A Much needed fix

At last a chance to go and play with Minnow. Got up, cooked breakfast, prepared vedge for dinner, went to fetch extra vedge from shop, then left Dawn doing housework and went off down the boat. It wasn’t so much I had got anything particular to do, it is just that I get withdrawal symptoms. I do have a whole list of things I need to do but it needs better weather for these jobs and so I just comforted myself by being there. I suppose the main reason for going down was to get some photo’s to finish off the second part of my current blog on graining.

On arrival, I opened everything up, including the bed ‘ole, then went into the hold just to check on the rain water level in the hold. I always cloth the hold up during the winter while Minnow is at her moorings just to keep out the rain, even so there was about 5” of water and it was just level with the top of the false floors. I have a small gulper bilge pump under the false floors up against the back cabin which soon made short work of it.

After that I set about taking the pictures of the graining that I wanted. With that out of the way, I took the crocheted cover and the copper kettle off the top of the Guidwife and black leaded it. Jobs like this and polishing brasses I find a great chore, but find that the end result far outweighs the effort required, not a philosophy supported by Dawn. Her philosophy is “I don’t do brass”. As I was buffing up the black lead, I felt the forward swill of an approaching boat, sounded like a proper engine, a Lister twin or something similar, so I went out into the hold just to see. It was a new build boat called ‘Moore Jam’ it was not a boat I have seen before as I would have remembered as the ‘A’ of Jam was a jar of jam. I did not recognise the couple on the back end either, but as always greeted them as they drew level with the normal “ow do” we then went into the normal 30 second long conversation as they past, mostly about the ice but as he was going off he turned back and shouted “ have you fixed that Bolinder yet?” I responded with “yes, was out boating all last year!” He waved and left. This then got me thinking- what does every single person on the cut and their dog know about the trouble that Minnows Bolinder was causing three years ago when we bought her. So I thought I would take this opportunity to tell the world

--- YES MINNOW’S BOLINDER IS FIXED-IS RUNNING-TOOK US OUT ALL SUMMER AND AUTUMN 2009.

Whilst I must admit at the beginning when we first bought her, it had me pulling my hair out but after ‘fiddling’ undertaken by Joe Hollinshead, and continuous tweaking by yours truly, It starts, runs and performs fine given the odd occasional ‘throwing a wobbler’ and ‘having a tantrum’ . This, I think, is only to be expected when you’re running an engine that is a 73 years old lady. Anyway that was my two hour ‘fix’ over and time to head back home as the Sunday roast would be ready (I was hoping)

Blossom