Weather - still!

We've been battered by very strong winds and torrential rain for days now - thank God we're in the marina, and not out on the cut! I really feel for holidaymakers who have to be back at their hire company's base by a certain time and day, meaning that they do not have the luxury of stopping and waiting for the weather to abate. The photo shows the waves across the marina pound. The boat moored to the service platform has been there since first thing this morning. Moving away from there in winds like this would be next to impossible.

Of course, the good thing is that the canals and the reservoirs are being replenished. The current question is when will the weather be good enough for cruising to be safe?

Wednesday was a day of some drama. Firstly, I did the thing I've been fearing ever since we got the boat - I dropped keys into the canal! The car keys. It would have been no problem had it been any of the boat keys, because they're sensibly attached to cork floats - but not the car ones. I tried dangling a magnet on the end of a cord into the murky waters, but discovered  that my magnet - not purchased for the job - was simply not powerful enough to pick up that weight. Fortunately a fellow-boater lent me his, very much more powerful magnet, and a few minutes of dragging that over the canal bottom where I believed the bunch to be, resulted in their safe retrieval. The "zapper" on the keyring was dismantled and subjected to scrupulous drying by Grace, and worked fine the next time I needed it.


The second drama was the explosive demise of the microwave oven. It had been emitting a very loud crack of lightening inside it every now and then for some weeks. Wednesday's display was its last, and it's now waiting in the car to be disposed of appropriately. We braved the weather, and did some shopping this afternoon, so a quick visit to Argos resulted in a replacement microwave oven.