Our friends Richard and Lizzie live in Lymington so we planned to visit them. We both sailed with Richard in our Laser dinghies at King George Sailing Club in London in the late 70s and early 80s and we have kept in touch ever since. Unfortunately Richard now has Alzheimers and Lizzie is finding it quite hard to look after him, so we try to provide moral support if, nothing else.
The bow protector seemed to work well as we weren’t woken by Harvard touching the buoy or the swivel and shackle that attaches the mooring strop to the buoy. Today there was a brisk north-easterly wind blowing down the western Solent so once outside the river we just un-rolled the genoa to run downwind against the tide. It was an easy fast passage and as we had booked ahead we were soon in our berth in Lymington Yacht Haven. This has a reputation as being the most expensive marina in the UK and on checking in it didn’t disappoint!!!! We walked in to town to do a little bit of shopping before the shops closed assuming that the next day, even though a bank holiday, the shops would be more or less open as normal.
Also did a repair job on the fender sock for our big ball fender as the elastic in it had rotted away. Replaced the elastic with proper shock cord we had in stock so it was a very satisfying repair. Another repair carried out in the winter was to our shore power electrical control panel. Richard had never been wholly satisfied with how it worked, the wording on the panel and the instructions above seeming to contradict each other. So it was dismantled, repaired and new indicator lights fitted. Although most equipment onboard is not polarity sensitive as Howard, Richard’s elder brother, and electrical guru explained there is a safety issue involved if the live and neutral conductors are reversed. After much checking and testing now when you plug in to the socket in the marina a green light comes on if the polarity is correct and a red light comes on when the circuit breaker is closed to indicate the circuits on the boat are live. It turned out the socket on the boat is incorrectly wired (presumably from when the boat was built) but it is a nightmare to access so the corresponding plug that belongs to the boat had to have the live and neutral connections swapped over. This isn’t a problem unless the connection lead ever has to be replaced. Lymington was the first opportunity to test everything out away from Marchwood and everything seems to work fine, so thank you Howard for your advice. I might think about changing the warning label at a later date. If the “polarity correct” green light does not illuminate, on the advice of a fellow Rustler owner at Marchwood, we now have a very short length of lead with a marina plug and socket with the polarity connections reversed in case the marina wiring is incorrect. It will be interesting to see if the system still works in French marinas!!!
