Leaderboard

Just not true im afraid, all previous advice is likely to end in catastrophy.. There are strong rituals about changing the name of your boat, and if you have been observing that the moon has been getting bigger, then this is a portent that the god of man made craft is aware of your plans and sending you a message. firstly the boat must be lifted from the canal in alignment with the major trade routes you intend to travel. So align with the a5 if you are on the grand union, the a14 if on the nene, etc. the dock must align. If lifting get the boat dropped on the flow line. secondly the ritualistic check to the goddess of the split pin must be carried out. balms and potions should be massaged into the exposed panels. Those of some persuasions light ritual bonfires of horse excrement and pitch, to smear over themselves and the goddess of the cut, but the cult of toopack has mostly ended that. finaly remember to drop the boat back in with the words i rename this boat ‘ and ‘ break a bottle of fullers esb on the stern ( and remember to tie a line on somewhere) you may think i am taking the proverbial, im not, when a certain ship was launched in liverpool , they planned to name it enterprise . However the docker swinging the hammer on the final baulk was thinking about what his wife had said last night about him being a bit premature. He swung the hammer just as the mayor of liverpool reading from the script ‘we pray this enterprise is a titanic commercial success i name this ship ......... as a result the ship hit the water early on a word begining with t. ( a name never to be quoth at a launch) and had to be renamed . This is because the last word spoken as a boat enters the water is its name. the rest is history. be very careful. if it is a dark side wide boat being placed on a silken thread of narrowness that is especially unlucky, you will be cursed and the god of wanton depreciation and high cost will haunt you forever.

I can't believe we've come to a point where Bizzard is quoting another post... and the one which makes the most sense is Bizzard's!

Sorry Rusty. Sadly you took the bait on this one. I often wonder why, Pirates in particular, lose their hands and feet. They all seemed to do it. A bit careless if you ask me. If your oppo has suffered losing a limb, you'd be extra careful surely. And finally, "where's your buccaneers!?"

I changed my boat's name while it was in the water and twenty years later the gearbox broke. Be very careful.

"Mooting is the oral presentation of a legal issue or problem against an opposing counsel and before a judge. It is perhaps the closest experience that a student can have whilst at university to appearing in court." and..... "adjective 1. subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty. "whether the temperature rise was mainly due to the greenhouse effect was a moot point" synonyms: debatable, open to debate, open to discussion, arguable, questionable, at issue, open to question, open, doubtful, open to doubt, disputable, contestable, controvertible, problematic, problematical, controversial, contentious, vexed, disputed, unresolved, unsettled, up in the air, undecided, yet to be decided, undetermined, unconcluded "whether the temperature rise is due to the greenhouse effect is a moot point" 2. having little or no practical relevance, typically because the subject is too uncertain to allow a decision. "the whole matter is becoming increasingly moot" verb 1. raise (a question or topic) for discussion; suggest (an idea or possibility). "the scheme was first mooted last October" synonyms: raise, bring up, broach, mention, put forward, introduce, advance, present, propose, suggest, submit, propound, air, ventilate "the idea was first mooted in the 1930s" noun 1. HISTORICAL an assembly held for debate, especially in Anglo-Saxon and medieval times. 2. LAW a mock judicial proceeding set up to examine a hypothetical case as an academic exercise. "the object of a moot is to provide practice in developing an argument" "

I've managed to find a couple, the second one down shows clearly the steelwork intact after removing the overplating.

Oh yes! For some reason I hadn't associated that with bad luck - talk about not being introspective! Anyway, I'm due to pick it up at the beginning of March so I'll post all about it. I don't care if it's boring, it cost an arm and a leg so you can all suffer!

Lady G....At your age.

Hmmm, commiserate with more like! Not sure why someone with only 59 posts to their name would want to do it, masochism perhaps? Anyway I’m sure he (or she, or they) will be great. If they survive!

Yes Ive inadvertantly clicked onto some facebook items before but the stupid pop up asking to log on or join overwhelms the page all too often. Facebook is at last being seen for what it is and hopefuly their abuse of peoples privacy and disrespect of various laws is coming to the forefront. Such platforms make life very easy for criminals in many ways which is a shame as if it were set up and used properly it would have been beneficial to many.

Look ive only just got up , im building a house on the wrong side of the planet which is alien to me. All the measurements keep getting screwed up, and the cement mixer goes the wrong way round. I havent had my medication. In the middle of this someone needs to avoid a titanic catastrophy over boat renaming and you expect instant accuracy and recall. no wonder boats keep getting named ferfucsake and mindyourhead by mistake. take advice. Belfast or liverpool who cares why let truth get in the way, we are lead by our peers and they have an upside down map, and keep climbing off the bus.

It's a basic design flaw of all single-glazed windows that they aren't double-glazed!

Inspecting the hatch at the rear of my boat there is a pool of water about 5mm deep. A couple of months ago my calorifier decided to dump all 55l of water into boay which I thought I'd all mopped up. Could this pool of water be coming from back then? The other inspection hatches middle and front show damp on the floor but only damp no water. Which I'm assuming can be put down to condensation? There are no pipes leaking as far as I can tell but this pool of water reappears every week or so since clarifier leak. This boat larks a real learning curve ?

If you don't know ................ I'm not going to tell you, ?

It's that time of night again, isn't it.

Such huts would have been useful for the boats carrying explosives from Ellesmere Port for the coal mines in the Black Country. Charlie Atkins told me he used to work on this traffic, and they were not allowed to have a fire on-board. However, it was expected that any company official would let a boatman use their house or office fire for cooking or making tea. As the boats worked non-stop, a hut with a fire would have been a welcome sight at night.

Good for you for getting that sorted out properly, well worth doing right.

Bit of a scrub with swarfega, they will be right

Our Rusty (no not that one, it's the very hairy one I'm talking about) has been having an intermittent tummy upset. It's been becoming more frequent, despite being careful about what food he has. He's been really good, we've not had any accidents in the boat, though he has been in distress, padding up and down the boat. The last bout was when we were iced up on Tixel Wide, having to get off the boat every half hour or so throughout the night. We thought it time to seek help. The reason for the post is to recommend the Rivermeet Vets, it's a short walk from the bottom of Lock 5 on the Atherstone flight. We had an appointment with a brilliant lady vet there (Jordan). She wanted to conduct investigations to rule out anything nasty. She planned to see us today at Riversmeet Vets (their other facility) near Tamworth for ultrasound and blood tests. But to get there we needed transport. We discovered 'Animals At Home ', it's a specialist taxi service (amongst other services) for pets. The service is nationwide (franchised), and the driver that took Rusty and my OH to the vets was brilliant. He even waited with my OH in the reception as they'd arrived half an hour too early (thanks to light road traffic because of half term). Cost of the pet's taxi £60 for two journeys. Well worth it we thought, and it's reassuring knowing this company can get us out of a possible horrible situation anywhere on the canal system. We can always phone 999 in an emergency if we get into trouble, we can't do that for Rusty. Pleased to report the Vet didn't find anything horrible, just a couple of non-worrying strange points, like a large spleen and a high red cell count. We're hanging around for a while for blood test results re pancreatic anomalies. Other good points, the vet knows we're on a boat and said that wouldn't be a problem, if Rusty has to have regular medication, the vet can provide a prescription, to be picked up from the nearest vet to where we're moored.

I said next to your bed - next time you hear grinding in the night and just dismiss it, maybe you should roll over and have a look down to the floor!

Good news of sorts. Hope they can track down what the allergy is so he can have some sort of variety in his diet. Sydney is on grain free and reacts a bit to beef. Which is a shame as he does like a tiny bit of steak. But it makes his skin red and itchy!

He’s out by rather a large factor. The coefficient of expansion for Steel is around 12x10-6 per degree C. So a difference of temperature of 20C (unlikely I would have thought) gives 240x10-6, or 0.000240. Over 60ft that gives a difference in length of 0.0144ft, or 0.17”.

We got the results back this morning, and thankfully Rusty doesn't have pancreatitis He's got a touch of colitis, and IBS in the small intestines, with tummy upsets being possibly triggered by an allergy, which is increasing by age. This is could be damage from when he had parvo as a pup. His symptoms could also be triggered by stress (he's got chronic separation anxiety). We climbed 5 locks the other day, and he got really stressed, as he normally does, when one of us is off the boat (he's 6 years old so I doubt we can stop this now), but surprisingly his tummy was fine. The vet (Jordan) phoned, and explained the way forward with his treatment. He's to go on a hypoallergic diet for 8 weeks, with nothing else to eat, no bacon rind at breakfast, and I'm guessing if all is ok at the end of the 8 weeks, other food and added. While we're cruising, she going to give us antibiotics just in case he has a flare-up. We'll be returning in 2 months for the vet to check him out. We cannot fault the vets at Riversmeet, and they're so handy for the canal, plus the vets very sympathetic to continual cruisers.

I think it's following the modern trend of anyone/thing more connected with bygone days canal wise is seen as irrelevant to today's requirements so not much reliance/interest

Arrrrgggghhhh, you see them too now Phil!!. I thought it was just me , but I was stuck behind the sofa for some time.

Our first goldfish were Gog and Magog Magog is often associated with apocalyptic traditions, Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal" (Ezek 38:2 NIV); on the basis of this mention, "Gog and Magog" over time became associated with each other as a pair. In the New Testament, this pairing is found in the Book of Revelation 20:8, in which instance they may merely be metaphors.

Good advice ...almost.....wipe it once with a spirit covered rag....it will be dirty black. Wipe it again with a spirit covered rag in the same place. If it's black this time it's bitumen. If it's almost clean , it's a different coating which could be comastic, epoxy 2 pack, gloss hammerite, ..or something else not dissolvable by white spirit.

Consider installing your back cabin stove in the middle of the boat. ? That way it will heat both ends and you won't be constantly trying to move heat from one end to the other. Back cabins aside, I see so many narrow boats with stoves installed in the wrong place, usually by the bow doors. That might work in terms of being a convenient out of the way corner in which to install a stove, but in terms of heating the whole boat it's completely inefficient.