Well – Yes and no.
There has been a lot going on at home in the last few months ranging from the family all seeming to go house moving mad through to acquiring a temporary “family” to fully replace them at home. But all that has slowed down boat progress.
The younger daughter has moved jobs from being a part time trainee administrator at the hospital in Norwich to become a Trainee Environmental officer in the West Midlands. A real job related to her degree at last instead of one of those “Job centre” semi-imaginary jobs. The hospital one had taken an inordinate amount of time to get organised because typically the hospital hadnt really made up their minds what the job was when they advertised it via the Norwich job center and kept changing their minds. Eventually she started work having had to go through the whole enrollment process a couple of times over with new DBS certificates each time – Personally I am amazed they have any staff at all with how long they messed her about for. Once she had started it didnt take too long before she was demonstrating her organisational skills and teaching things she had only just learned herself to staff who had been doing the job for years. Once the job interview came along it was only around a month before she was starting the new job and living part way between her fiance and work. Of course dad had to be involved in the move as her car is not big enough for all her stuff and multiple trips between Norwich and the midlands was not a viable option.
That made it more important than ever that the older one got her act together and pass the driving test as she was losing her captive taxi driver. The original driving instructor now runs a hotel / B&B somewhere so she already had a car to practice in, just no time and motivation for the two of them to make that happen all that often. Also she doesnt really know her way around Norwich by road yet so each of the tests was booked in Doncaster. Several double return trips later to get her and the car to the right place, she eventually passed the test and I could stop the roughly monthly drive to Norwich to park my car at her house for a few days
Just about got that finished and our son and his wife moved from Portishead to Penistone. At least one conflicting use of time hasnt been a waste of time in the last few years , teaching him to do jobs on our houses means he has been involved to varying extents in renovating three houses as well as working on horsebox conversions. Turns out he is really quite effective and doesnt get phased by fairly big jobs providing there is no need for electrical or plumbing work. He has been busy fitting laminate floors and decorating without needing to involve anything more than a couple of garage raids to borrow my tools or retrieve jointly owned ones.
The temporary family are a Ukrainian lady with her two children who we have sponsored to come to the UK. Her sister also lives fairly close to us with her two children. It was not the easiest job getting them sorted with visas, organising bedrooms for them in our house, getting ordinary household items, starting school in a foreign language (The kids’ English was manageable but mum was not all that confident to start with). Definitely wouldnt have gone as well as it has if my wife had not been at home most of every day as meetings or phone calls with the council, job centre, school and potential employers have taken up a lot of time. She had to be involved a lot at the start with translation help from Google but their independence is steadily growing.
More recently we have been dealing with weekend plans that sound a little like a film title – Two graduations and an Ordination (Bethany’s Geography degree postponed from 2021, Graces Medicine degree from 2020 plus Matthew’s wife Annabel finishing her training and becoming a curate in Penistone). The spare weekend in that month was occupied with a return visit from Katherine the Danish student who was living with us at the start of the pandemic and ended up being the last 6th form exchange student to be returned home from the UK. She and her parents have been planning to come over ever since but this was the first time it all worked out with the two countries’ covid rules.
So, Has there been any post progress at all?
Probably the longest job has been to do version 2 of the bilge drier pumping system. I still dont really know how it gets into the boat but the engine compartment continues to collect water even though Rathenice is not launched yet. This is happening more slowly with the cockpit cover on and seems to be very dependent on the weather so I am not sure if it is rain water getting in or accumulated condensation from temperature fluctuations. The major consequence of this is that after the levels rise slowly the level sensors fail to reset once the water has been pumped out. This seems to trace back to the PC board that the sensors are made from not being waterproof. After a few weeks immersed in water the “off” value to get the pump to turn off was a higher level than the original turn on figure.
The solution to that was to take out the analogue sensor boards and use float switches instead. These are worked by a magnet in the float and use a pull up resistor so the original 4 core cable for each one was modified to include a resistor and all encased in heat shrink tubing. Although that may sound like an easy task the lack of mains power made soldering relatively challenging and definitely prevented running the heat shrink gun (2.5KW) as I only have a 1KW inverter. The battery capacity meant I could only reliably change one sensor per visit as it took several days to re-charge the batteries after each soldering and testing attempt. The eventual solution to the heat shrink problem was to set my blow lamp on the worst possible flame and wave it near the joint. I will eventually tidy up using the heat gun and “shore power” once the boat gets somewhere that such things are available.
Mounting the new devices was relatively easy as I made aluminium adapter brackets to mount the vertically orientated device using the original pair of 3MM machine screws used for the analogue boards.
From the software perspective that was an easy enough change with some adjustment to the on and off trigger values to deal with changing between 0 and 5 volts but …. The turn off level for the reed switch inside these devices is very close to the turn on value and is nowhere near to indicating an empty bilge space. This new issue required a bit of re-programming so there is now a compartment specific over-run time so each pump stays running after the switch sends the off command which allows the space to empty completely. It works on the hard but I am not so sure it will be as effective when the boat is sailing, only time will tell me the answer to that.
The other project really deserves a post of it’s own …….