Relaxing in the Menai straights can be hard, especially if relaxing is not your thing. So while I was away at my Mums, Beverley scrubbed the deck several times, getting rid of the yard muck. It took several goes, because the dirt was ground in, she even went on the internet to find out what was the best scrubber for cleaning the non-skid areas of Salty Lass and found out that it was abrasive kitchen cleaner, so when I came back from visiting my Mum, Beverley got me to buy a bottle, so that I could join her in the fun. Now she could of picked me up in the dinghy, but seeing as she knew that I would take her lines, she single handed Salty Lass, it was the first time for her and she did a great job. Once aboard we both scrubbed the decks until we were happy and realistically we still need to do the back step, but at least most of Salty Lass is done.
Once aboard, we decided to go up the Menai straights to do a test anchoring, it just seems like ages since we anchored and we needed to check out the new depth gauge and just check out that we were doing our calculations correctly. Our approach on our anchorage was great, but we were both twitchy at the anchorage itself as we had land to leeward of us, We should know by now that this is not a good wind direction, but clearly we have much more to learn and improve on. Seeing as we were both quite twitchy, we left the anchorage after a cup of tea and returned to our mooring ball, but just after we left, we saw dolphins which was just great.
Another day, our boat task for the day was to get rid of rubbish and do some shopping. There are a few shops at Menai Bridge, certainly enough for our needs as all we need is a shop, but I also like to see the odd laundrette so that we can keep our clothes clean.
We like to do just one boat task a day, although when you are in at a Marina, we tend to do loads, just so that we can get out as soon as we can. Well the next day, I started by cleaning out the locker, all our fenders needed a good scrub, with the locker empty, Beverley finally ventured in to the dark hole known as our starboard locker to clean and repair our manual bilge pump. There were several things that we did not like about our manual bilge pump, the first being that it did not work, with the second being that is just looked messy. Beverley laughed such a lot, while she was removing the silicone, because there was just so much of it. We have spent several months removing silicone from Salty Lass and we thought that we had it all, how wrong could we be as Beverley found a whole tube of the stuff in and around the bilge pump. While she was cleaning, Beverley shared one of her tips for showing where silicone is and that is to rub dirt into the silicone and the dirt just sticks to it so that you can see the stuff. Another tip is to use a blade for removing it.
Once Beverley had cleaned up the Bilge pump, she could finally find out what was wrong with it, so the first thing that was wrong was that the diaphragm had come off, so no suction there. On top of that the joker valve that was on the out pipe was missing, so no wonder there was no suction.
