Retirement with No Problem

Today – Springwood Haven, Nuneaton to Hopwas, Coventry and Birmingham & Fazeley Canals, 16.5 miles 13 locks
Tues to Thurs – Moored Springwood Haven

On the move again at last after spending three days stuck at Springwood Haven Marina with a broken alternator..

We had been in trouble for about a week with the battery bank only being charged by the starter battery alternator, and that was only after the dedicated alternator had done it’s first in line job of keeping that starter turning over..

We were really pleased with the work and service at Onboard Energy, who are based at the Marina. They really know what they are doing and their staff are very friendly and helpful.. On another note, the marina does actually sell their diesel at boaters declaration although I had it as a no no on my diesel list.. I’ll change that later.  By the way, I have updated that page having had a comment that it was a bit difficult to read.. hopefully you will find it easier now with a list of canals to click on..

On the way again this morning past one of my favourite BW buildings at Hartshill..

I simply love this old building, and the place always looks neat and tidy.. It was very quiet there today, but no doubt in a couple of weeks time it will be a hive of activity preparing for the winter program of stoppages and improvements.  Most of the work to repair and maintain locks will probably be farmed out to contractors, but we have found British Waterways tend to do all the trimming and dredging along the canals

This made us chuckle for a few minutes….

I must remember to hold my nose when I pass this boat next time!

I have had to reinstall windows over the last couple of days.. so it’s all be happening at the moment.  I wanted some templates for picasa, the picture software from google, so I had a click around as you do and found just what I wanted.  It was on a nice well written web page “6 templates for you to download”.  I saw the thumbnail pictures of them and thought one of them would be ideal for what I wanted.. but they didn’t download, then suddenly all hell was let loose on my computer, I had downloaded a trojan of some sort which was quickly gobbling up my files and corrupting them very quickly one by one.

I disconnected from the internet as soon as I realised hoping that none of my email contacts had been infected, but even though I had disconnected, the ‘worm’ was causing havoc.

I don’t keep ‘My Documents’ on the computer, I have a external hard drive which I use for all my files.. that was whipped out before damage was done there thank goodness.. So I had no actual data to lose, but it takes forever to reinstall, update and put all the programs back on again.  My backup windows for this computer is quite old now, so the updates from Microsoft took all of yesterday afternoon to download and install!

A lone boater in front of us at Atherstone meant that we had a very slow trip down the eleven locks.. the guy was very miserable and had no words to say even though I had opened and closed gates and paddles for him.. I even asked him if he was OK to which he just said “Yes, fine”  There was no thanks for helping him along, so we stopped for a half hour or so to let him get ahead of us, but low and behold it was only two locks later that we caught up with him again!

Still it gave Vic time to test out those new bollards that British Waterways have kindly put in for use while waiting for the lock to empty!

And on a beautiful Autumn evening we stopped at Hopwas still having a chuckle about the boat we saw earlier and the sad boater we met at Atherstone..