It took a couple of attempts to tune the dish into the correct satellite but second time lucky and Lo and Behold! We have dozens of absolutely awful TV channels to view with a very few that are actually worth watching: viz BBC1 and 2, sometimes ITV and Film 4. otherwise we have seldom encountered in our protected lives, such a load of drivel and hush hush, sex channels!! Amazing! Who watches this stuff? (Saddos of the world unite we suppose.)
But the most important thing is that we can now get Radio 4 and The Archers six nights a week (Now who are the saddos we hear you ask!) and all for a mere £100 plus the gift of a Sky Plus receiver from kind sister Julia who had a spare.
Sorry to be so money-oriented again but with our income now at nearly zero due to the bank rate and the downturn in the economy we are having to spend the next year or so living on capital rather than income from capital. It was tight enough before but it is even tighter now. Fortunately both Alex and Louise thrive on thrift – Louise in the past by some necessity, Alex (always) by nature (it’s the Scots blood!).
We made another sortie to Terneuzen, however, in the car while we have it here and bought among other things a car load of cheap but OK Chilean wine and this time we had promised ourselves a rare treat – mussels in garlic and white wine in the lovely restaurant overlooking the Westersheldte. And of course the bloody place was closed for renovation – typical! What a let down. So we had to lower our sights and settle for a popular café in the central square where we had cucumber and basil soup! Sounds disgusting but it was actually lovely: but of course there were no big barges to watch passing back and forth. (Alex wanted to add here that there were plenty of big bottoms to look at, but Louise said he shouldn’t really say that!)
We have been entertained by the owners of the €1.3 million boat in front of us, along with the French/Flemish couple from the boat behind. We have returned drinks (well actually we started with a typical English tea complete with home-made scones, jam and cream and went on to drinks!) with the Dutch couple from the gin palace, and we have had the only other English couple, Derek and Erica from Star of Destiny, round for coffee. We also had our friends Suzanna and George from Waspik to stay after we had all visited the Ghent Boat Show. So all in all a pretty sociable few days and very nice it has been.
But while Alex has been busy rebuilding and fitting the generator Louise has been charging round Ghent taking lots of photos, some of which we show here
Friday 13 February 2009
Tuesday 3 February 2009
winter in Gent
A belated Happy New Year to anyone who happens to be reading this latest posting on the Riccall Rambling blog.
We left Riccall at our moorings in Ghent and travelled back to the UK in the car in mid December (having previously brought the car over with the ill-fated generator in November.)
While in the UK we have been fitting a new kitchen into the small house which we have as our pied à terre in the north of England close to the home where Louise's mother lives. So no rest for the wicked there then!
During the intervening weeks it became apparent that the much loved Citroen ZX was using more and more water in the radiator with no visible signs of a leak. This usually signifies the demise of the cylinder head gasket and it’s unpredictable as to when it might fail completely. To repair would be an expensive job at the best of times, so with much regret and 1000 miles short of a quarter of a million miles on the clock, a new car had to be found.
After several weeks an S reg Citroen Xantia with only 98,000 miles on the clock seemed the best bet (a car now excess to the requirements of a friend of ours). We knew it had a couple of problems but reckoned it would do the job.
So we loaded it up with four bottles of gas, seven 5-litre tins of paint, a higher rated inverter (which Alex had acquired from his erstwhile place of work), a battery and spare parts for the genny, a free-sat dish and receiver (we just have to be able to listen to Radio 4 somehow, we've missed it so much) and goodness knows how much other clobber - 350 kilos in all we estimated, and set off back to Ghent.
The water leak in the heater matrix in the Xantia is temporarily fixed with some radiator seal-it, but the clutch which Alex thought might be on its last legs did indeed start to slip with the extra load it was being asked to pull, so very careful acceleration in low gears became the order of the journey.
We arrived in Ghent in good time though, and in daylight, offloaded all the paraphernalia and parked up in our favourite free spot, walking back to Riccall as dusk fell.
We had been told that there had been a few days of hard frost while we had been away but thought little of it, until Alex turned on the water pump. The tap in the kitchen sink was destroyed, as was the one in the wheelhouse!
It was a similar story with the central heating: three radiators had very small leaks where the riveting had been disturbed by the ice forming in the core.
We fixed the taps one way or another and put plastic containers under the radiators to catch the drips and the next day drove off to the DIY shop for more radiator seal and some antifreeze! This has been added to the central heating system and, fingers crossed, the leaks have pretty well dried up.
We did set the central heating to come on for half an hour per night - 3 in the morning actually, as the coldest time - as a precaution, but it was obviously not enough. And we switched off the water pump as a precaution which we always do summer or winter when leaving the boat for any length of time. Pity we hadn't also opened all the taps!
The trouble is, we guess, that we have become complacent about frost. not having had any of any significance for so long in the UK. To be fair to us though, other boats moored here have had similar problems as even the Belgians have not had such prolonged cold weather for years.
But it’s another lesson learned!
Apart from fixing the new problems which occurred while we were away, Alex is now setting about the task of re-building the generator with the spare bits picked up from Southampton and other places on our diversionary route back here.
Louise’s main task while Alex is thus engaged is to source food at something less than the amazingly ridiculous prices which now pertain here. And if anyone thinks this is being somewhat paranoid, just imagine the exchange rate at rather less than parity (99.7p per €), cauliflowers at €2.80 each, mince at €4 per pound and chicken at €7 per pound! This search has become rather important to us both!
Back to the UK in a fortnight for three weeks or so before we set off at the end of March for the next cruising season. Next winter may find us moored in the south of France with luck, and maybe less chance of frozen pipes!!
We left Riccall at our moorings in Ghent and travelled back to the UK in the car in mid December (having previously brought the car over with the ill-fated generator in November.)
While in the UK we have been fitting a new kitchen into the small house which we have as our pied à terre in the north of England close to the home where Louise's mother lives. So no rest for the wicked there then!
During the intervening weeks it became apparent that the much loved Citroen ZX was using more and more water in the radiator with no visible signs of a leak. This usually signifies the demise of the cylinder head gasket and it’s unpredictable as to when it might fail completely. To repair would be an expensive job at the best of times, so with much regret and 1000 miles short of a quarter of a million miles on the clock, a new car had to be found.
After several weeks an S reg Citroen Xantia with only 98,000 miles on the clock seemed the best bet (a car now excess to the requirements of a friend of ours). We knew it had a couple of problems but reckoned it would do the job.
So we loaded it up with four bottles of gas, seven 5-litre tins of paint, a higher rated inverter (which Alex had acquired from his erstwhile place of work), a battery and spare parts for the genny, a free-sat dish and receiver (we just have to be able to listen to Radio 4 somehow, we've missed it so much) and goodness knows how much other clobber - 350 kilos in all we estimated, and set off back to Ghent.
The water leak in the heater matrix in the Xantia is temporarily fixed with some radiator seal-it, but the clutch which Alex thought might be on its last legs did indeed start to slip with the extra load it was being asked to pull, so very careful acceleration in low gears became the order of the journey.
We arrived in Ghent in good time though, and in daylight, offloaded all the paraphernalia and parked up in our favourite free spot, walking back to Riccall as dusk fell.
We had been told that there had been a few days of hard frost while we had been away but thought little of it, until Alex turned on the water pump. The tap in the kitchen sink was destroyed, as was the one in the wheelhouse!
It was a similar story with the central heating: three radiators had very small leaks where the riveting had been disturbed by the ice forming in the core.
We fixed the taps one way or another and put plastic containers under the radiators to catch the drips and the next day drove off to the DIY shop for more radiator seal and some antifreeze! This has been added to the central heating system and, fingers crossed, the leaks have pretty well dried up.
We did set the central heating to come on for half an hour per night - 3 in the morning actually, as the coldest time - as a precaution, but it was obviously not enough. And we switched off the water pump as a precaution which we always do summer or winter when leaving the boat for any length of time. Pity we hadn't also opened all the taps!
The trouble is, we guess, that we have become complacent about frost. not having had any of any significance for so long in the UK. To be fair to us though, other boats moored here have had similar problems as even the Belgians have not had such prolonged cold weather for years.
But it’s another lesson learned!
Apart from fixing the new problems which occurred while we were away, Alex is now setting about the task of re-building the generator with the spare bits picked up from Southampton and other places on our diversionary route back here.
Louise’s main task while Alex is thus engaged is to source food at something less than the amazingly ridiculous prices which now pertain here. And if anyone thinks this is being somewhat paranoid, just imagine the exchange rate at rather less than parity (99.7p per €), cauliflowers at €2.80 each, mince at €4 per pound and chicken at €7 per pound! This search has become rather important to us both!
Back to the UK in a fortnight for three weeks or so before we set off at the end of March for the next cruising season. Next winter may find us moored in the south of France with luck, and maybe less chance of frozen pipes!!
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