First boating of 2019 and replacing an iPhone battery

Yes, after a break of many months we are back on board Jubilee. Hooray! We drove to Fazeley yesterday, emptied the Volvo into the boat and prepared for a three week trip. I managed to remember all the things I'd switched off or closed, so I opened the gate valve from the domestic water tank, opened the diesel valve, switched on the gas, closed the water taps and switched on the water pump. Pleasingly, everything seemed to come back to life in the manner intended. The engine fired up first go too.

This morning we reversed to Fazeley Junction and set off for Glascote. David L came with us to help us through the locks before cycling to Tamworth Market.

Half an hour later (Amington?) we passed a house we hadn't seen before.

Bill and Ben seem to have had an update.

A plaque gave details of a royal nurse maid we hadn't heard of: Charlotte Bill "Lala".

We stopped for lunch at Polesworth and had a phone call from David to say that a package had arrived for me. This was the replacement battery for my iPhone which had almost died. I cycled back to Fazeley, brought it back to the boat and immediately got to work.

I was only just in time. The phone was being forced apart by the old battery, which was expanding as it died. I wasn't in time to stop the case splitting.

I hadn't started opening it in these two photos: this is the phone gently exploding all by itself.

The replacement battery came with the tools for undoing four tiny screws. The first two were of the "pentalobe" type with, as the name suggests, five lobes, which your common or garden pozidrive wouldn't come anywhere near.

Those screws were small, but the two I had to unscrew next were the most microscopic I had encountered. The divisions on my tape measure are millimetres. I hadn't known the tape measure was magnetic! The head is not much more than 1mm across; the length was about 1mm.

Here are the old and new batteries together. The side view shows how the dead battery is expanding.

I am very pleased to report that I managed to get it all back together again and, so far, it seems to be working. Thanks eBay. All for less than a fiver including tools and delivery.

Back to the boating. We thought about stopping half way up the Atherstone flight but decided to crack on and finish the locks.

It's good to be on board again - tomorrow we're aiming for Stretton Stop on the Oxford Canal. Braunston by Thursday, ready for the Boaters' Christian Fellowship Spring Conference on Saturday.