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When emptying a cassette from the caravan or the baby boat I always put the screw in lid on the ground in case it somehow gets knocked into the elsan. There is no way I would fish it out 😊

From personal experience, whenever I've had an intractable technical problem that has taken ages to fix, the root cause, nine times out of ten, has turned out to be something I'd dismissed early on as "it can't possibly be that, because...". The last tenth ones are truly hard to find. The other nine, I could have found early on with the clues I had right there, if only my thinking hadn't been blinkered by what I thought I knew. Never dismiss a possible cause. Work through each one systematically, regardless. One thing fault finding does is teach you humility!

Can anyone explain to me why so many posters get good, experience based, practical advice and either just ignore it or argue against it? N

Me too, about twenty five years ago. Now, the cap goes on the floor or in the sink while I do the deed, and gets taken off well away from the elsan.

I've lifted quite a few people out of the water, best if one is trained, the casualty is relatively light and fit, and the rescue boat is designed for the job. I also did an offshore rescue exercise, simulating jumping off a ferry, the idea is to cross hands to hold lifejacket down on entry to prevent it rising up A bit like falling off a tidal Trent lock,. But we were jumping in to a swimming pool off the top board no one got hurt, and we were all rescued using the lifejacket method. not so easy in cold dirty water of course.

Offshore 'twin-bladder and crotch strap' lifejackets (as well as many single bladder) usually incorporate a harness used for lifting / dragging the caualty out of the water. A standard 'cheapy' lifejacket does not have a harness designed for taking the weight of a casualty, Life jacket with safety harness - All boating and marine industry manufacturers (nauticexpo.com)

The Webasto header tank is designed to do this with an In and an Out feed, ideally, when all bubbles are out of the system, there should also be a bypass pipe below that you can open up.

Stop just before the Curdworth tunnel (there is good piling there) and walk up to Curdworth village. 2 good pubs, we ate in the Beehive last time which is down in the village. Family run, was a bit chaotic with service, cheap but very friendly and seemed to be where the villagers were going, and the beer was Enville and very good. The other pub is the white horse on the main road. Chain pub and I think would be a bit more up market, but we didn't eat there this time. Did look nice though. Have also stopped at the Cuttle Bridge, which looks like a motel. The problem with that one (or at least it was last year when we went there) is that it's where some of the HS2 workers go, so it was really busy. And the moorings outside are right by the main road so were a bit noisy, further down near the tunnel was much quieter.

My experience rhymes in that after finally cracking a particularly difficult fix, I realise with the benefit of hindsight all the evidence was there in plain sight, waiting to be seen or found.

What's the point in taking it out for just a day? You have already acknowledged that the 2-pack will need some touching up, so you will need a week out of the water, whether it is for touching up or a complete repaint. Why? Surely all you needed to do was abrade the existing epoxy to get a key, and give it another coat or two. Damaged areas would still have needed to full treatment.

The statement about delay is correct for traditional geostationary satellites but not for low-orbit ones like Starlink, especially the newer ones with laser data links between the satellites. The delay to send data up to such a satellite, across the laser link, and back down to earth -- all at the speed of light -- is shorter than sending the data more slowly through the optical fibre network. This is where Starlink plan to make a huge amount of money from high-frequency trading -- traders spent hundreds of millions of dollars laying a new straight-line optical cable from London to New York to save a few milliseconds, Starlink can do better than this -- and the advantage increases with distance, for example Europe or the USA to the Far East. And yes I'm 100% sure this is correct, because we supply the optical modules used for the intra-satellite links 😉

It's in the Bylaws, a requirement to show both the boats name and number on both sides of the vessel. Also to show the current licence on both sides. C&RT decided the paper licence was no longer required, and said so, only to be told the requirement was a legal necessary, unless the Bylaws were altered licences had to be displayed. The whole mess is due to C&RT's attitude to the Bylaws. The Bylaws give C&RT the power to run the waterways, in conjunction with Legal system, if only they would use them, instead of very dubious Terms Conditions. Bod

My understanding is that that legal percentage of meat only applies to uncooked sausages for retail sale to the public. For catering sausages sold wholesale for ultimate use in cooked food, the figures for meat content are halved. In the 1970's you could buy packs of uncooked sausages cheaply from our works canteen. The packs were prominently marked "Catering sausages, not for retail sale". I only found out about the reduced meat content years later, but they always tasted good. Perhaps it was the Sodium Monophosphate!

A big bag full of money. 😁 Tam

I am increasingly coming to the view that I would prefer guidance on passing moored boats to change. On our last trip out over the August bank holiday weekend, (Venetian-Chester-Market Drayton) we noticed at lot of boats moored during the day at widely spaced intervals, often in ones or twos, but apart from Chester to Beeston there was barely a stretch with no boats moored boats in sight. Realistically, to make a difference to speed, we are slowing down a couple of hundred yards in advance, and then it takes another couple of hundred yards after passing before we are up to cruising speed. The impact on overall journey time was about 2hrs, which makes a difference. I would like to see a definition of the canals as a transport network. If you want to moor up anywhere you like, that's great, but expect that other boats will be moving. We don't all slow to a crawl when passing a parked car, and the same applies if that's a motorhome parked in a layby. Perhaps there could be some reasonable exceptions to that - say the hours of 8pm to 8am it is expected that you will slow down, and maybe even create explicit 'slow down' zones for visitor moorings. Anywhere else and you could reasonably expect boats to be passing during the day at up to 4mph and if you are choosing not to move that day, you need to moor appropriately. If you really don't want the movement, perhaps you should take an offline mooring in a marina? Contentious - definitely. Will it happen, no. However, it's a thought. Alec

Far too many moons ago, I attended a leadership course whilst in the Navy. At one point they send send you up into the Black Mountains. My time was in February. It was cold and very wet. Then snowed.nice. We had four blokes in a two man tent. Kipped in dry clothes. Next morning, back into wet clothes, to save dry clothes. That wasn’t pleasant I can promise you. The tent we couldn’t fold as it was frozen. Taught me a great deal about myself. I’m such a wimp!!