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After many weeks of research and taking advice plus countless looking on Apolloduck today I went to Sawley Marina to go for a demonstration cruise with Dave and Trudy the lovely owners of Once upon a time 65x12 Widebeam. I first saw her ( the boat) on a random visit to Sawley a few weeks ago and although I had no appointment to view Dave was happy for me to step aboard and take a look .... both he and the boat impressed me to the point where I could not stop going back on line looking at her. I then went back to Sawley with my daughter to show her the boat and again even though it was a random visit Dave invited us aboard and gave us a tour and answered countless questions I asked of him. I did look at other Widebeam boats one in particular moored at Mirfield and despite it being better equipped and only 57feet so allowing a lot more cruising the owner was without doubt one of the hardest people Iv ever tried doing business with. He seemed reluctant to cooperate with any requests and seemed unsure on many points Iv raised to the point I believed he was definitely hiding something from me.... anyway his attitude and rudeness sealed the fate of that purchase ever happening. So a call to Sawley and a little bit of bartering and today’s cruise was arranged. Now the experiment the moment I stepped aboard was without doubt fantastic Dave and Trudy had the boat built and it was very clear their connection with her was very strong indeed. We drank tea and chatted before Dave showed me the cellar as his wife calls it and he wanted me to feel the engine so as to see it was stone cold be for he turned the key and she sprang into life before settling into a nice burble. A demonstration taking down of the pram cover followed and we were on our way. Turning left out of sawyonto the Sawley Cutting Dave steered whilst giving advice in a clear understandable manner and once we reached the Trent he stood to one side and handed control of his boat to me. Iv been told many times these fat boats swim like a brick but if that’s the case then this was a damn good brick. I soon found myself at one with the boat she steered clean and responsive and at no point was I fazed by her. We did a few locks and went under a few low bridges on to Shardlow where Dave demonstrated a relaxed trouble free turn around for out trip back to Sawley.To say I had a smile on my face was an understatement and a few cups of tea and a lot of questions later I handed over my deposit. So in a few weeks time at 63 I’m about to start a new chapter in my life and like all great stories it begins with Once upon a Time. I would like to thank Dave and Trudy for their honesty and openness today plus I need to thank Peyerboat and Tony D who over many weeks have advised guided and listened to my many wows on issue I was experiencing trying to find the right boat for me. So once she’s mine I’ll be changing her name to Misty & Me ( That’s my Labrador ) together we are entering a new phase in our lives amongst you guys.

Possibly...or it recognises that it takes some folk more time for the foolishness of their posts to sink in. Mine is set to infinity and I also get an automatic email alert asking "Did you really mean to post that??"

Hi All, An update after me and the wife visited the Ashby on foot many times recently and checking out the linear moorings site at Sutton Cheney i must confess we are smitten so much so that although not suitable for my friend he now has a mooring on a (marina not for me) It does look very tranquil quiet and such beautiful countryside and have not heard a bad thing said except for the shallowness of the canal which is not a problem for us as our boat has a shallow draft and is just over 8 tons The cafe car park seems very safe and secure and locals report no trouble there ok there are some artistic different individuals in the mooring line up but all seemed very friendly to us when we chatted to them from the towpath side to cut this short we now have a mooring on the this site and can't wait to moor up and enjoy The Ashby

Agree with DMR. If we are leaving a wide lock and someone is coming the other way, we leave the gates as they were. Some people demand both gates open and will shout at you if you close one, some people demand one gate open and will shout at you if you don’t close one. You can’t win. From your point of view I would just be grateful that the lock was ready for you and you didn’t have to drain it etc. I think you are being rather hard to please.

It's called a pintle. The bit it fits into is called the gudgeon.

At the lock now,all is fine! Just 2 boats in front, going down. Geert

My OH usually finds me surrounded by piles of books I have removed from the shelves to "sort". "What are you doing?" "I'm sorting my books out..." "How many have you sorted?" "I'm still sorting this one." "Is that the same one you were sorting yesterday?" "Leave me alone! I'm busy!" I have this notion that if I rotate my collection periodically there will always be a forgotten gem appearing at eye level.

I well remember one of our 1st times on a swing mooring. Holyhead (Anglesey) bay. We had a static caravan on a campsite close to Holyhead. Boat on swing mooring which was accessed by the Yacht-Club 'water taxi'. SWBMO (God bless her) decided it would be nice to have a night gently rocked to sleep by the small Summer swell. I decided not to stay on board, rather go back and spend the night in the Caravan as the forecast was not good. Took the last water-taxi back to shore at 9:00pm. Middle of the night and the phone goes off - "COME AND GET ME, its 'orrible she cried" I (gently) explained that she was on the boat, and, had the tender 1/2 mile out at sea - the water taxi's did not start to run again until 9:00am there was absolutely nothing I could do (unless she wanted the lifeboat launching) Wind dropped by morning, took the 1st water-taxi and I had to wake her up to do my breakfast. Not on !!!

Management fees for a 12th share in managedcschemes vary between £400 to around £450 per year which is why we are self managed in our syndicate of 12 and we find the running of the boat is straightforward with a small team of around three or four people filling the roles of secretary, treasurer and someone organising repairs and maintenance. We all meet up oncd a year for a dinner and then a meeting to decid what needs doing in the coming year, where we base the boat etc. It all runs very well with very few issues. Howard

There are Graham apparently for dome year's

Yes it's ok, it's mounted bang down the center line.

Somebody better tell that hire company that uses them that they don't work ? I watched them on you Tube the other week

This tube thing links the speed control to the engine. The rod has a piston on the end, a spring sits on top of that and bears against the brass adjuster at the top. Lifting the rod pulls the whole thing upwards via the spring. At idle, the spring is supposed to be fully unloaded and loose That link sits on a lever on the side of the governor housing, directly connected to the rack by the lower arm. There is a second spring pulling the lever against the governor The governor lever links directly to the rack of the pump This device also contains a spring, presumably to control the idle. Or let the rack move across against this stop to cut the fuel Does that help? It was corrosion in the tubular thing that was causing trouble, together with the speed control on the roof having no positive idle position Richard

Yes you did, but that was just silly. Rethinking the nomenclature I think nA is confusing as it could be confused with current. I propose nAc.

Should have nipped across and squatted one of those proper boats on the other bank. You would have barely noticed the slight chop.

Looks like efficiency is going to kill them off......

Honestly, some people here have no sense of style..!!! ?

I thought you were going to say every good story starts with ' so I had a few beers......' Always good when a purchase happens smoothly and with decent people. Just purchased myself and couldn't have been a more pleasant purchase with all good people I have met and had to deal with so far !!

We have just done a similar trip - Seend to Bristol and back in 4 days. We did Bathampton to Bristol in a single day each way, so didn't need to moor up on the river section. On our way down the pontoon mooring below the Avon Railway bridge (just above Keynsham) was fully occupied by a number of double moored mostly scruffy narrow boats and cruisers, so we assumed the CMers had taken up residence. So we were rather surprised that on the return trip the next day there was only one boat moored, and the rest of the pontoon was being used by several groups - families and teenagers - variously sunbathing, picnicing and swimming in the river. There are plenty of visitor moorings in Bath below Bath Old bridge - just over half a mile below the bottom lock. When we last boated this way in 2003 we managed to secure an overnight mooring on the back of the lock jetty above Saltford Lock, along with a couple of other boats. But now there is a large steel pile and a string of floating sausages preventing access in there.

You are joking. Ignore my post I pushed the wrong button. I started to reply seriously but something went wrong. If I look at the costs over the last 4 years it's nearer £8000 per year! As an indication, NOT TYPICAL BUT FACTUAL. This week, yes week, major problem with stern gear that will cost circa £400 parts, plus labour, not a DIY job say £200. plus slipping, say £400 plus odds and sods so if I see change out of 1 K I'll be lucky. Oh, as an other indication of costs, earlier today issue with Whale Gulper, the joker valve, not available as an individual item only in overhaul kit. £18.87. Since getting the boat 23 years ago I can count on one hand how many times I've paid for someone to work on it. Indeed I fitted it out completely from a bare shell. Sorry if I seem to be ranting but people who think owning a boat is cheap are living in cloud cuckoo land

Ah, our yesterdays! The Caribbean holiday referred to was in fact a voyage in which I rejoined my old boss, Peter Haward, who delivered yachts for a living. Many of them were of wood, in some cases old wood, and falling to pieces accordingly. This one, however, was of steel, a schooner we moved from Guadeloupe to Cannes in the Mediterranean. Despite being posh, and supposedly well-found, she still managed to spring a major leek 1,000 miles from anywhere, when a weld failed. This we managed to seal with the cement our far-sighted skipper had brought on board. For much of the voyage we saw a ship every couple of days. Nonetheless, if we hadn't got out of the way, the second one would have hit us. As on any voyage, there is always something. For me, I suppose it was a holiday, save for being shaken awake at two in the morning by a dripping figure telling me it was my turn to go on watch. Hence. probably, my return to canalling in later life. Regarding the 'Arthur' trip up the GU, a motivation was to demonstrate to Authority that canals should be used to their limits. Thereby, eventually, they might be made larger. Naive this may seem today, but I remember Harry Grafton, of British Waterways, putting forward a scheme to enlarge the waterway between Brentford and a transhipment terminal to be built at Watford. Even today such a project would get short shrift from a government with little connection with the benefits of water transport. Elsewhere, the viewpoint is different. To illustrate, I attach (hopefully, if I press the right buttons) a photo of a (British( friend's barge in France. This has 1,450 tonnes capacity, though carrying only 1,000 tonnes here, on a canal that was really intended for aa great deal less. The Grenelle Environnement, a Think Tank established when Sarkozy was President, has been rooting for water transport on a major scale. Indeed, a 2,500 tonne Canal is being built to succeed this one.. For more, if that is to your taste, see my forthcoming article in Waterways World, due at the end of this month. Canals move on, whether we want them to, or not!

I agree the human race is probably doomed but disagree on the reason for this. As long as, from virtually the cradle, people are brainwashed into believing that happiness is unattainable without amassing lots of largely unnecessary items, and the capitalist system provides for this with ever increasing growth, we are doomed. World economic activity, at current levels of growth, will increase by over 90% by 2050. This is the problem, not that some bloke in the street is a dinosaur, and refuses to change his diesel engine to an electric one.

There are two separate, but overlapping, objectives in environmental regulatory changes under discussion. The first is the need to reduce harmful emissions so that the atmosphere is not in danger of killing us all with pollution. This debate was made all the more divisive when some regulator devised a standard for diesel engines that the manufacturers proceeded to meet. As with all benchmarks, they often distort the behaviour in ways that were not intended. In this case the cars passed the tests (good) but failed to reduce the emissions (bad). Rather than admit that they cocked kit up (almost always happens with target setting politics) they opted to bad mouth the manufacturers who only took advantage of poorly drafted rules. The second objective is decarbonising the economy - mainly on the grounds that carbon fuels will run out one day and it is better to have alternatives in place well ahead of a collapse in fuel availability. Currently, the pressure to 'go electric' does not always do much for decarbonising if the generation and supply of electrical energy comes from 'conventional' power stations. But it does sometimes seem as if public opinion is driven by what it can see rather what it cannot see. Too often the alternative schemes either for reducing emissions or decarbonising, lack a comprehensive assessment of the implications, but depend on small order changes. In fact, the scale of the problem is such that only large order changes will achieve the aim and history shows that we do not have a good track record on predicting the outcome of such scale change. We may eliminate the original presenting issue but unwittingly introduce something else, perhaps even worse in its impact. Most electrical storage technologies at present involve the use of rather unpleasant substances which are often extracted from the ground in socially dubious contexts. What happens if we all go solar only to discover that we have used up all of the materials used in their, and battery, manufacture? One thing that policy makers and influencers have discovered is that the 'hair shirt' argument rarely gets much traction. Ways forward have to start from enabling people to keep doing the things they have come to take for granted, otherwise, short of a world melt down, they will never agree.

Ye, had same experience. Problem is that initial explanations have to be simple to get it in the time when folk are champing at the bit to get to their first pub in the plan. Such simple rules might fit most occasions but there will always be exceptions. However, I would rather have newbies always shut the gate, even if in such a circumstance, rather than have to run water down (which may not be there) just because boaters left gates open especially as the last boat trough before nightfall.

To me this sums up the whole problem and the reason the human race is very probably doomed. People refuse to accept the need to change quickly and will be in denial until (they hope) technology will allow them to cary on with their current style and standard of living. Complete refusal to accept we must all change and what we are able to do will reduce.

I have developed a little bit of sympathy for Peter reading this thread but while the contributions on real life experience of electrical propulsion are interesting I think there’s a bit of a backlash by the forum to a lack of balance in the considerations. As for not having a choice I concur the internal combustion engine will one day be superseded. I’m very much less convinced it’s total demise will be any time soon or that it’s long term replacement is electric propulsion. JP

Yes, we were talking about double lock gates and only using one! Please try and keep up, eh?

I like it when when are approaching a lock, just a few boat lengths away, as a boat is leaving the lock, and the lock crew walking past us say "we've left the gate open for you". But even better was approaching a lock in Brum and a bloke running towards saying, stop, stop, the canal is blocked by a big wooden wall. ...............Dave

Closing the gates when a boat is waiting is rude and leaving both gates open is normal and polite. I think that you specifying exactly how you want the gates left open is perhaps a bit over the top. Its happened to me and I have felt like "I am not really here to set the lock up to somebody else's exact requirements", though I would usually oblige for a single hander. Going in through one gate is bad boating, just look at that huge groove that boaters have caused by doing exactly that. Maybe your boat handling is so good that you Never scrape the gate, mine isn't, and from the evidence lots of boats who think they can do it obviously can't. I feel that by leaving only one gate open I am an "accessory to lock damage". Absolutely no excuse for rudeness though. .............Dave

I agree. The best way would I think be to use pin crimps on those cables, the same on the 12mm2, then a 15A chock block. Otherwise, ring terminals and bolts, covered with loads of insulating tape.

OK thanks.

I assume the idea, of this advert and much of what CRT do in general, is essentially to promote the waterways to the general public as something of value to them even if they don't happen to own a £50,000 boat or have a fascination with 18th century goods-carrying infrastructure. The more CRT can do to attract visitors to the canals and then demonstrate the value people place on them and the positive impacts they have on people's wellbeing, the better their chances of winning future support from the Government and perhaps other grant-giving bodies.

Dogs never stand their round anyway. Jen ?

It's all in the eye of the beholder aint it? We love that boat (Black Pearl iirc..), the owners are proper creative types who have i think a vw camper and a motorbike of some sort which are all proper works of art - not to everyone's taste to be sure but we loves 'em..

It was the first place we ever moored in 1989 having just bought the boat from a bloke at the side of the cut. Proper characters indeed. We were ony there a very short time but was interesting climbing over stuff to get to the boat lol.