A rocky start to our ‘Chance’ summer cruise.

One of our last “tasks” before leaving Selsey for the summer on ‘Chance’ was …….

……. to walk to the end of the road and inspect the repairs and improvements to the sea wall.  We now have a new path and a cast concrete wall with curved wave breaker top to it and topped with a bit of railing to stop us falling in.  The landscaping is being completed so by the time we get back in the autumn the grass will have grown (and the first of the winter storms may have taken it all away again!

A JCB has put the beach back where it belongs so we now have a clear path to walk on.

On Thursday morning we packed all our stuff in the car and set off for Packet Boat marina in West Drayton.  Early in the journey, three miles from the Peugeot garage which supplied the car (lucky!), it decided to throw a wobbly and, with a bit of gentle coaxing, we managed to make it to the garage.  Cutting along story to a reasonable length the car needs four new fuel injectors (which are on back order) so they can’t give us a date for when the car will be fixed!  However, the good news is that the car’s still under warranty and they set about providing us with a replacement car until they can fix ours.

The not so good news was that we had to transfer all the boat stuff (and all boaters will know how much stuff that can be!) into the new car – and it was a new car, with only 20 miles on the clock! Here we are - all our stuff, so neatly packed in the first place, now bundled unceremoniously into the replacement car so that we could continue the journey.  We got to the boat four hours late but as we were not intending to leave the marina until Friday things didn’t work out too badly in the end.

Over the next few weeks on ‘Chance’ we are taking part in the St Pancras Cruising Club’s tideway events so, at first light today (Friday) we set off towards Paddington where we hope to be for a few days before the first tideway event.  Arriving in Little Venice, who should we bump into (not literally!) but Jaq and Les on nb ‘Valerie’.  Delighted as always to see them it was a short chat as we were going in opposite directions.  It was lovely to see you both looking so well and we look forward to seeing you both later in the summer.

Getting into Paddington Basin there were several empty spaces so we chose the one with the grandstand view of the role up bridge (which gets tested each week on Fridays at mid day).  The first job was to finish cleaning the boat (which James started as we journeyed down from West Drayton) to get rid of the after effects of the dust storm which plagued London a couple of weeks ago.