General Witterings -
Still Here on Rosy

Well!!  We are still here.  We WERE just about all ready to go.  The floods on the River Oder are down to an acceptable level;  we are stocked up with food;  the weather is not nearly as cold as it was;  mail arrived from England (thanks Vron) - so all was tickety-boo save for a couple of maps due in the post from Poland.  Then Mike next door has come down with an amazingly severe dose of the flu!!  So we are still here.

But have we been idle?  Not us!!

The main event was our presentation to the Motoryachtclub at Eisenhuttenstadt, which is where we have over-wintered.  Canal and Riverboat magazine kindly gave away a couple of prints of water-colour paintings by Alex Prowse.  They each show narrow-boats - one near Maida tunnel and the other on the Regents canal.  We framed them, and presented them to the club President at the end of the first General Meeting that the club held in 1995 - on the 9 April.  We phoned the press, who were not too keen to turn out on a Saturday, but at least the local paper arrived.  Not only did we get ourselves into the papers again, but we also gave this very hospitable boat club a bit of publicity.

MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES!!!

We've been dishing out back numbers of 'Canal and Riverboat' and 'Waterways World' to club members, who, universally, have expressed astonishment at the leisure opportunities on the British canals.  If these boaters don't know about them, what about the non-boaty population of Germany?  Do not the UK hire companies target the German market?  Connoisseur Cruisers operate here, but perhaps they are too busy marketing their in-country operation to bother about their UK bases.

Out of interest, I have on board a copy of the July 1974 edition of National Geographic magazine, which featured the English canals.  This article is a key reason why so many Americans over the age of 55 are seen on the English canals.

WORK ON ROSY

There are still twiddly bits being done on Rosy.  The first was to put some more heat insulation between the silencer and a nearby wooden wall.  I tried to find some of the insulation material that would go between a cooker and its adjacent kitchen unit - I have in mind a flexible material (mineral wool, I think) supported by a silvery outer coating.  Utterly failed to find anything like that here in the shops.  We were eventually directed to a chimney builder, who had some fibre-glass tape, similar to that which is already bound around Rosy's exhaust system.  So I bought five metres of that, and wound it around the silencer.

Whilst not finding what I wanted in the shops, we came across a very useful item - d-i-y 'jubilee' type clips.  They come as a 3m length of grooved, steel band, and half a dozen of the adjustment mechanisms.  For smaller diameter clips, standard jubilee clips are obviously better, but for larger jobs (like securing fibre glass tape wrapped around a vertical engine silencer) they are pretty much perfect.

Recently, I mentioned the possibility of having to have a couple of alcohol-free days before netting into the Polish beer supply system.  I'm avoiding such an unpleasant episode by stocking with Sekt - the extremely pleasant German sparkling white wine which would be known in France as champagne.  A bottle a night leads to very pleasant dreams!!  The only problem I have is to find the extra dry variety - anything else is too sweet for me.

Talking of champagne ... at THE wedding, Sir David Frost was wearing a rather risqué outfit - to wit, a grey morning suit.  'Risqué' because, of course (as the know-all Sky expert told us) it is not usual for gentlemen to wear grey morning suits until after Ladies Day at Ascot!

See you in Poland!!

Toodle pip!!

Bill

P.S. There is a new page of photographs available if you would like to look at it.