I'd booked a service at Kings Lock Chandlers for today. We got there in reasonable time from our overnight mooring at Bramble Cuttings, and Nigel made a start shortly afterwards. The fuel filter he'd ordered still hadn't arrived, but he was hoping it might have by the time he finished the rest.
I took the opportunity to ask about the water pump, which seemed to have been introducing a lot of air into the system. What he found was a wet, discoloured support board, indicative of a lot of leaking.
Old copies of Towpath Talk were pressed into service to dry the surface moisture, and help locate the leak.
It turned out to be the seals in the pump itself which were at fault. When we looked at relative prices and various timings, it seemed better to replace the pump than to get hold of a replacement set of seals. So that's what Nigel did.
Then he said "How much of a hurry are you in?" We'd actually hurried to Middlewich for this service, but there's nothing else on the horizon apart from a folk session in Audlem next Monday evening. So we left the pump in place for a couple of hours to check there were no further leaks, and later in the afternoon the fuel filter arrived. We tied up by the chandlers for the night, and got an electric hook-up (thanks, guys) so we don't have to worry about the batteries.
Meanwhile, I'd been in touch with the maker of our Prestige pressure cooker. It had fallen off the back step a couple of evenings ago, and when we went to use it last night it didn't go to full pressure. Something wasn't sealing properly. I dismantled and reassembled the system, but wasn't happy about the result. However, when I rang for advice, Marion in customer services told me there had been a recall on the lid of our model a couple of years ago, and she would simply send me a new one. What a result! But where to send it? A few phone calls sorted out a delivery to Audlem Post Office, which will probably take three days, and give us a good reason to mess around a bit on the way and only arrive in Audlem next Monday – just in time for the folk session.
It's nice when a lot of different things coalesce into a happy pattern.
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