Where's Bertie? He's spending three nights in the relative shelter of Gardener's Cottage campsite, where he's been a number of times before (most recently in May this year). It's still £20 including 10kwh of electricity, plus £1 for a 6-minute shower.
Weather: Friday - dry until the middle of the day then increasingly wet. Saturday - calm and dry morning, getting a bit breezy as Storm Boelo approached. Sunday - absolutely wild as I type this, half an hour before the wind speeds are due to peak at 66mph.
Checking Bertie's leisure battery status when I got up, it was with some alarm that I found it reporting a voltage of 11.2. Yikes! Allowing a lead acid battery to go below 11.9v doesn't do it any good at all. Moreover, it was going to be a problem in the current weather if our battery couldn't cope with running the heating for a couple or three hours a day. The problem with reading a voltage off a battery is that you get a false reading if there's any draw (or input) currently on the battery, and because it had been such a cold night, the heater fan had been on high for a while by the time I got out of bed. Happily, once I'd turned the heating off, the voltage slowly settled at a more acceptable level - phew, the battery isn't quite dead yet.
Once that was sorted, my mind turned to the weather forecast, which had now improved from 95% chance of heavy rain all day, to a 70% chance at 8am, rising in increments to 95% by 11am. With the wind speeds being unremarkable, I decided to omit the other Marilyn I wanted to do in the area in favour of getting another TGOCE recce done, this one taking me from Glen Isla (initially retracing my steps from the end of yesterday) and over to Backwater Reservoir. It's a route that Mick and I took in 2009 on the TGOC, in wet weather and poor visibility. Thankfully the cloud base this morning was high - indeed, I even saw some glimpses of blue sky along the way.
As I set out, I figured that if I could get 5k before it rained on me, then even if it remained wet the rest of the way, I would have done well. When a few drops fell on me at 4km, I quickly popped my pack off, dug out my waterproof gloves, put my pack back on ... and the rain stopped again. I completed the 12k outing without so much as another drop hitting me. Indeed, so pleasant was it that as I approached Backwater, I sent Mick a message suggesting that he stroll out to meet me, which he duly did. Had I been five minutes behind myself, he wouldn't have appreciated my suggestion, but as it was, I'd just got my shoes off inside Bertie when a gentle pitter pattering was heard on his roof, and a few minutes later it was drumming. Once again, I'd timed myself to perfection.
Having booked this campsite at Fern for a couple of nights, I now realised that I wouldn't be able to deliver on the breakfast I'd promised Mick at the cafe at Peel Farm (although had I thought about it within twenty minutes of finishing my recce, we could have made it before the noon cut off time). As it was, we popped by for lunch, during which time it occurred to me that there was no point driving past my next recce location, only to have to drive back to it in a few days time. It wouldn't be worth a 12-mile backtracking round trip next time the weather was good just to avoid half an hour of unpleasant weather now, which was all that would be required, if we could get Bertie to the nearest car park (last year I'd walked in from a few miles away, and hadn't checked out the car park, but my recollection of the lane to get there was that it would be fine for Bertie. As it turned out, the access track to the car park is in a dreadful state, but Bertie was easily able to cope with it).
Then onto Fern we came, to batten down the hatches for Storm Boelo.
Yesterday (Saturday) morning was the calm before the storm, giving us a 3-hour window to go out and do something nearby, except that there's nothing obvious nearby to go and do. So after showers and a few chores, we turned Bertie around so he was facing the predicted wind direction for the worst part of the storm (just S of W), being sure that he was out of the reach of any tree that might fall, and just sat around and waited for the weather.
We fully expected a rough night, but the shelter of the wall of the walled-garden that sits 20m in front of us, combined with being head on into the wind meant it wasn't bad at all. In fact, I slept for 8 solid hours, without stirring once.
As I type this in the middle of Sunday, it has got wild out there. The gusts are swirling around, so we're getting walloped from the side every now and then. Fortunately, the rain hasn't reached us yet and the sun is on the windscreen, so after days of being huddled under blankets and wearing hats at all times, we're currently enjoying it being 23 degrees inside without the need for any heating. In fact, I've just checked the forecast again and it seems that the big band of rain is now going to miss us, so if we're lucky this sun will last until sunset ... which will come an hour earlier today than it did yesterday.
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