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Sorry I'm not getting this. The guy has been taking the p*ss for 4 years, drives his neighbours round the bend with anti-social behavior, running a genny whenever, has a boat that is basically a scrap claims moving it was the cause of it sinking and people here expect all of us to feel sorry for him and hope he gets a payday. I truly hope he gets exactly what he deserves.

Near one of my moorings, on a clapped out unlicensed cruiser lived a seriously dangerous guy who bragged sbout stealing from our boats, and that from local knowledge we knew it was true. He stole coal, diesel, generators and anything else he could get, broke into a few. Police wouldn't do anything, couldn't even be bothered to interview either us or him. None of us were particularly surprised or saddened when someone set fire to his boat, nor were we bothered that he was asleep drunk at the time. He and his dog (which had bitten enough people for us not to care about that either) got off and survived unhurt, the boat didn't, he shoved off somewhere and all the thieving stopped. Trouble is, the law is useless against most antisocial behaviour, however bad it is, and so sometimes you have to treat badly behaved animals like you do similar nonhuman ones. Rules only work against people who recognise their validity, and pisstakers don't. Thus CRT takes years to get a liveaboard off the water, and everyone suffers for that time.

Happy summers recalled. The fortified farm, at one time an abbey, lies at Basseville on the Canal du Nivernais. It dates back to 1328

First snow of this year on the Huddersfield Narrow.

George Useless has said it, so it must be so. The sausage meat is the key. A bit of pickling vinegar does not make it a substantial meal. All academic to me in tier 3.

Not sure if this has been posted before.

Just over a year ago I ordered some Leoch Pure Lead Carbon batteries, after a discussion on here, and I think I said I'd let everyone know how I got on with them. Much more recently I was asking for people's experience of the typical difference between batteries' nominal capacity and their actual capacity; this is a follow-up to that too. Unfortunately I don't think I have anything terribly worthwhile to report. I got what should have been a 432Ah bank of Leoch PLCs fitted late last year, but very quickly got the impression that their actual capacity was not as advertised; following a full charge, I was seeing about 110Ah-120Ah counted out by my BMV before my Smartgauge showed a 50% state of charge, suggesting an actual capacity of 220Ah-240Ah or so. Long story short, after many, many emails back and forth and a bit of heel-dragging on both sides, I've just managed to return the batteries for a full refund. I've just fitted a new bank of the same size - the cheaper Leoch Superior Lead Carbons this time, as a like-for-like replacement wasn't available - and they do seem to have the advertised capacity. So it seems reasonable to assume the other ones were just faulty in some way, rather than that the manufacturer is routinely overstating capacity. But one year on I still have no experience of a non-faulty set of lead carbon batteries to share, I'm afraid.

Quite frankly Bob, in a narrowboat, if your chair is within Bluetooth range you're sat next to the bloomin' charger anyway!

Agree with all that. There's also a possible plus point from Covid-19 that many companies (and individuals) have discovered they don't need to go into an office every day -- or at all in some cases, my last day in the office was in March and I don't expect to get back in before next April -- and this will cut down on the number of commuting car journeys if it continues. Might lead to a rise in the domestic murder rate though... ?

Not my stupidity (but could be argued my stupidity in not checking). And could have been serious... I used to tow a big boat for the dive club. 6.5m RHIB with a 140HP Suzuki four stroke on the back. Boat was rather over a ton (without divers, diving equipment etc) The RHIB was attached to the trailer in two ways at the bow; a winch used for launch and recovery and, for additional security the painter was lashed tight to the trailer. Some people prepared for launch by disconnecting the winch and securing the painter, others by untying the painter leaving the boat retained by the winch. As we were a large group with different people on different trips, the inevitable happened one day... One person disconnected the winch, another the painter... I started to back the trailer down the slipway and noticed the bow of the RHIB start to move... away from the car... Floor the throttle (which, in reverse and low ratio wasn't that fast) and just managed to make sure the RHIB slid off into the surf rather than onto concrete. Then start a discussion about the benefits of a standardising procedures and having a checklist.

One or two posts have amazed me this past week. Shiny verses Tatty. Renting out and getting round the regs. travelling or not traveling during a pandemic.

I feel I need to report this post!! Whilst in general the thread has been light hearted about trivia such as cars it has now become serious to the point of even a suggestion of the removal of pickled eggs from pubs and that's too serious a matter for a canal forum!! ?

The two you've missed out are walking and cycling. When the 1955 photo was taken, most people would be getting around that way, along with buses and trams. Employment and shopping would be much more likely to be closer to their homes. The government are making a (for Tories) reasonably good start on encouraging both, with considerable complaints from a noisy minority over a few bike lanes and traffic restricted areas so you can cycle without feeling like you could die at any second and walking without choking on fumes. A lot more still to do. It is a long process, a lot of which involves reducing the distances people travel to reach the places they regularly need to go as well as changing the way they get there. Jen

How about if it sinks having been moved into the middle of a multiple-boat argy bargy with a load of heavy steel things? Again, just going on the 'facts' as reported — it may have been in poor condition, but it may also not have sunk if it were remoored appropriately. We will likely never know. Ultimately the production company have created the problem for themselves by moving it without permission. If they hadn't moved it and it had sunk on its mooring, this conversation would not have happened. They've implicated themselves in a situation where it will be impossible to prove that they are innocent. Licences and the general attitude of the owner are separate problems. Conflating them only creates confusion. Edit: what if it were your pristine, wooden classic motor cruiser that had sunk as a result of their poor mooring skills? The production company need to be held to account for their actions to dissuade them from taking liberties with other property in future. This is important regardless of whether the boat had the right to be there in the first place.

But the lockers are probably OK ...

There have been several recent new CWDF members that have signed up making their user names the same as their email addresses. Most change it to something more anonymous after the down sides of doing this are pointed out, but it puts them at risk of being spammed, if nothing else. Can we have a warning in the sign-up page not to do this and why? Ideal would be a ban on the @ character in the user name field of the form, but I've no idea how hard that would be to arrange. Jen@oopsIjustgavemyemailaddesstotheentireplanet.com

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yosoo-Cleaning-Accessory-Stainless-Penetrator/dp/B07794Z4TF

I use touch note to send stuff to mum in her care home due to damned covid restrictions. It's a good app ?

I hadn't heard of touchnote but just had a look. I'll send something as I possibly will know the person as my parents worked at alvechurch marina and we had a boat moored there from around '78 to '90.

Is the pump out on the roof or gunwale, If its a long hose from the gunwale it may have got kinked before entering the top of the tank. You could try running a flowing hose down the suction pipe after the tank is empty

Try a wet and dry vac on suck and blow (carefully!) to break up the blockage. Get a stick in through the loo ball and poke well around to move the sludge which has probably slid towards the outlet with standing. If its a stainless or plastic tank a gallon of brick cleaner acid will break any blockage up. Not if its a mild steel tank.

One problem of course is that the vast majority of us don't live in or near London and wouldn't move there even if housing was free, its a horrendous place. 50 plus million of us live elsewhere with many in rural towns and villages and not even on the distant horizon is there yet anything like a replacement for the privately owned ice vehicle. In the past change has brought about an improvement in lifestyle and the problem we have with electric cars is they are very much a retrograde step in so many ways. Something has to change but how and when is far from decided and dates thrown out willy nilly by governments and politicians that will not be around to be held to account are pointless and just political waffle.

You're all doing the usual exceptionalism objection, just like "I have to drive 400 miles without stopping so BEVs are useless". Yes of course there are cases where people really *need* a car, for example if I do a band booking with hundreds of pounds weight of PA equipment in the back. But this isn't the case for the vast majority of car journeys (95%? 98%? 99%?) in the same way that 400 miles non-stop isn't. The farmer genuinely needs a 4x4 and people use the same argument to justify them, ignoring the fact that >90% of 4x4s have never been off-road in their lives (go and look it up...) since there there aren't many muddy fields on the drive to the supermarket or on the school run or in Chelsea. Unless you live in the middle of rural Wales, in which case you might need one even for that ?

Appreciate all of those points, and I'm acutely aware of my lack of river experience. That'd be why I want to start with the Weaver and see how things go. I'm very happy with my handling skills on the canals, so it seems like an obvious next step. As per the yacht thread, I'm not suicidal ? Also appreciate the differences in mooring — but it's better to have the tools on boar, unused, than it is to not have then on board and be wishing that you did! My mooring hardware in general needs a bit of an update, and a few more stakes or similar would definitely come in useful on the canals too.

I think there will still be strong pressure to reduce car usage even with BEV -- until the Holy Grail of essentially unlimited zero-carbon energy comes along, which probably means fusion power, which has been 20 years away for the last 50 years. I didn't mean cars will disappear entirely, but there will probably be strong pressure to be less profligate with energy all round, including cars. The reason CAAS doesn't really work yet is that somebody still has to drive them and their wages have to be paid. Autonomous cars will no doubt happen sooner or later even though it's a difficult and expensive problem to solve, and this will very likely change the picture -- why have an expensive lump of metal sitting idle on your drive or in a parking space and wasting money more than 90% of the time when you can be picked up in a few minutes by a clean non-racist robocar and driven there in comfort and silence while reading a book or whatever? It's possible that owning a car may eventually go the same way as private trains did, not only obsolete but becoming seen as something wasteful and ostentatious (and dangerous!) instead of a status symbol. But given many people's irrational obsession with their cars, this could be a long time coming...

I wonder how many "I must buy a boat quickly" type decisions work out well? It's always days (or more) after Boris makes a decree before the experts study the rules and give general public any idea what it all actually means. The first time round it was months before we realised we could all have taken a drive to Barnard Castle as an eye test. Why not wait 'til things change in your favour or you really know that you can safely look for the right boat in a wide range of places?

Ahh, the hazard of replying to a post when you see it, without realising that there are 3 more pages of posts, and the discussion has now moved on considerably from the particular point you were replying to...

Sources include lakes, ponds, bogs, sea, any 'wet areas'. It can even be cheaply farmed. The 'problem' is in the electricity needed to produce it - the plan is to use surplus wind generated leccy, where currently the generators are paud to be tuned off when the 'leccy is not needed (ie overnight) Various alternative production methods from 'DIY' to huge commercial operations Grow your own diesel: Is the future algae driven? | Brunel University London LumoFuel is a washing machine sized household ‘bioreactor’ which uses algae to turn CO2 and sunlight into a usable diesel that promises to not only work in existing cars, but also be carbon-negative. “Algae has been experimented with for over 20 years as a way to produce biofuels and power,” said Wilson, who designed LumoFuel as part of his Industrial Design and Technology degree at Brunel University London. “The biggest hang up though has been scaling it up – you’d have really good low-scale, high-yield laboratory experiments, but the moment you try commercialising it, growing algae in big waterways, you’d end up needing to put more energy in than you get out. It becomes like a perpetual motion machine.” Wilson’s solution is not to scale things up, but to scale them down. LumoFuel will use a species of quick-growing algae called Nannochloropsis Oculata that photosynthesises CO2 and light into oxygen and energy, which the algae stores as fats – or lipids, to use the technical term. The device works in day-long cycles, harvesting and processing half of its colony of algae in the system, with the remainder then taking approximately 24 hours to double its biomass back to full density, ready for the next cycle. The algae is harvested using an internal centrifuge, which separates it from the fluid it’s grown in before the energy dense lipids are extracted from the cells and combined with methanol and sodium hydroxide – an alcohol and a catalyst – to produce a biodiesel that can be pumped directly into an unaltered diesel vehicle, or used for applications like heating and cooking. From ponds to power: $2M to perfect algae as diesel fuel | University of Michigan News (umich.edu) The Department of Energy has said algae holds the potential to produce billions of gallons per year of renewable diesel, gasoline and jet fuels. And that contribution could prove crucial to meeting Renewable Fuel Standards.

It's only trim, not load bearing, I'd either do what I said above or just glue it, grab adhesive, Araldite ect, no real need for any visible fixings.

I have your back here, who in their right minds consider picked eggs actually edible

How on earth did it get across the Atlantic and into the Carribbean ?

Having done a little digging - a third boat, and famous! http://www.canalscape.net/Canals on Screen/Canals on Screen.htm Harmony - a cruiser stern starred in 'Travelling Man' a Grenada TV series..... Also confirms that David Jones operated out of Taylor's Boatyard in Chester.

I said earlier that we could end up like Japan no off road parking equals no car! Also the Kei cars would help (very small cars)

To be based in Milton Keynes: "Names such as BoatyMKBoatface..." That's clever!

You are new here aren't you !!

That's a different insurance claim altogether!!..?

Someone certainly has some explaining to do. Contractor ? C&RT ? LCC ? Who signed off the schedule of works ? Who signed of the 'satisfatory completion' ?