Woke up to a warm trailer and a healthy Lyn! The furnace didn’t come on at all last night so things are really looking up. Early morning temperature was 15°C and rising.
After breakfast Lyn carried on with her sewing projects for a while, and I went over to the local school with the helicopter. This time I stayed clear of the “beginners” mode, and went with the intermediate setting. All in all it went pretty well, a couple of heavy landings until I got used to the throttle response. Biggest problem I had was telling the front from the back. The back of the machine has a large LED light on it which shows the state of the beast. In my mind big lights are placed at the front of aircraft. This resulted in the helicopter get further away from me than I had planned a couple of times.
Back at the trailer I wanted to tackle a problem with a meter I have to help set up the dish alignment. It hadn’t been working and I thought the problem was that its batteries needed charging, unfortunately fully charged batteries didn’t solve the problem. I took it outside and connected it to the dish with a short length of cable; it then worked. Back inside and reconnected it to a longer cable I had coming from the dish… nothing. Putting on my Sherlock Holmes hat, obvious deduction was a bad cable. Replacing one of the connectors solved the problem. This episode got me to thinking about last years trip where we couldn’t get the satellite receiver to work, I now believe that the problem was caused by this cable. I have four cables I can use, but only need to connect two of them. I remember last year checking the cables and they all seemed OK when tested with a meter, but in this case the problem was that the centre wire was just a little too short to make a good connection. You live and learn.
After lunch we headed out to get reacquainted with geocaching. Again we chose 4 sites to go to and again we managed to find all 4 caches. One of the sites had a small natural well bubbling water to surface making for a soggy trek. Another site was at a bar-pit, which I had never heard of. Turns out it is a local expression for a gravel pit. Any way we managed to get our first decent walk in since Monday, which is a good thing as our weight loss has slowed right down. By mid afternoon the temperature had risen to the low 20’s and humidity was making it’s presence felt.
A week or so ago I asked if any one knew what the metal machine was that was in one of the pictures
This response from Charlie solves the mystery:
“The large iron objects are fixed position gun placements from the Civil war era. The muzzle loading gun is missing. The front end is fixed and the back end has the two wheels to move the gun to point in the right direction.”
Thanks Charlie.