Anodes and painting

Catching up with photos ... Ollie completed the blacking yesterday ...

... and today he welded on four new sacrificial anodes. I was asked if I wanted slim anodes half-way along the sides as well, but I decided against it. Yes, they would give better protection against galvanic corrosion, but they could potentially catch on an obstruction. I measured the width of the base plate as 79" or 6' 7"; the base plate protrudes from the hull sides by half an inch each side. The slim anodes are only one inch thick so the overall effect would be to increase the width at the bottom to 6' 8", so not enough to cause a problem at any lock ... but we tend to be cruising for six months of the year and the rest of the time the boat is tied up with no other boats on shoreline within the vicinity. Our isolation transformer on board provides the most effective galvanic protection when we connect up to a shoreline.

I spent the whole day preparing and painting the gunwales with some Hempel Multicoat semi-gloss black paint I bought from the marina. I was advised to thin it, which I did, but it dried almost as soon as I brushed it on. Thinking about it now, perhaps I used the wrong solvent. I had a bottle of cellulose thinners which I used, but should I have thinned with white spirit? Too late now. Annoyingly, muck from pressure washing of a neighbouring boat blew onto us and I had to wash down the gunwales and elsewhere a second time before painting.

Friends Paul and Kim from Somang came to our temporarily land-based boat for tea; it started to rain lightly as they were leaving. Perhaps it will wash off some of the muck from the boat. 

One job for tomorrow can be seen from the top photo: repainting the red tunnel band.

While the red paint is out I'll have a go at redoing the bow flashes. I think masking tape will help.

Blacking begins at North Kilworth Marina

On Tuesday 3rd May we set off for North Kilworth Marina for the booked blacking. We had been given the time of 1045 but I wanted to be early, so we left our countryside mooring two miles away at 0915. I had a vague recollection that the workshops area was on the north side of the marina close to the canal so, once I had turned left into the marina entrance, I navigated my way to the right place with the help of Waterway Routes.

We were initially directed to the bay beside the lifting bay as a boat had to be taken out of the water for a hull survey.

As we waited we had a good view of the surveyor making his measurements (presumably of hull thickness) and chalking his results on the boat. But what do the marks mean?

With Jubilee raised but still mostly over the water Ollie pressure washed the hull. Here's before and after in one shot.

When the boat needed to be moved more, Ollie drove the crane while Paul positioned the blocks onto which Jubilee was to be lowered.

Yesterday (Wednesday) was showery; Jan and I spent most of it in the Moorers' Lounge while Ollie finished pressure washing. He managed to black the underneath too. 

The facilities here at North Kilworth Marina are excellent. The Moorers' Lounge is under-floor heated and has leather settees and tables and chairs. There is a fully-kitted out kitchen with free tea and coffee (although the milk is long life), spotless loos and showers. We chatted to a couple who had had their boat in the marina for a year and were planning to use it more. 

On the hardstanding we talked to a young couple called Sam and Alice who had just blacked their boat, Harwood. They were very friendly and "lent" us some Ferrozinc rust treatment. It's a bit like Fertan, apparently, but you can apply it to dry metal and paint it directly. I made a start on attacking some of the rusty bits on our bow and gunwales.

Winding paddles the right way first time

Yesterday we were the last in a procession of boats ascending the Audlem flight: I had to turn nearly every lock. Today we somehow found ourselves following a boat up the last two Audlem locks and the Adderley flight. We did, at least, meet three or four boats.

At one of the locks the top gate foot board had a piece of super-grippy pontoon-type covering rather than the usual strip of sandpaper.

 

How many locks have I worked in my life so far? Hundreds. How many paddles have I raised? Probably thousands. But it is only today, 10th May 2021, that I have realised that I can turn the paddle spindle the right way first time. How, you ask? By turning towards the pivot point of the pawl. It works on this type of paddle gear, at least, and I venture to suggest that it must work on every type with a pawl and ratchet.

In the case of the paddle gear below, winding anticlockwise raises the paddle.
 

We came through two or three heavy showers as we made our way back to Market Drayton and the end of this four-week trip. This rain cloud had just passed over.

Back at the mooring I changed the engine oil and filter. I also topped up the Webasto heating header tank and bled the radiators. The header tank took about three pints of antifreeze mixture. Where has all the water gone? (We hardly ever use the Webasto, the prime reason being that it doesn't fire up unless the engine is running to supply the heavy initial load.)

Broken stern fender, stiff Morse control, lovely Caldon Canal

It has been several years since we've been on the Caldon Canal; now we're enjoying this lovely waterway with lots of interesting features. First up was Etruria Staircase locks.

In the next lock, Planet Lock, Jan watched as the stern fender nudged the bottom gates as the lock filled. She continued to watch as the fender slipped to one side. Oops.

The left-hand chain has become detached from the fender - I suspect a shackle has failed. We tied up in Hanley Park and I made a repair of sorts, threading the chain through a loop of the ropework of the fender. I wonder how long it will last.

While we were stopped I had a go at freeing off the Morse control lever which had become very stiff. The last time the control got stiff was just before the gear control cable broke last year. I disconnected that cable from the Morse lever and pulled and pushed the inner. It felt a bit stiff, but not hugely so. With the cable disconnected I operated the Morse lever, which still felt a bit stiff, but not as stiff as before. I tried to dribble some oil down where the inner rod emerges from the outer sheath, but I don't know if this will make any difference. The Morse lever itself looks a bit like it's coming apart, so I think this is the real problem. With the gear cable reconnected it all felt much like it did before, i.e. too stiff.

Those cables look a mess, don't they? Some of that is how it was when I bought the boat but some is down to me!

Speaking of cables, not far above Hanley Park was this canalside box disgorging its innards.  I have noticed a few of these anonymous boxes - do you know what they do?
 

Of the three lift bridges encountered so far two - Ivy House Lift Bridge and this one at Norton Green - are electro-hydraulic operated by BW key; the third is manual hydraulic operated by (large-eye) windlass.

Interestingly, the control panel for this Norton Green lift bridge is user-friendly, being on the towpath side.
 

We tied up below Stockton Brook Locks and went for a walk before tea. Crossing the middle of the flight is an abandoned railway line. This is complete with concrete sleepers and rails. There are a few trees to clear before trains can run again.

From the urban surroundings of Etruria it's not far to the rural scene of lambs in the evening sunshine.

Rust affecting wood; crinkle-cut logs; normal trolley service resumes

Over the last few years Jubilee's wooden front doors have become increasingly difficult to open or shut. The threshold had bowed up in the middle, catching the undersides of both doors. I tried sanding the undersides of the doors to no avail. It was a problem we lived with, and one which more or less disappeared in the summer months. I assumed this was because the doors dried out and shrank in the warmer weather, combining with the steelwork of the boat expanding.

On Monday I found the root of the problem.  Our friends Chris and Di joined us for a (socially distanced, outside) coffee and I mentioned that I should have asked him to bring a chisel.  As we talked Chris pulled off the (loose) horizontal architrave immediately under the threshold.  The photo shows the bowed threshold with the architrave removed.
 

I could then see what was going on. The threshold sat on two wooden packing pieces lifting it off a lip of steelwork. The steel had rusted; the rust had expanded and pushed up the packing and, with it, the threshold. In the middle of the picture below is what's left of one of the packing pieces after I dug most of it away. You can see an extra-thick area of rust under it.

With the packing gone the doors work properly! I have inserted a thinner piece of packing; I will have to try to treat the rust to stop it happening again.

After lunch we continued south along the Shroppie to Brewood.  On the way from Wheaton Aston were several areas where trees had been cut down, leaving logs for collection.  They were mostly too big for us (with no chain saw on board) but I did find a few smaller pieces.
 

These I sawed up with a bow saw when we'd tied up at Brewood. The cut faces display a phenomenon I'd noticed before: a series of ridges at 90 degrees to the direction of cut.

Comparing the pitch of the ridges with that of the saw shows that there is a correspondence. I think what's happening is that the teeth set up a sort of resonance as I draw the saw to and fro.

We walked round Brewood before returning to the boat for tea, which was part two of the previous day's takeaway.

On Tuesday 20th April we continued our journey.  After leaving Brewood we saw another sort of brood - of ducklings.
 

As we approached Pendeford we saw that some things are returning to normal: the dumping of supermarket trollies in the cut.

We stopped at Bridge 2 to walk to Morrisons. Just over the bridge, by a children's play area, was a patch of snake's head fritillaries growing out of the grass.

With our supplies back on board we passed through the stop lock and turned left at Autherley Junction onto the Staffs and Worcs Canal. We tied up at Coven Heath, out of earshot of the M54. It was nice to hear one or two trains, though.

I'm almost up to date with this blog now.  Tomorrow I shall write about a close encounter with Nev, Rachel and Percy.

(Updated to correct a typo)

Diesel filter, batteries and boating at last

It seems I just got out of the habit of blogging. Well, here's the first of what I hope will be a restart, coinciding with the relaxation of lockdown (to the extent that we are allowed to stay overnight, self-catering, away from home) and BOATING! The first job was to look through the log to see when I last changed the fuel filter. Oops: it was 2.5 years ago! This is what the first filter looked like when I removed it.

I'd say it had been doing its job. I replaced that and the spin-on filter. The engine oil and filter had not many hours on the clock, so that was OK. We set off on Tuesday 13th April from our new mooring at Market Drayton heading north. We stopped for the night just above Adderley Top Lock having done all of threee miles. We were in no hurry. During the night the fridge struggled. A flashing red light indicated it wasn't happy with the battery voltage; when I saw that it had dropped to about 11V neither was I. The current (pun intended) set was six years old so time for a replacement. I ordered four 110Ah leisure batteries from Advanced Battery Supplies at 1155 on Wednesday; they were delivered at 0845 on Thursday which was pretty good going. These are the old batteries in situ ...

... and here are the new ones installed exactly the same way.

There's always a big flash when I reconnect the chunky inverter positive lead; I wasn't expecting the flash when I reinserted the fuse to reconnect the solar panels. I had taken the precaution of covering up the solar panels, so why the flash? Now we could set off again, this time southbound to meander round the Four Counties Ring with a trip up the Caldon Canal thrown in. That's the plan, anyway. It felt good to be boating again. This is Bridge 61 on the Shroppie.

We stopped at Tyrley Top. THe next morning the fridge was happy and so was I. The landslips at Woodseaves Cutting look worse every time we pass. Here the towpath is blocked to all but the most agile.

The caravan site at Goldstone Wharf looked busy.

I shall try to catch up by covering two or three days at a time - then it will be situation normal. Ha ha.

Replacing gearbox control cable after it broke (and suffering another breakdown)

At Brinklow CRT is getting round the landslip problem by literally getting round it. A temporary floating walkway has been constructed over the edge of the canal bypassing a not that huge pile of rock and earth on the towpath.

Everything was going swimmingly for us until Sutton Stop. As we entered the stop lock I suddenly found that I could not disengage astern gear. All I could do was kill the engine. We descended the lock and I pulled the boat out onto the lock landing on the right, where we would be out of the way. The Morse control lever felt most peculiar; it didn't take long for me to diagnose a broken cable. The photo below shows a short length of inner cable (running bottom left to centre), still connected to the gearbox lever on the left, and the outer cable (on the right) now hanging free.

Within three miles of where we were now stranded live two sets of friends. The first were on holiday in Suffolk. The second had gone to Baddesley Clinton, fortunately not by boat. Stephen drove back while we had lunch, then took me to Springwood Haven where I bought a replacement cable (having removed the old one and measured its length). Back at the boat I fitted the cable. It was two inches shorter than the original, but there was plenty of slack so that was not a problem.

I had not done this before, so I discovered that what holds the outer in position at each end is a toroidal channel in the metal part next to the black plastic sheathed flexible part. This channel at the gearbox end is held by a brass clip secured by two bolts, lock washers and nuts. The clip has a protruding ridge which engages in the channel. At the Morse control end the channel is held in position by a small brass U-shaped pin. The protruding parts of the U are of unequal lengths. This pin goes through holes in the hard plastic "socket"; the longer part of the pin is bent over to stop it falling out.

The photo below shows the back of the Morse control; the two thick black cables are the throttle (going into the red housing) and the gearbox (black). The U-pins are inserted from the left in both cases; I have already removed the gearbox cable one.

At the gearbox end the inner cable screws into a brass piece which pokes through a hole in the lever and is prevented from falling out by a split pin. The photo shows me inserting this split pin.

Here is the gearbox end of the cable all fitted. The brass clip with its détente can be seen to the left.

I am very grateful to Stephen for his advice, especially on measuring the distance the inner extends from the outer at each end on the old cable, and making sure the new cable's measurements are the same. I did this and found everything worked perfectly when I started up again.

Interestingly - and could this be the cause of the failure? - the cable shows it has partially melted where it ran against the (fibreglass bandaged) exhaust. The new cable presses against the exhaust in the same way and cannot be rerouted as it is close to the gearbox clamp. I need to insert a thin piece of something heat resistant to protect it. Ideas, anyone?

We thought that was the end of the excitement for the day but, just an hour later, the engine began losing power. Yes, we had run out of diesel! We always have a full jerry can on board so in went 20 litres to get us out of trouble. We had stopped by a long stretch of piling just south of Marston Junction. Very handy again.

Before this emergency top-up (and I know, the jerry can is now empty) I sucked out a lot of crud and water from the bottom of the tank. It separates from the diesel immediately in the jam jars I put it in; I'll provide a photo later.

Masking up on boats

As predicted, we were lowered back into the water this morning, having been out for less than 24 hours. When I went to pay it took a long time for the office staff to work out the bill, which had gone up a whopping 17% since two years ago.

I was going to clean the drips of bitumastic off the prop before it got wet, but I forgot, managing to snap this photo as the boat was being moved.

I don't suppose it will affect things too much before it wears off.

As I was reversing out of the lifting dock Gwendoline May came out of the marina. This boat is used for helmsman training. It looked very incongruous seeing the party on the back all wearing masks.

That's all of us in just three days, though (shops, not boats, I'm glad to say, but I'm not looking forward to it).

We were very quickly up Foxton Locks, arriving at the top at 1100 - coffee time. We carried on without stopping, tying up at Bridge 37 to rendezvous with Ally, Josiah and Micah who drove to see us.

Blacking

Today was B-Day: blacking day. The first - and slightly scary - step is to lift the boat out of the water.

Next, Dean pressure washes off the crud from being in the water for two and a third years.

The conditions were perfect for drying, so the first coat of the bitumastic blacking went on very soon.

We went for a walk across the fields to Gumley, where we ate our sandwiches, and then to Foxton, where we saw the gongoozlers crowding towards the top of the flight watching a boat make its ascent. The locks were otherwise very quiet, with no boats waiting at either end.

We walked into the village where we saw that the church was open for private prayer, so we went in. It was the first time we'd been into a church building since the start of lockdown in March. Continuing down Swingbridge Lane, over the canal, and through to the other side of the village, we took the footpath across the fields back to Debdale Wharf. Here the second coat was already being applied.

After tea I repainted the red tunnel band and treated some of the rust on the gunnels with Fertan. Painting these will have to wait until we're afloat again as I reckon we'll be put back in the water in the morning.

Sealing the mushroom vent

I'm sure there's more weed in the canals now than in previous Julys. Some of it gets round our prop. And that will be because there have been far fewer boats moving around to keep the growth down. The extra weed helps to clarify the water: I can actually see the blades and weed wrapped round the prop shaft when I lift the weed hatch - sometimes fish too.

We moved the five miles or so to Market Harborough this morning. After shopping - including a trip to Screwfix for me - I sealed down the mushroom base with Sika Sikaflex EBT+. I hope it will allow me to remove the base in the future should that be necessary.

This is the scene after I treated the rust and painted with Hammerite, before applying the sealant.

After watching the F1 qualifying highlights we went for another walk into the town, going along the towpath to the alleyway to a residential street first.

I have never seen the permanent moorings empty before. Where has everybody gone?

Tomorrow we return to Debdale Wharf ready for blacking (take two).