Getting ready

Over the last three weeks we've finally got back up to the marina to get Erin Mae ready for all sorts of things. Thankfully the various medical issues that afflicted me around Christmas seem to have been resolved, and we're now on our third visit north in as many weeks, fitting them in around other bits and pieces that have kept us occupied in the south.

It's been exciting! First was "de-winterisation" – basically getting the water systems back in operation. Doing it ourselves saves about £100 at both ends of the winter – it was only sheer terror at the prospect that made us get the workshop to do it the first few years. We've replaced the "candle" in the water filter under the sink, and in the process have gone back to getting a mere trickle of filtered water, far less flow than last year. It may be that we didn't have the filter properly in place before and so were drinking only partially filtered Adam's ale. Whatever, we seem to have survived it, but I don't think we'll repeat the experiment deliberately just for the sake of filling the kettle faster.

Secondly has been an operation with the audio. Erin Mae came with a rather nice DVD player / radio equipped with Dolby 5.1 electronics and speakers. All at an electrical cost, of course, and the twelvoltification operation meant dispensing with its services. However, we still wanted to be able to play music through something other than the laptop's own speakers. I found a small 12 volt amplifier on Amazon, and wired it up to Erin Mae's speaker system. To that I added a small device which links into the boat's WiFi network, so now I can stream music wirelessly from the laptop, with a minimum of fuss and, more importantly, a minimum of electrons. It's currently playing a nice album from Máiri Brennan which we haven't listened to for a long time.

Thirdly – the tachometer. It's never simple, is it! But this post runs the risk of being over-long, so I think I'll leave that tale until tomorrow.