Carried Away By A Moonlight Shadow...

[YnysMon]

Monday 10th February

It was still pretty windy this morning. Unlike yesterday evening, the water levels were pretty high, with high tide not due until lunch time. The forecast was for a sunny morning and rainy afternoon, so we set off shortly after 9am, making our way to the north coast, but stopping off initially at Walsingham. Little Walsingham is quite quaint.

The priority was coffee and cake, which we had in the Norton’s Café in the Anglican Shrine. Very nice cakes they had too. Graham had something called Norfolk shortcake, which seemed to be a cross between a shortcake and a scone. I had lemon cake. We had a look around the shine. It was very ‘high church’, unless you were paying attention you would think it was a Catholic church. I had also wanted to see around the grounds of the ruined Abbey, as I’d read that they have a good show of snowdrops this time of the year. However, it was now after 11am, it was £5.50 entry per person and we still hadn’t yet taken Seren for a walk. We decided to make our way to Wells-next-the-Sea instead.

Once we’d found a parking spot in Wells we walked from the harbour along the dyke that leads to the beach.

It was a lovely walk but, as Graham had only paid for two hours parking, we couldn’t stay long at the beach once we got there. I loved the beach huts, especially the variety of designs and colours.

This one was particularly lovely.

Seren enjoyed herself.

As the seafood restaurant that we had fancied visiting in Wells was shut on Mondays, we thought of going to Cromer for lunch instead. That didn’t quite work out either, as we found the coast road to Cromer was closed half way through Stiffkey, so we had to turn around (with difficulty). We had just passed a pub anyway, The Red Lion, so we had our lunch there instead: Graham had a very nice fish and chips with minty mushy peas and I had a crab salad.

The sky was looking pretty gloomy when we left the pub, so we just drove back to the boat. Just as well as it rained most of the rest of the afternoon. The water level was even higher when we got back to the boat, and it was quite a step up to get on board.

Shortly before sunset the sky turned really black, we had some thunder and then a really heavy hail storm. The ‘scum’ on the water in the picture below is hail.

It felt a lot colder this evening, I hadn’t needed a hot water bottle last night, but did this night. It’s cosy in the cabin with thick duvet, water bottle and dimplex heater.

[SwanR]

Thanks for sharing your photos Helen. Glad to hear you're keeping warm on board. :)

[YnysMon]

We are warm this evening...despite continuing gusts of wind, low temperatures and a problem with the heating. In fact, the Webasto unit is not currently on board as we sent an email this morning reporting that it was cutting out due to overheating. Very impressed how quickly Brooms engineers arrived, literally with minutes of BCBM forwarding my email.
Luckily, Graham had checked out Aldi’s deals for this week and knew they included various heaters. We picked up a fan heater for £9.99 at their Gt Yarmouth store. They also had very reasonably priced convector heaters and oil filled radiators. 

[YnysMon]

Oh, I should have mentioned that Brooms did offer to lend us some heaters. We just though it a good idea to take advantage of the Aldi offer.

[SPEEDTRIPLE]

1 hour ago, YnysMon said:

  They also had very reasonably priced convector heaters and oil filled radiators. 

We took a couple of them up on Lightning about 3 years back, as we kept drawing November for our autumn week. Yes they are pretty good, but they hammer the nuts out of the leccy supply., so if we were to stay in the yard for the week with them on all the time, we`d end up owing the syndicate about £20 in leccy.

Glad you`re enjoying your week despite the weather Helen, did Merv and Pauling take Lightning out in the end?.

[ranworthbreeze]

12 hours ago, YnysMon said:

We are warm this evening...despite continuing gusts of wind, low temperatures and a problem with the heating. In fact, the Webasto unit is not currently on board as we sent an email this morning reporting that it was cutting out due to overheating. Very impressed how quickly Brooms engineers arrived, literally with minutes of BCBM forwarding my email.
Luckily, Graham had checked out Aldi’s deals for this week and knew they included various heaters. We picked up a fan heater for £9.99 at their Gt Yarmouth store. They also had very reasonably priced convector heaters and oil filled radiators. 

Hello Helen,

 

We have a couple of fan heaters aboard Ranworth Breeze also a small oil filled radiator that we use overnight in the galley for keeping the boat aired during the out of season weeks. 

A fleece on top of the bedding keeps the condensation at bay and this can be dried during the day.

Regards

Alan

[NorfolkNog]

15 hours ago, YnysMon said:

problem with the heating

Get Fireman Sam on the case!!! 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, NorfolkNog said:

Get Fireman Sam on the case!!! 

It's all being dealt with Sir 

[Tempest]

45 minutes ago, Jayfire said:

It's all being dealt with Sir 

Get it sorted before we take her out....

😉

Please!

🙏🙏

[SueH]

2 hours ago, Jayfire said:

It's all being dealt with Sir 

It seems to me that this heating just is not up to the job.  Was problematic for most of the time we owned our shares.  We always had a fan heater and extra 'throws' we took on board with us.

[Guest]

It's just the motor has failed Sue after (so I'm told) 4500 hours of use, it's now with the dealer and will hopefully be back on the boat shortly ready for Helen to use again this week.

Unfortunately sometimes these things do go wrong on every boat, but get sorted just as soon as possible 

[YnysMon]

Poor heater...that’s some time spent heating people!

Well, we’ve been to Loddon and back today. Its still pretty breezy though. Coming back against the wind was interesting, especially the bit past Cantley which was more like a choppy Breydon crossing than anything. Graham is currently occupied - cleaning all the spray off the windows.

[SwanR]

Glad to read that you managed a cruise today Helen. It's definitely been a better day ... and finally the daylight hours do seem to be increasing little by little.

[Broads01]

I imagine heating systems on syndicate boats get a ton of use given the number of weeks the boats are occupied. Does there therefore tend to be a higher risk of heating failure or can the risk be mitigated?

[D46]

Basically it equates to 5 hrs for 365 days for just under 2 1/2 yrs ,  not too bad really for a diesel heater many others breakdown much more often 

[YnysMon]

Tuesday 11th February

We didn’t rush away this morning. We were experiencing problems with the heating. It had suddenly cut out a couple of times leaving a strong diesel smell, and the flashing indicator suggested it was overheating. I emailed BCBM to ask about reporting it, within a minute my email had been forwarded to Brooms, and in another 5 minutes a couple of engineers turned up. That was quick!

They took the heating unit out (I’ve now realised that one of the pre-requisites for being a boat engineer is not to suffer from claustrophobia) and said they would take it to the dealers to get it fixed, and hopefully would be able to reinstall it later in the day.

Graham and I took ourselves and Seren off to Caister-on-Sea (we seem to have settled on Caister as our favourite place to walk Seren). We had a lovely walk, but the wind was bitterly cold.

Anyone know what sort of vessel this is?

I liked the indications that Caister still has a small fishing industry.

We had spotted a bakery with tea rooms as we had passed through Caister, so popped in there after our walk. Disappointed to find that they had closed the tea rooms, as they had scaled up their ‘commercial work’. Well it’s a shame they couldn’t have taken the sign down, or painted over the ‘tea rooms’ bit! We drove down the road to Tesco’s and picked up sandwiches there instead, as it was getting on for 2pm.

Before we set off back to the boat, I checked out where the nearest Aldi was, as Graham recalled seeing fan heaters in their offers for this week. It turned out there was one in Gt Yarmouth, just on our route home, so that was handy, and the heater was only £9.95, so we have some ‘insurance’ this evening in case we don’t get our heater back on the boat.

When we got back an engineer was already on board re-installing the heating unit. When he had done so he did a test run. Initially it was fine, but then started making a really peculiar noise and packed up again, again with a diesel smell. So, it ended up being taken away again to the dealers. Oh well. Hopefully it will be back and up and running in time for Jay’s stint on the boat next week. In the meantime, our little fan heater worked really well.

We had sausage, mash and veg this evening with instant gravy – an easy option. There wasn’t much on telly to interest us, so we spent a quiet night reading. I’m currently reading Lindsey Davies’ ‘The Ides of April’, crime fiction set in ancient Rome.

By the way, when I was writing up Sunday’s blog, I forgot to mention something that made us laugh. As we were leaving the Surlingham Ferry I put on the Satnav to guide us back to Brundall. ‘Shirley’ as usual told us to go to the highlighted route – which was the lane the other side of the river. LOL.

[YnysMon]

Wednesday 12th February

A special day today. 42 years since Graham and I started dating (we were still in school 42 years ago). Somehow, this anniversary always seems more significant than our wedding anniversary, maybe because it was over six years before we got married (we went to different Uni’s, so it wasn’t really feasible to get married before that).

Anyhow…back to the Broads. The weather forecast for today appeared to be promising the best of the whole week, so we were keen to take the opportunity to cruise somewhere. (Well I was anyway, Graham was quite happy reading his book – or should I say stack of books. The stack has come in handy this week preventing too many drafts through the vent at the back of the sliding roof, whilst still allowing some ventilation.)

On the other hand, we really needed to get back to our home-mooring for late afternoon, either to get the heater re-installed, or to rely on the shore power provided with the mooring so that we could run the fan heater this evening.

As I mentioned above, we ended up going to Loddon. Mainly because we needed to top up our water. Well, that was the excuse. We both love the journey up the Chet.

The trouble with starting off early is having the sun's glare. We had a clear sky.

The stretch between the two dykes leading to Rockland Broad must be good for fishing. There were four herons all in fairly close proximity.

Seren started to whine before we got to Chet Mouth, and I had an attempt at mooring at Hardley Cross so that we could let her off the boat. However, the wind had picked up again and was blowing us off the mooring, so I aborted that and just carried on until we moored at Loddon Staithe – the only boat there. We spotted an otter along the stretch near Hardley Flood.

Loddon Staithe.

We put some credit on the lekky point, just so we could use our fan heater (a lucky someone will have found over 60p credit after us) and Graham took Seren out for a walk whilst I started to cook a brunch using the Suffolk bacon that we had picked up at the La Hogue Farm Shop. The thickest rashers I’ve seen for a long time.

We set off back down the Chet before 1pm. It was such a lovely sunny day, lighting up the reeds with a golden colour. I really appreciate being able to see the Broads in the different seasons. Today was (naturally) very quiet. We saw no other boats on the river until we were approaching Pye’s Mill, where a sailey under power passed us. He passed us again as we were returning down the Chet.

Hardley Flood was pretty full.

Even the Chet was choppy.

Back on the Yare we only passed two other vessels.

We were travelling against the wind most of the way back and it was mostly very choppy, especially along the Cantley stretch where we were having a lot of spray thrown up onto the windscreen.

Spray on the windscreen..

Just as choppy near the pub...

Flocks of birds near Cantley...

Seren relaxed a bit on our journey back.

Got back around 3pm. The tide was pretty high again.

Had another quiet evening. I called the Broom’s office to tell them we were back on our mooring, but there was no further news about the heating unit. I went to bed really early this evening. Just after 8pm my eyes were dropping, and I’m pretty sure that I was asleep by 8.30. Shame, I missed The Great Pottery Throw Down programme that’s showing on More4 currently.

[YnysMon]

Well, the heater unit is back in place and seems to be running more smoothly.

[YnysMon]

And! The Sun has come out. Yippee!

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, YnysMon said:

Well, the heater unit is back in place and seems to be running more smoothly.

Glad it has hopefully been sorted for you Helen and you enjoy the end of your holiday 

[YnysMon]

Heater seems to be working fine (cross fingers). Much quieter too.
Currently moored at Whitlingham cooking brunch whilst Graham and Seren are out walking.
I notice the electric post that was out of action has been fixed, and had 60p credit on it.


Sent from the Norfolk Broads Network mobile app

[YnysMon]

Oh, and I got a message from the guy who was on MS last week. As I suspected he had forgotten that he needed to book a valet if he didn't want to clean the boat himself. So all good.


Sent from the Norfolk Broads Network mobile app

[vanessan]

Helen - the Caister picture looks interesting for dog walking, is it somewhere that’s safe for off-lead walks? I’m sure we have been there in recent years but for the life of me I can’t remember it!

[SwanR]

Love your write up Helen and the photos. Not sure if the boat you asked about was the CEFAS Endeavour that moors at Lowestoft. It’s a fisheries research vessel. You can check it out on Google. 

[YnysMon]

Thanks Jean. Graham though it might be something to do with fishing.

Vanessan, yes Caister is generally safe for dog walks. We daren’t allow Seren off the lead anywhere near cars, but once we are out of sight of the Caister car park she’s fine, either on the beach or the dunes to the south of the car park. However, you do need to check whether the lifeboat is out, as they use large tractor type vehicles to launch both lifeboats. I took some pictures of those in November - see a few pages back on this thread.

Helen