Just a quick weekend trip to check all is OK and charge the batteries.

Arrived about 6 o’clock last night to find the boat a bit cold and damp and the batteries almost flat. Tried to put the Eberspacher central heating on but it wouldn’t start. I lit the fire, had a meal and went to bed, deciding to look ant the heating in the morning.

We cruised down to Stourport, winded in the basin then back to near the old railway bridge by the former transhipment basin.

In the afternoon we decided to go for a walk along the disused railway track to Hartlebury Common. Getting there was OK, but things on the ground aren’t exactly as shown on the OS map, so we got a bit lost on the way back!

When I checked the Eberspacher it worked perfectly. I checked the manual and it said that it wont work below 10 volts, so I assume that the flat battery was the problem. This is a little worrying as we leave it on ‘frost stat’ setting at this time of the year, and it looks like it was the heater itself that had run the battery down, making the frost protection less than reliable.