July Long Weekend - Monday

Another lie in! It was gone seven before I awoke to another bright day. After breakfast it was time to get serious with the engine. The problem must,I reckoned, be fuel related so it was time to strip down the carb and have a look.

Off with the covers again, I started stripping down the attachments to remove the carb. Once off, it was a case of carefully removing the float bowl and then the jet and needle valve turn, cleaning them and putting them back exactly as before.

I found a very small fine thread like obstruction in the jet and similar bits in the bottom of the float bowl along with tiny flakes of what looked like blue paint. The same dirt was present in the fuel filter

With everything thoroughly cleaned and reassembled, I fired her up and ran her at various throttle settings for half an hour or so. She seemed to be idling much better than she ever has before and she didn't cut out once.

We won't know whether this is the end of the problem for certain until we've been out on a long run at medium to high throttle settings but I'm hopeful!

By now it was late morning and coming back from the loo Jane noticed somebody had stolen our space on the tender dock. You'd think the oar bag tied to the rail would be sufficient hint but no. The dock is chock full of tenders with more people wanting to store a dinghy there than there is space so I suppose it's not surprising. Nothing for it, we'll just have to leave the thing afloat tied to the pontoon and bale it out every time we want to use it.

That settled the program for the afternoon anyway. I've been meaning to add some cleats for mooring lines and to hang fenders off to the tender so we popped back to the chandlers to spend some more money and I spent the afternoon screwing hardware to the gunnels and failing to put an eye splice in a length of 6mm 3 strand. I need to practice splicing so for now a bowline will suffice.

As the afternoon headed into the early evening, we started off loading kit into the car. On the first run with the trolley I fell into conversation with Toby, who runs the swinging moorings. I casually mentioned the tender storage issue in passing, not expecting or anticipating any specific response, and Toby jumped up saying he was going to be having a clear out on the dock on the morrow as some tenders on there haven't been used in years. Pointing to the nearest spot to the ramp onto the dock from the shore pier he said "What about there, I'll shift that and you can have that spot". Perfect for us as we usually row up and down the inside of the pontoon anyway so it's the nearest space to where we launch and recover the dinghy - result!

It seemed a bit churlish to me before but now I'm definitely going to put a name board on our space on the dock. With that sorted, we finished off-loading and motored back down to our buoy where Jane made a first time pick up. Nice one, she's really starting to get the hang of things now. We rowed back to the pontoon and stowed the tender in her new home before leaving at just about bang on half past eight. The drive home took a shade over two hours, justifying the late departure to miss the traffic and so ended this trip to the boat.