A quick visit to St Ives Monday market after a family breakfast revealed very little of interest and so I tackled the repairs to The Lady as Di took the children to the St Ivo Pool swimming. I fixed all three problems and then helped Debbie and Daniel to catch some fish and then took Di to Flood’s Wine bar tonight. Reports are emerging of conflict between The Palace and Downing Street now that a third of the Games competitors are out with the boycott.Back in South Africa, Tuto meets Botha without agreement and Boesak’s car is tear-gassed after his church service
Awoken at dawn by Debbie coming into our room, having had a bedtime dream. Then awoken at 7.00am by the girls again and Di had a scramble to get everything ready for breakfast. I took a long while in the bathroom and by the time I had got to the saloon, the others had already started their breakfast. Helped Di clean up The Lady afterwards and then set off to see the St Ives Monday market and the antique auction viewing. Not much of interest at either and so came back and started the repairs to The Lady, whilst the others continued to shop and swim at the St Ivo.
I tracked down our problem with the refrigerator, which was not the fridge at all, but a conflict of the negatively earthed fridge and the positively earthed engine. The gas lines were bridging the two at the diesel tank and shorting the wires. Managed to fix that and then the pressure water system and finally the rear toilet. So now, just about all of the systems are working properly. Lunch of chicken and chips from the takeaway, but went out this evening with Di to the Floods Wine Bar, where we enjoyed a nice meal and walk afterwards. Took a look at the new Dolphin Pub below the bridge on the far bank and thought that the good moorings and meat carvery would be worth a visit some time. This afternoon I got the rods out, bought 30p worth of maggots from the tackle shop opposite and did some fishing in the Waits Quay. Debbie fished with me and I caught an eel. Then Daniel took over her rod and caught 4 dace & rudd, which he enjoyed as a rare excursion into the piscatorial art! After a few light showers, the weather turned clear again later on and the sun was quite hot when it was out. There was some space at the Waits today, which we thought strange on the market day, but there are more moorings these days in St Ives. We plan to cruise early tomorrow and go through the manned locks on the Middle Ouse and reach the ‘Twenty Pence’ moorings on the Old West before evening. There were many fighter planes flying today over our moorings and rather too low and too noisy for our convenience. News today was of the mounting crisis over the Commonwealth Games as Chairman, Robert Maxwell, plans to charge the boycotters £2M for the disruption. 26 companies (today India Seychelles and one other) are now out, making it the lowest participated in numbers of countries since 1964. Still, 2,000+ compete out of the originally planned 3,000. There was a Sunday Times report yesterday of conflict between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace over Thatcher’s style of government, but all sides back pedal in today’s follow up story, even though Sunday Times Editor, Andrew O’Neil, claims Palace sources as the basis of the story. Bishop Tutu met Botha in South Africa today, but without any agreements. In Cape Town, Dr Allan Boesak had a teargas canister fired into his car after taking a religious service claimed to be political.