As I sit on board, looking across a forest of masts, I’ve noticed a small bird going in and out of the top of a neighbouring mast, I just hope we’ve not got a nest up ours! .
So it’s on with the list of jobs, Ann has gone mad servicing Jacana’s 5 winches. Also crossed off the list include re-mounting the GPS antenna on the solar panel gantry, which should have been a 5 minute job but in the end took an entire day feeding the cable through the gantry, stern cabin, wardrobes and connecting it, with lots of swearing to the mess of wires deep beside the nav table. I was going to do the same with the Navtex antenna, but (thankfully?) discovered it was full of water, so a new one is called for. However that can wait particularly as we don’t use it that much.
Also fitted led lights to the gantry, greased the 9 Sea cocks, replaced the engine impeller, alternator belt, tested the AIS, mounted the life raft cradle to the hatch roof……..
A dilemma we have over winter is whether to leave the batteries charging via the mains or solar panels or not charge them at all. Ideally charging would be fine, but in reality batteries can develop faults and start over heating as we had first hand experience of a couple of years ago in Port Napoléon. So over winter I’ve built a small box that allows us to remotely monitor the battery voltages and remotely switch on and off the solar panels as necessary and sends a text alarm if battery temperatures exceed a threshold or voltages drop below a level. This is now fitted and works well as well as producing an almost real time GPS track of our route.
We’re beginning to run out of the jobs, apart from the inevitable cleaning and polishing. So today it was the turn of the stainless steel, tomorrow the coach roof after a thorough wash down.
Also Saturday night as we were leaving the taverna we saw a fire fly hovering in front of us. A first for both of us.
Cleopatra Marina offers daily free transport to Preveza. We were told it is a bus (10am return 1pm) but no one seemed to know where it stopped. Luckily there was a chap sat on a bench who knew. Dutifully on the return journey we were waiting for the bus to arrive when some people who we’d chatted to waved to us to let us know it was a ferry on the way back! And 2 minutes later we were back at the marina.
The ferry has been a god send (no shops here, only a tiny convenience store) although on Monday we discovered that almost every where was closed with it being Labour day, only a week after Easter, almost as bad as the UK! But also we’ve had the opportunity to walk a bit further in Preveza than we’ve done in previous years, and what a lovely place it is! Despite a bit of rain on Monday, we found an open fish shop and a gorgeous coffee shop called the Art Cafe that we’ll definitely visit again, nice biscuits, including nougat!
