General Witterings -
After Christmas on Rosy

Christmas has been and gone here on Rosy.  Rather muted I fear, as I went for a medical check up a few weeks ago, and discovered that my blood-sugar level is too high - so I'm off all sugar!!  Hence no coffee or tea (neither of which I can stand without sugar) no custard, no ginger jam, no honey.  The doctor has even banned fruit.  I'm allowed some beer, but not sugary liqueurs - I had to give away nine-tenths of a bottle of Apfel Korn (an apple based, sweet liquor) as it was just too tempting.  Out, too, is the seasonal German 'stolle' - a sweet bread smothered in icing sugar ('sweet bread' as in loaf, not as in the dodgy bits of animals).  I allowed myself a couple of mouthfuls of Christmas pud, but the traditional brandy butter was replaced by some cream.

Incidentally, my sister and I particular like brandy butter, mainly because it reminds us that we are now SO much better off than when we were young, when we had to make do with sherry margarine.  There were two reasons for this - one was that in the 1940s when food rationing was all the rage, but reason number two was all to do with having a Scottish mother.

The sugar substitutes that I've tried (saccharin and aspatarme (spelling?)) are dreadful, leaving (for me) a ghastly after-taste.

Anyway, all this self mortification has brought the sugar level down to an acceptable level.

New Year's Eve, here in Germany, is firework night, so the rattle of machine gun fire, the crack of sniper rifles, the boom of the artillery and the whoosh of incoming rockets lasted from midday to one a.m.  Luckily, Fanny the Woof is un-fazed by all this noise.

THE ENGINE

Ongoing work on the engine has now re-commenced.  The engine uses diesel oil, kept in a big tank (some 500 litres).  There is a hand driven, semi-rotary pump to move fuel from this big tank, up to a header tank of some 16 litres capacity.  The old Kelvin engine did not have a fuel pump, so the header tank allowed fuel to get to the engine courtesy of Mr Gravity.  I want to keep the hand pump and the header tank (in case there is a failure of the fuel pump on the new Perkins engine).  However, we are now paralleling the hand pump with an electric pump, supported by some fancy electronic controls.  Two float switches in the header tank will tell the pump when it should switch on (because the header tank is nearly empty) and when the pump should switch off (because it has filled up the header tank).  A third float switch is the reserve.  It is the lowest switch, and will sound an audible alarm if the fuel level falls to its level.  The alarm will also sound if the electric pump runs for too long (perhaps, for example, because the main fuel tank is empty).

I've wanted to do this for some time.  Next year, in the spring, we will be going up the Varta river.  There are very few moorings available, so we might have some long cruising days - and, hence, using more fuel than the header tank can hold.  The idea of abandoning the tiller on a swift flowing river, whilst I nip below to pump fuel up into the header tank, is not a proposition that appeals to me.  So I can justify the expense of a automatic system on safety grounds. 

I have also discarded the '1, 2, Both, Off' type of rotary battery switch, in favour of a blocking diode.  '1' is the engine starting battery, '2' is the bank or 3 batteries for lights, computers etc (commonly called the house batteries) whilst 'Both' puts '1' and '2' in parallel.  Being an idle person, I often cannot be bothered to switch over to '1' to start the engine with the engine battery, so start it with the 'house' batteries.  In most circumstances this works fine.  BUT it means that when the 3 house batteries can no longer hold a charge, and have to be replaced, the engine battery (having had so little use) is still alive and kicking.  The blocking diode panders to my idleness.  It allows the alternator to charge both the house and the engine starting batteries, whilst dedicating the house batteries to housekeeping functions and the engine battery to the engine.

As a fall back position, we will fit a switch to parallel the house and engine batteries - just in case!

Incidentally, I first got this idea from the West Marine catalogue.  West Marine is a USA chandlers, with an excellent mail order catalogue which includes help and advice on all sorts of boaty matters and systems

SERIOUS STUFF - MONEY

Having been in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Poland during the last 12 months, the following practical tips about money might help people.

First - get a 'Chip and PIN' card as soon as possible.  It seems that several countries have already switched over - in some, the cash machines accept the old cards OK (but see 'Five' below), but some shops and restaurants can now not accept them.

Second - as a precaution, carry 2 cards (preferably from different banks) so that if there are problems with one card, the other might be able to bail you out.

Three - Nationwide make no charges for using their card in a cash machine overseas.  Other cards seem to charge from 1% to 3% for withdrawals up to about 350 Euros.  I've tried extracting money from the same machine using a Nationwide debit card and a Barclays debit card within half a minute of each other.  Each gave the same exchange rate, but the Barclay's card carried their normal withdrawal charge.

Four - Personally, I'm a bit of a worrier, so I couldn't manage without some form of card 'loss and protection' scheme.  I've 'lost' 2 cards over the last 10 years, and the protection scheme came up trumps each time.  (In neither case was the card used fraudulently).

Five - The big problem country was Belgium, where an organisation called Mister Cash seems to run most of the ATMs, and refused all my cards in the 6 machines I tried.  It might have been that they wanted Chip and PIN cards.  Luckily, we discovered this when we were still close to the French border, so we stocked up with loot there.

Six - Germany provides a bit of a problem, as the ATMs don't give a print-out of the transactions.

Hope this helps.

CRANES.

No!  Not as in 'building site' but as in 'our feathered friends'.

One of the joys of nature (for me) is to watch skeins of geese flying in arrow-head formation overhead, each goose getting some dynamic help from the eddies of air generated by the goose slightly ahead of it.

(As an aside, one still, warm night in Cyprus, we were on our patio, and in a mellow mood, having eaten and drunk particularly well, when we heard a rushing sound up in the sky.  It was geese flying over.  There must have been thousands of them, as they took 10 or 15 minutes to pass over.  There was just the occasional 'Honk', which we interpreted as 'Are we there yet, mum?'.  'Hush, child!!  Just keep flapping.  There's another 200 miles to go!')

Anyway, cranes, too, appreciate the benefits of formation flying.  It's just that they are not very good at it.  They don't have a roster for taking turns as point bird, so there are continual and noisy arguments about who it should be.  Eventually, the bird who is being bullied into taking over the point position takes evasive action, leaving the flock and heading in the wrong direction, but the other cranes fall in behind it!  So there is the whole flock heading in the wrong direction.  Hence they weave about the sky, taking a longer route to wherever they are going, and wasting breath and energy in all their squabbles.

Most bird books give pointless 'recognition' features for cranes.  A true one would be - often seen in argumentative, disorganised rabbles meandering in noisy gangs across the sky.

And while we're on this subject …

A pair of swans, flying along, beat time together with their wing beats.  I watched two swans taking off.  Within a couple of wing beats of leaving the water, they were in sync!!  As they headed up the canal, one went under a bridge whilst the other went over, and in this manoeuvre they lost synchronicity, but quickly regained it when they joined up after the bridge.

Would that we were as sensitive and sympathetic to our partners.

Toodle pip!!

Bill