Graham has a big one!

Well that's what the lady on the boat opposite said and at least Daisy's sacrifice wasn't in vain. We are now moored at Littleport on the wrong side so Daisy can't go out because of the adjacent road. There was an opportunity to move but himself was busy catching this 25lb Pike.

My apologies that I haven't blogged for a while; G has become so fed up with me that he threw a few pics up the other day and so I'm trying to get back into the blogging habit before he hijacks my blog permanently. I can only start again from today (but might be tempted to work back a bit with some memorable events and photos).

So; last night we moored on the EA moorings on the River Lark and the sun came out unexpectedly and it was glorious - Lesley and I sat out and soaked up some rays whilst the fellers fished. The intention today was to trundle on down the Lark through the lock to Judes Ferry but, yet again, we were advised that the river was on strong stream warnings through the lock and it was still lashing down with rain. We chose the option of reversing out of the Lark back on to the Great Ouse - staying put would have been good but not an option as NB Yarwood are expecting guests tomorrow and our mooring was inaccessible to landlubbers.

We started our engine an hour before we had agreed to leave to push through some washing and drying and to give the batteries a bit of a boost as we had been stuck under the trees at Ely with a defunct starter motor solenoid and our solar panels hadn't had much of a view at the sunny stuff. There was a sort of bang and the engine cut out - we dashed out the back to be greeted by a steam room with everything engine wise boiling over. Whilst we waited for it to cool down and fearing the worst we looked at prices for a new engine. We were lucky; it hadn't seized.

To cut a long story short - and with some excellent helpful diagnostics from Joe - we (that would be the Royal we) isolated the calorifier, topped up the skin tank and retained our water coolant system and reversed off the Lark to the Great Ouse where G spotted that big bugger and then managed to catch it whilst I watched Andy Murray make the Wimbledon Finals.

We'll look at the calorifier problem tommorrow.

PS Calorifier is a tank in which the water can be heated by immersion heater or engine power and a skin tank is a sort of radiator - if it's on a boat you give them different names so that peoples can charge you twice as much for replacements