69p can save you ££'s

Today saw us wake to a lot cooler day. The rain had passed overnight and the day has slowly got better. I had deliberately cruised close to Coven last night  as we were due to drop off my mum and Ross at the Fox & Anchor. We had a tick over cruise to the pub this morning and all went to plan with lunch taken and passengers disembarked.

We then cruised onto the Shroppie and are now moored up at Brewood in the cutting between 13 and 14. We have been watching the weather forecast and will sit tight in this cutting only needing about 4 hours more to get to Norbury for Sunday morning.

So to the title.... we are still learning about Percy and its engine, Percy does not have a tachometer to gauge speed and engine working by so we work on turns of the speed wheel. Progress is all relative, as was the case this mornings cruise with us having an blissful tickover cruise, but  normal cruising and to plan progress we work on 3mph. While cruising today I downloaded a 69p gps speed app for my Iphone and had it running while (unscientifically based on canal depth) we ran the engine at 3 turns of the speed wheel and 4 turns .... one whole turn gave us abut 0.4mph more speed over time up to about 3.7mph , still a good engine note and sound but 25% less and we were still making a nice 3.3 mph. So unless we hit a nice deep water straight it will be three turns and a truly relaxing engine and exhaust note and a lot less diesel used.

One other thing is Percy makes little wash, quite a bit of bow water movement but no great wash.

Some pics from the last 24 hours...

This was the view from our cosy bed hole 6am ish the other morning.

It's small but so are we so it works when we have visitors on board

We stopped here but then moved to be out of the wind.

Lilly checking out the boat storage.....

Not sure what this is being built. It was underway when we came this way last year.

This was our pub pit stop. Can't get much closer, helped by a very quiet canal.

I have a video of this little bit of canal just before cut end.... I'll get it uploaded sometime soon.