From Bad to Worse!

Captains Blog

Canal Date 15^th April 2015

Things go from bad to worse!

 

The Man came and changed the gearbox on Monday evening and bless him he worked until 8.30 in the evening to finish it. We tried it and all was well. Next morning we set off at dawn, well 0930hrs, to move on to our next mooring location of Sutton Cheney. We need to move as we were into our fifth day on a two day restricted mooring.

All went well, the new shiny gearbox performed well, it was smooth and quiet.

The visitor moorings here at Sutton Cheney are very nice indeed. There is a café a few yards along the path and the Bosworth Fields Battle Site the other direction. The mooring are pontoons on the off side and so are very quiet. Once again it is only a 2-day site so we can’t stop long. I tried to move the boat along the moorings this morning (Wednesday) only to find that once gain it would work perfectly in reverse but nothing at all in forwards! It's a brand new gearbox and showing similar faults to the old one. It just can’t be faulty; it is just too much of a coincidence. It must be the control cable or low oil’ it just has to be something simple. Now at this point I think it is right to remind you that this is NB Daddy Cook and the only thing simple on this boat is the owners! I spent an hour looking at the gear cable and oil levels. Nothing wrong there so I phoned RCR again (The company that supplied and fitted the new gearbox). They sent the same man out again, after about 30 seconds he came out with the same line as before “The box is F****d again mate. Not what I expected and certainly not what I wanted to hear. I sat and watched him take out the gearbox again. My nerves and temper being calmed by a proper man sized glass of scotch!

So here we are again – on a 48-hour mooring with no hope of movement in the near future. He will return wit

H yet another gearbox just as soon as he finds one but he has no idea how long that may be!

I phoned C&RT to let them know that I was stranded again; they said that they knew as I had already told them. I then had to go through the whole sorry story with them.

The most annoying part of this saga is that every passing boater askes what’s wrong, we tell them and then they say Oh really – PRM boxes never go wrong! Oh yes the bloody well do!