Thursday 21 Nov, HHN Day 41: PC setup ticked, decks cleared, hatch sealed, a bit of a challenge with Empirbus and lastly the ever-popular laundry time!
New PC setup is finalized. After a fresh look at it this morning, all seems to be good. Over breakfast we make a plan for a Saturday departure, taking hire car back tomorrow after a last shopping, and a dinner out with Ray on Friday.
First job is to go retrieve the old PC and pay our bill for trying to save it. But it’s still in pieces and the technician is not there again. Seems he barely works a normal week, unless there is a lot of out-of-office work to do. On the way back I stop in at the canvas shop in Deale and manage to scrounge some scrap foam which Oana has been wanting, to make our foot “poof” harder. Currently it’s filled with small beads which seem to have shrunk!
When I get back, Oana has all the dry goods finally stowed away. Just where did it all go? Aren’t we grateful to have so many cupboards to store our food. This yacht really is a cavern of space.
My next job is to try to upload the updated system to our Empirbus remote switching system. I have the new file from Hallberg Rassy but I have to link the PC to the system via a USB to RS232 adapter. Guess what? Yes, it doesn’t work. So an email is sent to my friendly support in Empirbus Sweden. Hopefully he can come in on TeamViewer and sort it out for me.
Meanwhile, Oana is having fun removing the beads from our foot poof. They are full of static and stick to everything! Soon half the saloon is invaded by them. It’s tempting to just go outside and brush them all away, but if they go in the water that would certainly not be an environmentally friendly thing to do. So we take it to the dumpster and do the battle there. Finally every last one of the damned little polystyrene beads are off the poof. We then cut the new foam with a kitchen carving knife and Oana stuffs the poof. For the first time it actually resembles the cube that it’s supposed to be!
Lastly, outside departure jobs. Oana cleans bow cabin (all interior cleaning is now completed) and the fenders and other bits from the deck get thrown in there. And just before it’s dark I install the hatch sealing strips that came form Defender. Firstly, to the bow cabin hatch and secondly to both aft deck-locker hatches. All of these had minor but annoying leaks when Cloudy was ploughing through waves, with decks awash. Along with sealing up the bow cabin vent, this should make us a dry boat when we are pushing Cloudy hard.
Then in the evening it’s laundry time, using the marina washing machines. But do these machines even manage to wash in just 30 mins? It seems not. Nothing seems any cleaner than when it went into the machine! Oana wishes for her proper machine back in Bucharest, which takes at least 1 ½ hours per cycle and everything comes out clean and fresh. These launderette machines only seem to turn a few times before they are draining and going to the rinse cycle ☹
Later in the evening we are trying to catch up on the blogs. We really do have to try to finalize each day as it happens. When we have a few days back log, all manner of thing seem to happen to the drafts, like disappearing then reappearing back on the PC after you again rewrite them. Very frustrating.
Again, to bed exhausted.