Narrowboat Just Heaven

We arrived about four o’clock yesterday and I immediately set about refitting the water tank.

I climbed down into the tank void to clean it out and realised that I’m getting too old for that sort of thing. At one point I got to the stage where I wasnt quite sure how I was going to get back out again!

Eventually it was all cleaned out and I put the repaired liner back in. It was quite difficult to get it to fit snugly into the corners and so I thought that filling it with water would help to push it out to the right position. That partially helped. It filled up OK, and we now have flowing water again, however it’s not in there exactly central and that is putting a bit of a strain on the plastic plumbing. Next time the tank gets near to empty I’m going to try and move it a bit.

I spent this morning doing a few electrcal jobs on board, fitting some LED lamps in place of incandescent ones to reduce the battery load and fitting a 12v socket in the bedroom so that we can have some music in there via our radio/ipod player.

In the afternoon we went on a lovely walk around Bewdley and Ribbesford and back along the riverside path. It was ideal walking weather warm but not hot.

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Yesterday I put the old tank liner in the skip, we tidied up a bit and went home.

Today I contacted various companies about a replacement liner and found that Duratank had made the original and were prepared to attempt a repair. So this afternoon we dashed back up the M5 to retrieve it from the skip before the skip was emptied!

We got it OK, got home, packed it all up and I’ll send it off by courier tomorrow to Duratank.

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Off to Netto before breakfast to get some bread (and wine and other stuff we didn’t intend to buy) and then got stuck into today’s tasks.

Heddi did lots of painting. The bow area in particular now looks much smarter.

I tried to drill out the eight screws holding down the inspection hatch into the fresh water tank. Water has been leaking from here into the space behind the step where the bow thruster tube is. I had previously tried to remove the screws but they wouldnt budge, so I decided that the only option was to drill them out and re-tap them. The screw heads where flush level and took an allen key, so I drilled down through the hexagonal hole where the allen key fitted. I guessed that they might be about 5mm screws so started with a 4mm drill. It soon became clear that the drills I had weren’t going to be man enough for the job. I walked over to B&Q and bought some new drills. After much effort I managed to remove three of the eight screws, but by now even the new drills I had just bought were blunt! Back to B&Q for more drills a 7mm and an 8mm. With these and much more effort I evenutally got the inpection hatch up. It had taken nearly four hours!

Inside was a butyl liner like a large bag, with three connections one for filling, and air vent and the outlet. It was difficult to check it out while still down in the hole, but I could see quite a bit of water outside the bag. We put a rope through some eyelets and heaved it out. It soon became clear that there was a tear or split on one of the seams near a corner. This must be the cause of the leak. Because of it’s position it was clear that we wouldn’t be able to repair the leak with a patch. So it would mean replacing the whole liner, in that case it wasnt worth putting the old one back in and we decided to manage the rest of the weekend without running water.

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Not going anywhere this weekend, we have decided to spend some time doing jobs on board. We didn’t do much today though. After a trip up the motorway in lovely bright sunshine we arrived about six o’clock. We unloaded, cooked a meal and played with our new clock radio/ipod docking thing that we bought from Aldi for the bedroom. The previous clock couldn’t be seen in the dark and the radio was a windup one. After you have got out of bed for the third time to wind it up it tends to lose it’s ability to send you off to sleep !

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