Cruising through Utrecht

The posts seem to have become a little mixed up and any element of surprise lost. We obviously made it through the bridges with minimal damage - only a scraped handrail.




We lowered the canopy, nav frame and windscreens,

crossed our fingers and ducked.











lots of bridges.



The Indian restaurant where we had dinner the night before. Last year Rob was on a beer tour this year's quest has been for the perfect vindaloo. Not bad here.


-and as always in Holland there's an army of people keeping everything nice.


canal garbos scooping leaves out of the water




and wharf cleaners blowing them in.....

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shipshape

Image
Sunset at St Jean de Losne At first sight things didn't look too bad. We had been excited to be back and find our boat still safely tied up and afloat and were just anxious to get aboard. The main problem I had really noticed as I hauled myself and bags onto the deck was that there wasn't a scrap of varnish left on the handrails. It's always a concern when opening up  the boat after an extended period away, the main one being is it going to be dry inside?  L'Avenir had never let us down in the almost 15 years we had owned her and this year this year was no different. Opening up the door was always an instant step back in time. Usually that was only a period of 6 months or so but this time (thanks to Covid) it had been more than 2 and a half years. Thanfully everything was exactly as we had left it. We spent that first day getting unpacked and shipshape inside; de-winterising, water on, gas on, starting up the engines etc. All went well. I went over to the supermarket fo...
Read more

Cracks Appearing

Image
      Friday  24th June 2022. l'Avenir looks v sad. Dirty, Lots of rusty cracks. We spent the next 10 days tied up at the marina in St Jean de Losne trying to restore our poor boat to some semblance of her former self. 3 winters and 2 hot summers of total neglect (thanks to Australia's stringent Covid lockdowns) had not been kind to her.  Although it was still quite early in the boating season water restrictions were already in place and boat washing with hoses was banned. So, there was nothing for it but to fill buckets, get down on hands and knees and scrub. Hard work at any time but even more so in the heat; clear skies every day and temperatures in the high 30s. As the filth disappeared the true state of the bodywork was revealed and it was a thoroughly depressing sight; flaking paint, bleeding rust patches, peeling varnish. The more we cleaned the more it became apparent that l'Avenir was going to need a complete repaint. 
Read more

Gearbox Again

Image
Damazan So, it seems I tempted fate once again. The slightly 'smarty pants' tone of my last post might have requested a more appropriate title - something like Pride Comes Before...(you know the rest). To be fair, I was just relieved that the resident engineer seemed to have found a way around a major repair. He clearly had that too good to be true feeling because first thing next morning he said, 'I'm not happy. There's more to it.' He then proceeded to dismantle the gearbox once again - and he was right. I'm a little vague on the technical details but the source of the problem was eventually found and was one of those things which apparently had been on the verge of going wrong for longer than we've had the boat. In short, a welder had had a brain fade - or perhaps a coffee break - exactly halfway through a job and had welded only two of four sides of a small rectangular piece of steel deep in the guts of the gearbox. After 8 plus yea...
Read more