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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

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 s

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

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

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

Awful weather here too, we had to resort to emergency ice creams every hour today as the temps nudged 39c

Some photos of Creighton's in the last post of this old thread.

That is one reason that my design has the engine/gearbox above the paddle wheel. No holes whatever in the hull.

The mm square vs square mm confusion can be easily got round by using a unit of area for conductor measurement, rather than a linear unit. I propose an imperial unit to keep the crustier forum members happy. The nanoAcre. 1nanoAcre = 4.0469mm2 or 1mm2 roughly equals 1/4 nanoAcre. Jen

I have done the entire length of the K&A many times, usually in late spring and mid Autumn when the flow on the Kennet can be quite challenging. I realise that you have discovered this by unfortunate experience but, in future, carefuly studying the waterways guide ahead of a days journey should equip you with advance knowlede of where the Kennet flows into and out of ther canal, so you can make sure of a secure mooring before reaching a lock when there is a potential side flow. You presumably have not yet attempted Reading, but there are a couple of places where particular attention is req

If the fuel boats draw more than 3 foot they'll get stuck / roll over it, more than 3 foot 3 they have no chance, but given then dont normally have a wooden bottom and can load to bow down a fair bit it brings the back up a little. as above yea was towy below lock 5 now gone with alot of effort. shame as It was a section i really wanted to do

I agree with this, but when the kids were young even with a 10 minute warning we would arrive at a lock and suddenly one of them would need a poo, suddenly require food to avoid starvation or just take forever to find wellies or to put a life jacket on. So sometimes we would just sit on the landing as either myself or my wife would be faffing around trying to organise the troops. On the T&M a few years back I got abused by another boat leaving the lock for not helping as I dealt with a four year old in tears trying to put a life jacket on. I would never speak to another person

NOX is produced by burning air at high temperatures. Air is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. This is because modern diesels are turbocharged, thus pumping in more air to be burnt on every combustion cycle.

To err is human; it takes a computer.....

Morning Gents OP here. Sorry I haven’t been on this thread for a bit, I've had a lot going on! I can see all the fantastic ideas and suggestions - thank you to ALL of you. Ill try and respond to the genny options later, ive also been looking at the Honda eu20 ‘suitcase’ generator. in regards to the ballast issue, there have been some significant improvements. I had a stack of steel plates placed under the galley before kitchen was installed. This has dropped the Uxter plate to less than half inch above water. We still have a few bits to go in the galley as well as grani

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 overh

They may respond by pointing out that the available width permits passage of craft up to and including the maximum craft dimensions. ?

OK. The problem is that governments have made no effort whatsoever to reduce growth. Their focus is on mitigation of the damage caused by said growth, ignoring the root cause, the nub of the problem.

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.

Ah, that makes it OK then, stuff the Northern canals, stuff the little bits that few people do, stuff Billybob in his historic failing to complete the Caldon after over a month of trying, stuff full length boats getting through Hurleston safely, but yes, mobilise the troops to get a fat boat through a bridge. It is no wonder boaters satisfaction is going down.

Do they all read the same on a given load or are they like your smartgauges

I am equally confident it won't because LPG is a fossil fuel adding to exactly the same problem as diesel. CO2. Yes it has lower Nox etc but that does not mean it bungs out any less CO2, and CO2 is the biggie that needs fixing. All the rest is fiddling around the edges of the elephant in the room. They are already planning to ban gas appliances in houses so why should boats be exempt?

It most likely is the "Birmingham" , I think he had the Camborne 1955/6 time.

We just took a photo of the boat then coloured it with different colours onscreen ...

Ah, but Brian, the folk who moan and criticise hire boaters never had to learn. They knew everything the minute they stepped aboard and never ever made a mistake. I sometimes think that folk who go narrowboating (I won't call them boaters) are a crowd of complainers. If it is not hire boats or shared boats it is folk going past their badly moored boat too fast. I wonder if complainers are more prevalent among folk who use the internet . I sincerely hope so as what we see on the internet is not encouraging. haggis

...although it doesn't really manage to say anything about what CRT actually do. You wouldn't glean from that advert that CRT are actually responsible for maintaining infrastructure, managing navigation, running museums, etc. They could just be a sort of 'tourist board for the waterways' for all the ad spells out. (I'm not saying this a bad thing, necessarily, but I suspect a lot of people could see the advert and yet walk along the towpath the next day thinking 'the council should come and trim these verges' or 'I wish Bristish Waterways would do something about the graffiti on those lock gat

And the stern of MARCELLUS was at Braunston in June along with its new owner (acquired in February ?) - unless it is for sale again

And a similar view today: http://binged.it/1S1gJe5 This?

All the canals are of the same depth. Half way up a duck