To spend or not to spend, that is the question

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the temptation and frustration of window shopping
Or to blow the cash on a spending spree and worry not about the consequences

Well, the self evident fact is that since I'm at home posting this garbage, I didn't go down to the boat this weekend. Apart from having lots to do at home, I started adding up the cost/benefit of a short weekend trip at this stage of the year and can't help wondering whether its worth it.

With the shifts Jane is working this month, I can't travel down until Saturday morning and I've got to be back by early Sunday evening. Effectively I get a day to spend on maintenance tasks or a toddle up and down the river. What with travel costs, taxis to get Jane to and from Work Saturday night / Sunday morning, and so on the whole excercise will cost getting on for £100 and it'll maybe save half a day of sorting out at the start of our week long trip in a few weeks time.

Now £100 would go a long way towards buying a new GPS. The ancient Magellan Glen passed on to us does the job after a fashion but it's woefully slow, can't be connected to the PC to upload and download data and has a very limited number of waypoints and routes. Not only that, the text and symbols are ludicrously small making it all but impossible to read when steering the boat.

So, methinks, rather than blow a whole weekend and getting on for a ton on a relatively unproductive trip to the boat p'raps I'll spend the dosh, plus a bit, on a Garmin GPS72H instead. Good plan, in theory, but then I gets to thinking it'd be handy to have better charting than the basic base map and maybe the built in 3 axis compass would be very handy and ... well OK, so maybe what I'd really like is a Garmin GPSMAP 78s!

All right, I know, it's twice the price but hey ho. Oh, but, well ... it's nearly as expensive as a Standard Horizon CP180i chart plotter! There's only 25 quid difference, a mere drop in the ocean. And the CP180i is firmly on my long term shopping list too.

But then, if I buy the plotter, I really want the better UK charting for it and that's another £130 on top. So I started off planning to spend £141.59 and now I'm looking at £439.90 fer crissakes!

I think not!

I must go down to the seas again ...

and I can't! At least not until the weekend after next at least.

We spent the last fortnight, or at least a goodly chunk of it, on a leisure centre sports field in sunny Burton-upon-Trent where I had the dubious pleasure of being the Technical Manager of the entertainment venues at the IWA Waterways Festival (we're also the suppliers of all the PA and lighting equipment to the show).

There's a lot of work involved what with four flown lighting bars, set construction, and a 4.7kw PA system to install and commission in two days ... well it would have taken two days if someone hadn't half inched the ladders for most of the first afternoon of the build which cost us several hours of build time.

Then three days of running the show and it time to take it all down again! That took another full day and then it was time to head for home after packing away our accommodation (an elderly folding camper)

I had planned to head down to Brigantia for the rest of the week after getting home but my left ankle, which I can't recall injuring, was swollen and quite painful which took several days to settle down so that put paid to that.

This coming weekend my brother is moving house and wants help. It'd be churlish to say no, of course, but it's another weekend lost! Worse still, my mate Tony is stuck in Felixstowe for the weekend and it would have been a perfect opportunity for him to get down to the boat for a couple of days.

I'm planning on going down to Fambridge the weekend after the coming one unless something else comes up to get in the way! It's that or the following weekend, the one after that a friend wants me to play at her 40th birthday party and then we're into the week Rik and I have planned for a decent sail, weather permitting.

It's very frustrating this, having a boat at last and then never seeming to have the time to get down and use her. Oh well, there's no IWA festival next year so I'll have a lot more spare time I hope.