Heading back to Ellesmere as the blacking appointment is coming up.

Who'd have thought it, there is a mobile chippy that comes to Bettisfield and sits in the local community building car park for between 4pm and 6pm every other Thursday, so we took advantage and had ourselves a fish and chip supper. Quite a treat.

Hanging around at Blakemere (hoping to see the kingfishers) until we move up to Ellesmere dry dock.

Iowner in dry dock for the week for blacking.Arrived at about half six outside at the facilities so as to get ride of my rubbish and make sure the porta pottie was empty and filled up with water.
The CRT staff arrived at about 8 o'clock and filled the dry dock to let another boat out. Once that was off and away they manoeuvred me into the dock, positioned my nicely and emptied the dock of water.
Robert Bird (the guy doing the blacking) arrived during this process and was ready to start pressure blasting Iowner as soon as the dock was dry.

All a bit of a blur. Supervised Robert doing the blacking (sort of). Once the pressure washing was complete he showed me some of the 'damage'. What I was looking at is Microbiologically Influenced Corrosion (MIC), evidenced by bright patches of steel. Endemic on the Llangollen because the water is clean enough to support the bacteria that causes it. Left untreated it can go through a steel hull in a matter of months in ideal conditions. Initial reaction is panic, but after a little thought and research I came to the conclusion that it could not be as bad as the worst case as I would have heard of it before and there would be a significant number of boats sinking because of it and insurance premiums would be elevated for craft on the Llangollen canal.
It can be treated by washing with methylated spirit and then three coats of bitumen blacking, so that is what happened.
Had some welding done at the front of the boat to replace the wooden shields either side of my fore cabin, new anodes (to minimise MIC) and the rudder seat rebuilt so that it no longer rattles.
Most of the time I was in the boat working on my new web site.

Changeover day. Iowner out, Dennis in. My No2 couldn't stand the thought of living in the dry dock while all the work was being done so she had organised a hire boat from Trevor Basin so as to spend the week with her sister at Llangollen doing sisterly things. She had a taxi booked with detailed instructions as to the pick up point, but as is so often the case, the taxi driver thought he knew best. Spotted him in the Tesco car park and showed him where he should be. When he did arrive he sat in his seat and simply popped the boot open for us to load up. I can (sort of) understand why he did this as he was grossly overweight and struggled hard to extricate himself from the vehicle when we could not operate the boot catch. Got all the luggage loaded up and off they went.

I have an appointment at the eye hospital at Shrewsbury tomorrow and as I hate to be taken by surprise and like to make sure everything goes according to plan I did a dry run today. Caught the 501 from Ellesmere to Shrewsbury bus station and then a choice of busses from there to the eye hospital. Got there in plenty of time for my appointment tomorrow and checked in with reception explaining that this was a dry run and that my appointment was for tomorrow, all OK.
The return journey was a little more arduous as I had to get to the bus station at Shrewsbury by 16:40 at the latest as that was when the last bus back to Ellesmere leaves.

Eye appointment proper. Started off by telling the specialist that it was my right eye with the problem not the left as stated in the referral letter and I wanted them to be absolutely sure of that because I would hate for them to take out the wrong eye. He assured me that they were not going to take any eyes out and that he could tell from the preliminary scans taken as part of the appointment procedure that it was indeed my right eye with the abnormality. After some drops in the eyes and a few bright lights being shone at them while the visual examination was taking place he explained to me that it was not a tumour (my main worry) but age-related macular degeneration which could not be cured or reversed but it could be controlled and hopefully slowed down. The effect of age-related macular degeneration is that the central part of vision goes dark due to the receptors being worn out.

Dennis out, my No2 back. Took Dennis along the arm to be next to Iowner, moored up and wandered along to the wharf to see if my No2 had returned. She had just pulled up in a taxi and was getting all her luggage out of the boot so I did that while she paid the taxi driver.

Somewhere quiet to recover from the hurly burly of holidays and boat blacking and eye appointments.