Leaderboard

Advantages of the BCN over Venetian canals. Can any one think of more? Any one can become a commercial boat skipper in Birmingham. Gondolier jobs are a closed shop, passed down in families. The smell of sewage wafting over the Venice canals. The smell of skunk wafting over the Birmingham canals. Global warming and sea level rise will doom Venice to sink below the waves. The Birmingham level is at 453 feet. Sipping a very expensive coffee on St Mark's Square, overlooking the Grand Canal, compared with sipping a cheaper pint of beer in the Tap and Spile, overlooking Gas Street Basin. Venice has the Campanile overlooking the Grand Canal. Birmingham has the Post Office Tower overlooking the Farmer's Bridge Flight. Venice has cruise ships in the Grand Canal. Birmingham is protected from wide beam monstrosities by flights of narrow locks on all the approaches. Venice is on the Adriatic, so sea life can get in to the canals. In Birmingham, sea life is safely segregated from the canals in the Sea Life Centre. No risk of your boat being pulled down to its doom by a kraken, or damaged in a dolphin collision. Listening to the beautiful, melodious Brummie accent, compared with the jarring drone of Venician Italian. Your Watermate key won't open any Elsan facility in Venice. The artistic endevours of Birmingham's many painters are displayed in public on every canal side wall, or other vertical surface, not hidden away in galleries, churches and museums as in Venice. Venice has no tunnels, or locks on their canals at all. In high summer, on some parts of the BCN, you can go all day without seeing another boat on the move. In high summer, Venice is so overcrowded, the authorities want to limit the numbers allowed in. Birmingham has never been a major naval power, or used its boats to carry fire and sword to other cities. The overblown lines of a gondolier, versus the elegant lines of a narrowboat. Venice might have the Bridge of Sighs over a canal, but Birmingham has Spaghetti Junction soaring over its canals.

It's hard not to draw the conclusion that composting separating toilet owners are simply lazy and cling to the green angle to obfuscate. Anyone prepared to dump their shite in public bins and their pee in the hedge or the canal should consider what a world we'd live in if everyone did that. Lazy and selfish, it only works if hardly anyone does it. Apologies to the one in a hundred who actually compost and take their pee to the Elsan, but come on - if you do that you might as well take a cassette the the elsan. It's notable how many of the shite in the bin / pee in the hedge crowd still insist on describing their toilet as composting - you're fooling nobody. Dumping your excrement is Pre-Victorian and went out of fashion due to the associated diseases like cholera - it's backward third world behaviour, it's not even remotely green.

If it takes six men to fit one sign how many broken paddles can be fixed for the same cost?

Reminded me of this that circulated around BW during the 2009 reorganisation, one of several initiated by Robin Evans

Ive just been out walking the dog and walked past a couple of locks. Some locks seal on the top gates, some locks seal on the bottom gates, some seal a bit on each, some even change top to bottom each time the lock is used. Leaving any gates open therefore carries a significant risk of empty pounds. Leaving gates open might save a little time and effort, but sorting empty pounds consumes a lot of time and effort. Its selfish.

If you think that's odd wait until you try Hermitage Lock when the Gt Ouse is carrying several feet of fresh. The highest spot on Midnight is the tiller pin top it was just 5mm from the underside of the road bridge above . When we entered Salter's Lode from the tidal I expected to go up instead of down. Weird but well worth it. The Nene, Fens and Gt Ouse are just brilliant.

Especially if they are open-topped bins not covered ones ... All you'd need is a lifering as a seat and a roll of paper in your pocket.

Big thank you to the Atherstone vlockie who helped us and the boat in front all the way up the flight this morning. 👍🙂

@Alway SwilbyI will wave to you as we pass 😀 I will be on a slightly crusty looking Annie heading for Salters tomorrow (unless Ive had the chance to wash it by then)

There was a boat race between a Japanese crew and a crew from the National Health Service (UK). Both sides practised long and hard and the Japanese team won by a mile. So the NHS ...faced with this problem setup a working party which reported that the Japanese had eight people rowing and one steering and the NHS had eight people steering and one rowing. So they brought in management consultants and the management consultants confirmed the diagnosis, suggested the NHS team be completely restructured to make it more efficient, more cohesive, streamlining and all-round better performance. A strategy document was drawn up and the recommendations encouraged restructuring for the entire organisation. As part of the restructuring, a number of appointments were made including three Assistant Steering Managers, three Deputy Steering Managers, a Director of Steering Services and the rower was given an incentive to row harder. They had another race, this time the NHS team lost by two miles, so management laid off the rower for poor performance, sold the boat and gave the Director of steering services a large payout for making the ‘hard decisions’ and concluded they had too many management consultants and not enough managers!"

Opposite opinion: we visited the secret bunker a few years back - all four of us agreed it was very good. Don't know if it's been altered since then, but we plan to go again next time we chug that way.

How about peelings and waste food? Do people compost them? If it’s cooked or raw meat the fish get it. If it’s onion skin, banana peel etc the hedge row gets it ( only if I’m well countryfide, not someone’s garden hedge).

Just found this postcard that I bought when I did the Canal De Midi in 1988

Last week. Bridge 70 (restored) Old Uttoxeter Canal course.

Nah, it's ages away yet. I was just thinking that @Midnight could check when they are planning to shut Yorkshire again - although of course the plan doesn't allow for the emergency stoppages ... The other useful thing about early planning is that it helps CCers decide where they might like to either head for or avoid over winter. If a favourite area has limited or no access to services it's handy to know before the stoppages happen.

Tesco certainly prefer Birmingham ...

It's bad enough dog walkers now wanting someone else to deal with the excrement their pets produce. I reckon every dog owner ought to spend one month a year emptying dogwaste bins full time. But now you want some other poor sod to get rid of your personal crap too. Funny how it's always someone else who has to clear up the mess of the ecologically right on...

Lemme guess, you've been fooled into buying a composting toilet - only to find it doesn't compost anything.

Bit worrying a cold war expecting a nuclear attack and all the bunkers are secret, I wonder if there are any today with Putin shouting the odd, if there is I bet there are none for the general public.

One in one out Last Thursday at Streethay Sorry Peter, that was the only shot I took of CopperkinsII

It has been a very nice stay and we have been spoilt for choice of nice dog friendly pubs, eat-ins and take-away. It will be good to get on the go soon too.

Nope, it is still closed. The notice is still there on the stoppage pages. They have promised to update tomorrow ( Friday 20th) at the end of the day and have also said lock operation will begin between 20th to 25th latest but no indication of precisely when. We are holed up in Skipton just now waiting for the word. Still, there are far worse places to have had to stop for a few days. It's packed in Skipton with most boats waiting for the Gargrave locks to open and I am told several moored nearer to Gargrave too.

From the very bottom? Well, there's a first time for everything!

But then they would wouldn't they. Nobody wants a rubbish incinerator in their vicinity so it has to be given a more positive sounding name, regardless of what the net energy balance actually is.

Nah, there's room. Just. Had to reverse out and pull the tiller pin though, having removed the solar before even trying ... and mines a low boat!

Wholemeal, sourdough, foccacia? Or plain white? Is the canal in a middle class area?

Now credit where credit's due; one Richard Parry of CRT got personally involved in this re-alignment, and no doubt, having spent many years in the railway industry, was in a good position to bend a few ears and provide solutions. I believe he took HS2 to task on several other sensitive sites along the proposed line.

We need to campaign for more accessible bins, they are far too high, it's discriminating and non inclusive. I demand my rights!

Hi, I live in a village next to the Hudds narrow, and I walk along the canal most days. The water levels have been very low for the last month., making navigation very difficult. Yesterday evening I stopped and talked with boaters coming up the canal, it had taken them two days to get from the lower locks to lock 28, and they only managed that by calling out C&RT to let down water, they also told me there is also an issue with travel Standedge tunnel at present due to lose brickwork, which is causing them further delays. If you are on a tight time for your trip, I think you have made the right assumption in avoiding the Hudds narrow.

Boats are not like houses. The legal regime that makes renting out houses so advantagous doesn't work with boats.

And it benefits millions of dog owners, and everyone else who doesn't want to tread in dogsh!t... If your point that dog waste bins are worthwhile and economic because their cost is divided between millions of users, plus they protect the environment, then perhaps councils should allow boaters to use them, increasing the number of users still further and protecting the hedgerow from illegal dumping? Even more people benefit and even more of the environment is protected! Only users of composting toilets will know how much more pleasant partially dessicated human waste is than dog poo. I have seen dog poo bins being emptied and the operative doesn't touch the contents of the bin and of course at the processing plant the plastic bags are ripped off mechanically. Canal-side bins could be larger, but even several weeks of human 'deposits', having dried out and shrunk as they do, amounts to a tiny volume that needs binning. It could be that those unlucky enough to not have composting facilities of their own are already do this.

Because of extra licensing, insurance, BSS, and operating premisses costs as required by CaRT and the need to provide 24/7 support for breakdowns etc. the usual advice is that it is not worth it, but buying a sponsor boat in a hire fleet for an agreed number of years where you reserve X weeks for your own use does seem to work, but your budget almost certainly rules that out.

Finally, a benefit identified of eating in McDonalds....

Plus Birmingham canals have long had an extensive, free to view public art collection, which Venice lacks. For clarity, the upper photo is from Birmingham, the lower is from Venice. Photograph taken by Chris Jones in September 2010 and was added to the database on Thursday the 5th of January, 2012. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence By Saffron Blaze - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15374420

I don't see why. Boaters with pumpouts and composting toilets pay for Elsans but don't use them. We don't use every service we contribute to, that's the nature of taxation and the distributed costs associated with living in a civilised society, and ensuring human waste is disposed of in a sustainable way benefits us all. Even this point is moot anyway since as I've already said, it's the direction of travel whether you like it or not, being more sustainable than any of the other solutions in the long term. If I recall the starting point of this thread was that composters were told overnight that CRT guidance was changing and they could no longer do what they had previously been told they could. This was a management failure by the CRT and the results were entirely predictable, it has nothing to do with the behaviour of composting toilet users. No one is using them incorrectly. A composting toilet itself is designed to start the process not complete it and given the marine application it is unlikely the end user is in a position to complete it either - but yes, a holistic solution is required to support the process. If councils can provide in some cases up to 4 different bins to categorise and collect household waste it is not beyond the wit of man, the CRT and companies such as Veolia to provide suitable collection facilities at rubbish points. In my experience the 'atmosphere' shall we say, around and inside Elsan points is considerably more unpleasant than any effect of composting toilet users currently putting their double bagged waste into regular waste containers (which I am NOT condoning) so once a suitable collection point is provided I do not see the problem. Honestly all I see is reactionary posts citing would are essentially trivial issues with what is otherwise a considerable improvement in the sustainable disposal of human waste over the long term. I don't get what would motivate anyone to be so negative. I appreciate changes in behaviour need to be supported by organisations such as the CRT to make them happen, but surely far better to encourage and lobby for positive change than simply resist what is, as I said before, the direction of travel.

Nowadays we just use an app.