What a do

As I said previous we were taking Dove to Hoo Mill for a bit of a do. I wont go into detail about the party, as Blossom has written a wonderful blog on it already.
This outing worked out to be a good way of testing all the new bits, such as the engine for one and to see how the prop behaved.
Saturday was never going to be an early start, due it being Andrea's birthday on Friday and her swallowing copious amounts of what she called "pink pop" Rose wine, I think is the proper term. Looked more like diesel to me. Anyway, after loading the where with all for the trip we got underway. Up through Middle and Shade House locks, forward and reverse gears working ok and we're popping along quite nicely. Up Woodend lock and its a level run now until Colwich lock.
With it being a long level run you wind up the motor and steer, so I keep popping down to see if everything is still there and doing what it should doing, quite boring really. On approaching Armitage Tunnel, Andrea got off and went to see if anything was coming the other way and I just coasted along in tickover, Andrea signaled that a boat was coming through so I popped it in reverse and put few revs on to bring us to a stop. But, it didn't, it went faster forward, insert your choice of word here....... Andrea is shouting "STOP" I'm shouting "THE B######D THING WON'T". I dive down the 'ole to find gear link has fell off, after fiddling about I get the box in reverse which then stalls the motor and we're still traveling forward, quite quick. I then jump out of the engine 'ole grab the back rail rope and rap round the tunnel hand rail and stop the boat inches from Stem bar contact. Few!!!! Apparently the panic on the other boat was greater than mine. How this happened, I don't know, but I couldn't make it do it again, but still, time for a re-design. All ran well for a while then, just after passing Trent Aqueduct the motor started to fade away and come back then fade away again, this was obviously a fuel problem, but where? I first thought the day tank was empty but no. The fuel filter? No. It turned out to be the valve on the tank had wound it's self shut with the vibration, Never had that one before! We finally arrive at Hoo Mill and the party was in full swing, went to wind round, breasted up against Trout and went into beer mode.
The only other thing I found was the oil leak on the pressure gauge pipe I thought I'd fixed had got worse and we had used nearly as much oil as diesel. That is now re-piped and sorted.