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If you dry it out it may light up and tell you, they often keep counting but not displaying I am told

In my experience engines do not come off their mounts. If they did then exhausts, cables, wiring and plumbing would all have to move as well and something drastic would have happened to the shaft as well. As for the propeller well that would have been destroyed. What engine? Something is not right here. If I were you I would be tempted to take possession of your boat again and see what has happened to it. Where is it, If it is within some sort of reasonable travelling distance I would be happy to have a look at it.

I think this particular announcement is premature. There is currently a government programme to investigate the feasibility of substituting hydrogen for natural gas in the existing distribution network. The first round of tender responses for the underpinning investigation (materials suitability, logistics, safety etc) were only submitted about a month ago (I know because I wrote one). The government will be investigating options for heating between now and 2025 when it will make the decision between hydrogen and electricity. If anyone actually wants to know more on this (I doubt it!) it can be found on the BEIS website. Alec

No. It's much more sophisicated than that. The "throttle" (a misnomer - it isn't a throttle) is actually an "engine speed selector". There is a mechanical governor which increases the fuel injected if the engine is running slower than selected on the speed control, and vice versa. So it you load the engine with an alternator, it slow down and more fuel gets injected to compensate.

I have to say, there is little point, it will be completely messed up. You might as well get on ebay and try to buy another one.

Water damage to the back 2m of the floor is almost certainly that the bilge under the cabin floor has filled with water. If this has come from a water leak on the plumbing, its a heck of a lot of water to fill the bilge. More likely its a hull leak, most Harbourer boats have a wet bilge with the front deck draining to under the floor, the bilge pump in the stern is supposed to pump it overboard. I would be VERY suspicious that this boat has started to sink.

Some insurance policies do cover impacts with under water objects, especially policies that are for more general and not canal specific 😀. If the mounts are old and dirty with oil contamination then they can fail, the rubber splitting off from the metal is the failure mode. £1500 sounds a bit steep for a set of mounts so you need to find out if and what other damage was done. Does the boat mover have insurance? is he a proper boat mover?

Having completed our first purchase of a boat a month ago (the previous two having been a nominal pound which doesn't really count), and done so as a private purchase, the following observations might help: The absence of paperwork seems to be normal. As has been stated above, Something from CRT addressed to the same name as the owner gives is a reasonable indication. Other indications are whether they have had work done on it, in which case there may be invoices in their name. Ours wasn't a liveaboard so we had a name and physical address for the paperwork, which we independently verified (it is quite easy to find things out about people these days via the internet). The photo-ID matching the name would be a good alternative. Timelines are also a help - if they have paperwork going back a few years then the odds are that it would have been identified as stolen by then - most people will miss a boat in a matter of days or weeks, not years. A Bill of Sale is uncommon for privately sold canal boats, but really easy to create from the RYA template. What it essentially declares is that any issues pre-dating your purchase are the previous owner's problem and anything after your purchase date is your problem. It therefore protects both parties. Specific statements in the declaration are around any finance owing, so like a HPI check on a car. Although the debt would still transfer to you, their declaration that there isn't one would hold good in court if you sued them for the money back - messy I know but the sums involved would probably justify it. Something which is easy with a broker but harder with a private sale is to avoid a point in time where one party (buyer or seller) holds all the cards. If you turn up with a bag of cash, the seller counts it in front of you, signs a receipt and hands you the keys then the problem does not arise. One equivalent option we came up with was both sitting at a table and making a bank transfer online so when the seller saw it in their account they handed over the receipt. The problem is whether your bank's security system flags it as a high value transfer and blocks it, in which case it can take a while to sort out. What I did was identify the threshold which triggered this (by ringing my bank and asking them) and breaking it down into a series of payments that fell below the total. I also transferred a nominal pound first, which the seller verified had arrived, just in case of any data errors. In practice, the seller completed the bill of sale and posted it back to us before I transferred any money, so technically he took the risk - I'm not sure he realised he was doing so, even when we explained what it was. Something we didn't pick up on, and wish we had. When a boat transfers to a broker's, generally it is then being sold 'as viewed'. That means there is very little doubt as to what is/is not part of the sale. When a boat remains in private hands, you can't assume that everything will be staying on it. This can (from personal experience) get annoying. We noticed between a first and second viewing that some things had been removed. I explicitly asked (by email so a written record) for a list of what else was to be removed and got the reply of a kettle and other personal effects but when we turned up to take it away, various other items which I would regard as part of the boat (chimney, tiller bar and pin, fiddle-rail from the Epping stove, a couple of engine-related items etc) had gone. On querying this, we were told that they did not belong to the seller so he had given them back to their owners. This was at the very least misleading - not hugely valuable but probably £200-£300 of things to replace and some of them were very irritating as they reduced the functionality of the boat until we sorted them out. An inventory is a way around this and for a mostly empty boat would work fine, but for a liveaboard which is still being lived in that could get tricky to itemise everything. It would certainly be easier if I do this again to complete the sale standing by the boat and immediately get the receipt and keys in my hand. All parties would then be clear. Alec

Transport and the need for it is going to be one of the casualties of climate change. Business travel is becoming less necessary with zoom meetings etc, holiday travel is just a luxury that has only been around a short time and won't be missed much. Car journeys multiplied with the death of corner shops and growth of supermarkets, and that's easily remedied.

Surely the boat movers insurance should cover it

I would say evolved rather than fundamentally changed. The swing to the Conservatives in North East since then has seen a shift in emphasis from Liverpool and Manchester towards Teesside which is now both a Freeport and a Hydrogen Hub. A new site has also been added in South Wales. There are several different aspects to hydrogen. Hydrogen goes by various colour names depending on source. Brown hydrogen is made by heating water and coke together, forming a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen (the old towns gas) and is still industrially significant, particularly on Teesside. Green hydrogen is made by electrolysis of water and is seen as clean and sustainable, so long as you are using surplus renewable electricity to make it. Blue hydrogen is the same but specifically made using offshore wind turbines. Leaving aside the challenges for the moment, and they are considerable, the planned applications are where you need a higher energy density than can be delivered with battery storage. Current areas of interest include rail, flight and shipping, and possibly heavy road haulage. The question is how you use it, which is in part a matter of semantics but it is actually at the heart of one of the current areas of debate. If you burn hydrogen, either for domestic heat or to run an internal combustion engine, it is very simple and cost-effective at point of use, but whilst it creates no carbon emissions it does emit nitrous oxides as the oxygen and nitrogen react at temperature. This NOx is nowhere near as significant a greenhouse gas as carbon based gases but it is still there. The alternative is to use a fuel cell for motive power and rely on electrical heating but this has major technical and commercial barriers - the fuel cell uses enough platinum for this to be infeasible to scale to the current requirements (my first job was developing fuel cell catalysts for Johnson Matthey). Therefore, what it comes down to is whether targets are defined as 'net zero carbon emissions' or 'net zero emissions' and if the latter whether offsetting the NOx emissions is deemed acceptable. It's a political debate and I personally have little interest in what the decision is, but I will probably be part of working out how to implement it so I do take a significant interest in knowing where the thinking ends up. Alec

2035 is almost 15 years away, most of us will be dead or at least no longer boating. Most organisations don't plan more than 5 years ahead. Climate change assisted by CRT poor management might have removed much of the canal system by 2035, dry summers, wet winters threatening the reservoirs, will be a big problem. There are much bigger challenges that gas water heaters.

No, I tend to plan ahead & look 'which way the wind is blowing' and position myself such that I can take advantage of a following wind, its much easier that fighting against the inevitable.

Our last night on board Kelpie for this trip and sitting on one of our favourite moorings - Bramble cuttings. We went to Ellesmere Port with a wee side trip to Audlem and in true Street boating weather we only had a little rain when we were locking down to the basin at Ellesmere . We have had several trips on Kelpie this year and we have yet to need waterproofs - our neighbours in the marina are pleased to see us as it means good weather! It was a fairly leisurely trip apart from yesterday when we came from Chester to Barbridge but it was such a lovely day we didn't want to stop. On the trip most locks have been against us but the one yesterday which was for us provided some entertainment. Two 65 footers were coming down and they insisted on trying to come out together despite the fact that their crew couldn't open the gates fully. They got stuck - twice , before deciding to come out singly, but which one should go first ?. A bit of light entertainment after one of the crew telling me how he was an experienced boater. Both were private boats 😀 Nice to see so many hire boats still out and a lot of them with experienced crew. All on all, yet another good Kelpie trip and although we will winterise her before we go home tomorrow we might fit in another trip before the end of the year. Haggis

But only once it turns into a major breach, obviously.

Yep, just like the start of a pandemic, "it's only tiny so we won't fix it, we'll just do nothing until it is RIGHT OUT OF CONTROL" ok?

He only needs one - the other is still fine.

Won't the service history show you that ?

The River Ouse and River Foss in York today.

What were the circumstance when this man had command of the boat? Were you present? Is he a professional boat mover or boatyard employee being paid for the job? Or just a mate helping out? And why is he quoting you a price for repair, with the implication that you should pay? If he was moving the boat in a professional capacity he should be insured, and his insurance should cover the cost. First thing you need is your own independent assessment of the damage. That may mean contacting a boatyard with no connection to the boat mover. And you should notify your insurers. They may want to send an assessor to inspect the damage.

Yes, as it happens I do, both on the strategic and technical levels as a lot of our work is for the oil and gas extraction sector and the issue of permeability is heavily tested there, as are the effects of hydrogen due to the problems of hydrogen embrittlement within welds. The government has identified the issue (note, by government I mean the ministries rather than the politicians) and is explicitly assessing the issue. The link below is a very dry document but if you scan the subject areas it shows the initial investigative work is about to be undertaken to assess which materials present a problem and how to manage that: https://www.delta-esourcing.com/delta/respondToList.html?accessCode=9W8Z2VUX4N The reason I know about this is that I wrote a tender response, so if we are selected it could even be me doing some of the work! The comments that this will go through building regs and therefore not specifically apply to boats are correct. The issue will be one of supply I suspect - this is what the historic steam users (railways, boats, pumping engines etc) are beginning to experience with the closure of the last steam coal pit in Wales and the challenges of importing. Alec

Your insurance company may be able to advise you about this.

Agreed, but there are also step-change technologies that look as if they may offer what the aircraft industry needs - long haul will likely require 'jet engines' and ............. Is an electric jet engine possible? While still a prototype, the engine could one day help alleviate climate change rates. A team of researchers has created a prototype jet engine that's able to propel itself forward using only electricity. ... Their study was published in AIP Advances in May 2020 DHL have ordered several 'electric planes' DHL's zero-emission strategy takes off with purchase of 12 all-electric cargo planes (electricautonomy.ca) The purchase, announced this week, will see DHL acquire 12 Alice eCargo planes from Eviation, to form what is says will be “the world’s first electric Express network.” The acquisition is in line with Deutsche Post DHL Group’s sustainability roadmap, released earlier this year. Delivery of the planes is slated for 2024.

We also love Bramble Cuttings & have been there a few times with no other boats ! We did keep a look out for the wasps.🐝

There's also a significant administrative overhead in valuing boats and maintaining a register of boat values (including resolving disputes) - akin to council tax bands. Size is at least a fixed quantity and already recorded used for licencing purposes.

On this day in 2016 Office Lock L&L Compare 20Aug1994 3Apr2013 11Jun2013 2July2013 2Apr2014 28Jan2021 at the beginning of the L&L bicentenary flotilla Compare (#1) (#2)

Gibbo