A September Weekend On Challenge

This weekend was a real mixed bag of weather. On Saturday we had glorious sunshine, which was followed by torrential downpours on Sunday.

With the sun shining on Saturday it wasn’t long before the river came alive with rowers and canoeists. Now then, we have a written rule on the waterways that you keep to the right when passing other boats. That’s not always possible when you are sculling or rowing backwards, so these guys normally stick to the middle of the river. Unfortunately this can lean to near misses when you go round a bend and the river is full of canoeists straddling the whole river.

 

More of a problem can be inconsiderate boater who not only speed down the centre of the river, but go round bends without tooting their hooter. As you can see in the photo this can lead to disasters whereby a team of scullers were cut in half.

 

Fortunately nobody was injured on this occasion, even though the narrowboat responsible failed to stop and offer assistance to the crew in the water. We understand the narrowboat owner was tracked down several days later. We hope they throw the book at him!

 

As Sunday dawned and the heavens opened up the temperature started to fall. One of our projects last year was to install central heating in the boat. This was quickly switched on to warm up the boat.

 

As we couldn't work outside we decided to disconnect the Webasto heater that had been left in situe. This heater has been a right pain in the neck since we took over the boat 4 years ago. The unit was purchased new to replace an old Eberspächer heater. We could never get the Webasto to fire up, so our resident Mr Fix-It concluded that the pump was faulty. Now everything apart from the starter batteries is 24v on Challenge. Needless to say we bought a 24v pump for the unit but even this wouldn't work.

 

As I'm renowned for thinking outside of the box I sat there with the old pump and the instruction book in my hands just contemplating the problem. I then asked if anybody had run a test on the pump to see if it really was faulty? A few blank stares later I jury rigged the pump to a 12v battery and it sprang into life. I then asked Mr Fixit (who has the smallest head) to get his head in the bilges with a torch and check the voltage on the back of the Webasto. Yeah you've guessed it, this was 12v also and the whole unit was wired into a 24v system! Once we pulled in a 12v supply and put back the 12v pump the whole system fired up and blew hot air around the boat.

 

I won't talk about the Webasto being undersized for a 70' boat as that's a story for another day. All you need to know is that our new gas fired heating works a treat and we are ready for anything winter wants to throw at us.