At van der Laan marina - Chores

We went out for dinner last night with Lynn and Shaun - like proper people!  Fabulous Greek restaurant.  They are staying in a B&B for a couple of nights and took two bags of our laundry and got it washed and dried there as if it were theirs.  Good thing I forgot to put the tea towels and bedding in the bags!  We went to an open air market in the town square in the afternoon and we asked  a few people where we could find a laundry and, well, there isn't one in this town!  The sheets, etc, can wait a few days till we get to Maastricht but we were running out of clean clothes.

Today: chores.  But, as fast as Ian crossed one off the list another was added to the bottom - so what's new?

However, one was pretty serious.  He opened up the foreward bilge to store something and it was full of water.  It had been dust dry in Rotterdam - so where was the leak?  In our sailing days we would taste the water to see if it was salty or fresh water to start the elimination process but that doesn't work in fresh water canals.

We removed about 50 litres, a sizeable amount of water!  Once the water was out Ian took a look at the water tank and fittings and noticed that the pump was very wet, turned on a tap and it sprayed water in every direction.  I was down in the dumps, where could we get a new water pump?  "Here"said Ian and reached for one that arrived in the box yesterday!  And he tells me he has a spare for the spare.

But we discovered that this boat has no bilge pump!  How can anyone build a boat without a bilge pump!  Fortunately, a couple of those arrived in the box yesterday too, and we found out that today, Good Friday, all commercial shops are open at least half day.  How strange, but lucky for us.  We went shopping for skin fittings, pipe, etc, so that Ian can fit a bilge pump during the next week.  Yet another chore added to the list.

I took this picture of the seriously impressive travel hoist here, which is operated remotely by a little hand-held black box!

Now that our electric bikes have arrived it is time for me to learn how to ride a bike again - after more years than I care to remember.  Well, actually I am so old now that I can't remember!  Urrrm, I was very wobbly to start with but I went for a 10 minute ride on public roads, didn't fall off and didn't hit anything.  Hoorrrray!