An 8 hour breakdown

Monday 12th July 2021

Well the Euro’s are over, get your memorabilia cheap in the bargains bin. Cheap shirt any-one? And well done England, a young less experienced team took the silver medal.

We set off at 9am on a grey morning after a wet night. The birds chirruped and tweeted their heads off at stupid-o-clock this morning. No locks today. Before we even reached the first bridge (shown below) we had an engine failure. Symptoms showed a lack of fuel. Good job the Cap’n is also the Engineering Officer!

 

After checking all the obvious and changing the fuel filter for a new one he found that the lift pump on the engine was not sucking the fuel to feed the engine as it should. There followed about one hour of groaning and straining to extract the faulty pump from the dark recesses of the engine hole. Further testing confirmed the pump was not sucking or blowing when operated manually.

He then rang Bryco at Daventry and determined that they had a new replacement available, reserved one and then set off on the Di Blasi to travel the 20 miles to Daventry to purchase it. Then on to Midland Chandlers in adjacent Braunston to get some copper olives to use when refitting.

Having left the Honda generator running to recharge the batteries, it spluttered to a stop 5 minutes after he’d left. It appeared that the Cap’n had forgotten to open the air vent on the generators filler cap and so it had also starved itself of fuel.

On Grahams return, he restarted the generator and then worked to fit the new lift pump onto Jannock’s mighty Kubota engine. After an epic bout of spannering and bleeding of the diesel fuel system Jannock spluttered back into life but not before the battery charger that was connected to the Honda expired.

8 hours after we first set off we started again. It started to rain as we entered Husbands Bosworth tunnel which was good timing. A group of kids playing with an inflatable canoe decided that it would be good to hang onto Jannock’s stern mooring rope and be towed through the tunnel but we sped up so that they could not catch us.

We moored for the night just South of Husbands Bosworth just after 7pm. After his bath the Cap’n grabbed a fresh T shirt from the drawer – this one! Quite apt considering the day he’d had.

 

G&B