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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

You owe the money even though they forgot to take it. But they need to reach a sensible repayment agreement with you. If you think their offer is too much then try a sensible counter offer, but you will need to compromise.

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 ?

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

Type of toilet, drop through, vac or massarator ? If drop through pump out via that to get out of trouble then find the problem

I'm not saying that cars should be banned or that *everyone* should shift to BEV or CAAS, there will always be so-called edge cases where this doesn't work. Once charging is sorted out, for the vast majority of people BEVs will work just fine and are far better for the environment than ICE -- no amount of dislike for them or love for petrol engines is going to alter this fact. Once CAAS is sorted out I suspect a lot of people will find they don't need to own a car at all, just like quite a lot of people I know in London (yes I know about public transport here...) -- for the few occasions they really *need* a car, they hire one, the rest of the time they don't have a deteriorating money sink sitting on the drive they don't have. Those who genuinely still need cars (or 4x4s) will continue to need them, for everyone else there will be much greener solutions ? Hence "or crash"... ?

Usual practice for most forums, web sites and so on, where the info is going to be public, is not to have peoples email addresses visible to the planet. I can't remember any off hand that would display an email address for the entire world to see, rather than just logged in members in good standing. Less of a problem than it used to be, but anyone who does do it is going to get spam email in huge quantities. Increased exposure if someone decides to go all stalker on you. Many reasons why it is a bad idea. Jen

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 ?

Go on then, and you'll find out ...

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...

Precisely. The Australians always say if you go into the bush take a Land rover but if you want to come back go in a Toyota, so very true sad to say.

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?

Alison, Does your resident have access to the internet? If so show him the thread below, which started off as a general pick-me-up, and has morphed into a fascinating thread of "on this day" photographs covering the whole of the UK waterway network and a fair sprinkling of continental views, over the last 40 years or so.

Or how much space car parking takes up compared with cycle parking. And the point was well made as long ago as 1965 by London Transport

To make it easy to remove you can use velcro dots on the battens and the underside of the shelf. Either sticky back dots or glue them on. Not too many or it will be hell to lift. N

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 ?

Someone in a car complaining about being caught in congestion, supposedly caused by bikes passing in a free flowing adjacent cycle lane shows a staggering lack of self awareness! Sheffield's air quality is bad. Not Dehli, or Beijing levels fortunately. Not helped by a lot of it being in valleys between high hills. During lock down 1 I could feel the improvement. All gone now. The air quality in the pub might be improved if he stopped selling pickled eggs! Could be worth suggesting... Jen

The biggest change in the appearance of residential streets from say the the 1950's period to today are almost all related to car use and parking. It gives you an appreciation of just how much is devoted to them and how much space they take up. With a few exceptions, like the changes in street lighting and the appearance of various utility boxes, many residential streets are unchanged apart from car parking, road markings and so on, which take up much of the space. A long while ago I saw a TV clip of a group of people walking around wearing car sized cardboard rectangles. It really gave you an appreciation of how much space they took. When they were car sized, not car shaped they drew the eye in the way that the familiar car shapes do not. Compare these pictures of the same street in Sheffield in 1955 and 2019. The houses have off street parking and are bog standard semi's, so there shouldn't be on street parking if there were one car per house. Not particularly prosperous, but not a down at heel neighbourhood. In the google street view the only gap in the parking is the zig-zag markings outside a primary school and the access for house drive ways for parking! Jen

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)

You are new here aren't you !!

It would make a good bonfire once it's dried out?

Whilst I do not want to get involved in your personal slanging match, I do think Mr Chagall has a point.