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I am for CART, I am for anyone who has anything to do with my waterways even if they sometimes get it wrong. I have found almost invariably in life that its a certain type of person that is often simply anti any person or institute with any kind of authority. I found some people to be anti police and funnily enough it nearly always turned out they had criminal records. We have morons daily who abuse staff in hospitals even when they are treating them!! CART knocking has simply taken over from BW knocking and funnily enough in my 28 years of dealing with them I have always found them helpful, funny innitt?

I bet whoever was on the bog got a shock.

Hear hear, excellent thread. Have to say I found gigoguy's tone intensely irritating at first, but then thought that if Aickman were alive today and posting on here, he'd probably have the same effect and we owe the continued existence of most of the network to him. Sometimes stroppy sods are just what's needed .

I keep turning up on this forum from time to time A little flushed as the blade went past

Twin motion activated chainguns, bit messy and the occasional cyclist gets caught but no one has untied my boat

Who are you again? I’ve never heard of you...

Very much this! Mr Steve Jay is very much a hater of everything CRT, him and the floater are a little tedious.

That's fine I have no problem with what you do with it if it ever becomes your boat I perhaps worded it incorrectly & was pointing out that having boated a considerable distance on a boat with that cabin/engine arrangement & found it a much less pleasant experience than the conventional engine set up on my FMC motor on which I boated 14 years both commercially & hotel set ups

It's a sad fact that, whatever SJ's agenda might be (and yes, I know it too!) he's almost certainly right that not many of CRT's on the ground staff think that their management is any good. Parkinson's second law, I think, that in any organisation, after a time it becomes more important to run the organisation than to look after what it was supposed to be doing in the first place. Why should CRT be any different? We're just lucky that most of the bods on the ground still care about the canals - all the back office people care about is their jobs.

Did you cut any Semi Circular sections out of the Tyres? You could have strapped them on your feet and Hitched a Tow from a Fast Boat. You could have invented the Sport of Aqua Planing?

Over the years I have had mostly good experiences when dealing with CaRT staff many levels. It is perhaps the general decline in pre-emptive maintenance, the closures, poor communications, delays, the reduction of bank staff and the apparent money-wasting schemes which cause so many of us concern over the future. In my experience those CaRT staff at the lower levels do seem to be quite disillusioned compared with those lock keepers employed by the EA on the Thames and Yorkshire Derwent. Admittedly I've had much less involvement with E.A. staff so no doubt someone will redress the balance. Generally I heard much the same kind of comment when I worked in local government but it does seem in the past 20 years some local authorities have made big improvements to staff moral. It should be well within CaRT's grasp to make improvements too but management does need to listen and act.

I think that's a bit unfair, I don't know who this Steve J is but a quick look at his website and it's pretty clear he has an "agenda" and, possibly, a bit too much time on his hands. So those who do know him from the past were making a pretty safe assumption I would say. FWIW a lot of this negativity about CRT flies in the face of my personal experience and I'm sure many others. I'd go further and say the vast majority of boaters I talk to have nothing but good things to say about the way the waterways are managed. The fact that there are some disgruntled workers isn't very revealing, I'm more impressed by the evidence of my own eyes.

Utterly amazing that people clearly state they HAVE NOT read the link but feel free to adversely comment on it's content, and on the poster's honestly held views. In the same post to also declare that in view of who posted, the post would be biased against C&RT, is gob smacking. Even those with experience of working with C&RT have acknowledged and recognised the truth of the views expressed. Rog

If it is on the site of Steve Jay / Steve Jenkin, (Jenlyn, formerly of this forum), I imagine it was never going to turn out with views strongly supportive of CRT! I haven't read through it , but surely it would be impossible to know if responses had been suitably manipulated to support his own message? (For clarity, I'm not saying they have been, only that they could be!).

That weld doesn't particularly matter though, does it? Well, not unless you use the thing round the wrong way, and have the rope pulling on the circular bit (which admittedly seems the popular way of doing it these days). If you use it correctly and have the rope round the stake with the circular bit behind, you're not putting any strain on the circular bit or the weld.

10 responses there. I wonder how many were surveyed and what the ratio of positive, neutral and negative responses were. Picking a handful of the worst ones is always going to create a negative picture of things.

Neither have we, and we have tied up in some allegedly dodgy locations. I agree leaving the boat for several days tied to pins/stakes/spikes is asking for trouble. We spent a very frustrating hour trying to shift a boat that had wedged itself very securely across the Leeds Liverpool back in August. According to a nearby skipper the owner of said boat had left it some days ago, just tied up to stakes, and it had rained a lot... Actually I have lost count of the number of boats we have had to rescue because the stakes have been pulled out. There's quite a bit of good advice on this thread but honestly if I found our boat had been untied more than once in my lifetime I would assume I had a stalker. We had some stones thrown at us some time ago for the first time, I doubt it will ever happen again, it's important to keep these things in perspective.

it's a sad fact that the ground staff will get that low in moral that they will leave and then where will CRT be? contractors that don't care sadly

If you won't visit the site to see what has been put then why are you having an input on the content that you haven't read?

Unless the Smartgauge is out of calibration, I think determining the SoC by looking at the morning voltage will yield the same results as the Smartgauge, within the accurcies of both methods. Depending on where you look on the internet, there are different tables of SoC vs rested voltage, with a difference of more than 5%. Which one is right?

Why on earth should I go anywhere near a site that I know has been used by its owner to attack me personally? I'll pass on that one, thank you. Mr Jay's site is like Thunderboat - I have no desire to read either.

how would you know if you haven't read the site? you can in fact comment if you wish but sadly not telepathically

I tried that but they kept taking me around the bend. Maybe I shouldn't have used radials.

I did the work the bulkhead divided a new bedroom from the bathroom

I think the stuff we were talking about was vermiculite fire brick

Sorted!! Turned everything off, phone and head unit, turned both back on, and there it all is... including Volume and the unit has been running for a couple of hours now without cutting out, so the original problem must have been inside the Sony head unit. Thanks to all for the input.

mmmmm how long have you been in the flatlands? Many many narrowboats navigate the tidal Trent every year. You are correct in that it needs some forward thinking but is perfectly within most narrowboats and boaters ability

I know it well, I used to have a 32 foot Dawncraft on the ouze. Neil

well at least you're heading in the right direction

Well 42 years experience with lead acid batteries in critical power applications, telephone exchanges, hospitals, banks, and data centres has show me you can get up to 95% in 12 hours and the final 5% takes another 12. Perhaps the US battery data comes from carefully controlled lab conditions? Back in the late 70's I had a colleague who had worked on diesel elecitric submarines, he reckoned they got battery charging down to 12 hours by bubbling compressed air up through the battery whilst it was charging. Apparently this prevented the hydrogen bubbles from collecting on the surace of the plates, which inhibits the chemical reaction between plate and electrolyte.

But those who SJ has in the past decided to post personal attacks on on his own website don't have that option do they?

I found that being retired freed up almost enough time to maintain my boat properly (almost but not enough) .

Trouble is you never feel older till you come to recuperate!

I retired 4 years ago - early because I had reached the stage where it was no longer a matter of listening to the 'management speak' but having to take part, to recite this rubbish to those who I managed. I found it impossible, I just left. Tim, I have not purchased a newspaper or taken up golf (or even considered either). You will be fine! I am considering replacing my pump-out with a compostor but everyone is allowed a little eccentricity in retirement.

I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Nigel for adding some clarity to the BC situation. None more so than Peel who probably have been following this and similar discussions and now know more than their own legal eagles could decipher. Perhaps not the outcome we wanted but at least we all now know the situation. I will continue to use the BC as a through route but will plan return trips to avoid charges. I also applaud Gigoguy for his challenge and others who have contributed useful information to this thread.

It may possibly be due to retarding the ignition, allowing unburned fuel into the exhaust. Many years ago, after rebuilding the engine on a Mustang which I owned, I managed to fire it up for the first time with the ignition retarded by quite a large amount. This caused my tubular exhaust "headers" to glow red hot. Setting the timing to the correct position cured it. I seem to recall that a lot of cars of the vintage shown in the film have manual ignition timing adjusters on the steering wheel. I suspect that this might be the drivers "party trick"

Ty for asking, I had a bit of a setback selling my flat, [in fact a nightmare], and got it sorted and back on the market, I have been twiddling my toes for five weeks, and have had ONE viewer, in spite of having had a major upgrade, I have missed a few nice boats, but at this moment in time, I am in limbo, .... Always look on the bright side of life, even though the dark clouds of despair drop hailstones the size of golfballs on your financial umbrella.

I think it now highly unlikely that any of the few remaining ex working boats still with CRT will ever be offered to "Joe Public" on the open market, by any means of sale. The exact mechanism seems to change each time, but unless you can put yourself forward as a heritage group or some kind of trust, I don't think you will secure one by this route. If you want a real piece of history, better looking at those privately advertised, whether on e-Bay, Apollo Duck or via the HNBC. If not already sold, "Otley" would be my current pick for anybody wanting a project. I have no real idea if it would represent more work than malvern, but my gut instinct is that it wouldn't. Most of the BW/CRT owned boats are fairly "clapped" once passed to new owners, (witness the huge spend that Chesterfield Canal Trust people have had to make to bring Python back to a good standard).

I am not sure that is what Pete is saying. 600Ah seems an awful lot to me for a holiday boat as well. It all depends where the 600Ah came from - guess , advice, or sensible calculation. Remember that the larger the bank the longer you can go between charging BUT the longer it will take to fully recharge. Really, in my view, you should look at the recharge time for your use of the boat first and from there work out how you ensure your consumption is balanced by the available charge. That should also give you a fair idea of the optimum bank size. Fitting a huge bank is fine as long as you keep it as near fully charges as you can but if you regularly use it to stay a day or two without charging then there is every chance you will never fully charge it while away from shore power and thus suffer sulphation, not to mention deeper discharges than may be best fro the batteries.

Bullying from middle management? Pretty much sums up my time with CRT, as do a worrying amount of the other points raised

The source tapes of clips used in Yesterday's Witness - The Narrowboat Men can be downloaded from: WAV format = 1.80GB https://wetransfer.com/downloads/10cae746dc28090344c7c20e06c6573220171017143420/0c88976cb3c88437dfed799f3cf42a3420171017143420/7b4b50 MP3 format = 329MB https://wetransfer.com/downloads/ef4b43a066f163b569f8a83e359f1e3720171016134221/031d174e143e593f179fe448bd243e0e20171016134221/3db15a

Yes its completely wrong and that's my point. How many people have not gone and done the northern system with longer boats due to this fact? I would suggest that its quite a few. For instance my bro in laws present boat is 67 feet and mine is 68 feet and we are going to York next year via Thorne. This misnomer has been printed since time immemorial and the facts are these. A seventy foot boat WILL go thro Thorne lock both ways. Going uphill you drive straight in and coming back downhill you spin the boat round at the top of the lock and come down backwards and spin the boat again at the bottom of the lock no need for winding holes. I will clarify one point here in that my boat was a 70 foot steve Hudson sold as 70 foot, now I don't know just how accurate any particular boatbuilder or indeed Steve H was but my boat fitted with absolutely zero tolerance ( well maybe I inch ) so a boat over that length will have no chance. So seventy foot it is subject to that detail. The tiller needs to be able to lie as near straight as possible at the arse end also to clear the gate walkways. we did it no problem. In short that one piece of incorrect information has probably put many many people off for many years. I must reiterate that's a narrowbeam boat, a 70 foot widebeam would have absolutely zero chance. Absolutely correct. This 68 footer has a cabin length eighteen inches longer than my seventy footer did for instance and the fitout is better for living on.

Layout is far more important then length for making a boat suitable or not. We have been on some 60 odd ft boats that have less useable space then 59 odd ft boats due to wasted space and poor layout.

"Tom's Moorings" at Market Drayton was similar.... we had to move jetty as the one we usually moored on silted up so much that a tyre lying on the bottom wasn't even fully submerged. Now its been dredged, jetties rebuilt, new power poles, lighting and water put in... and its now Ladybird moorings (Not sure why Ladybird... I would have thought Gingerbread would have been a more suitable name)

Most often, your boat could be doing with being about 5 feet longer, except now and then when about 5 feet less would be handy. How long it is to start with seems to be rather less hard and fast.