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My view: 1. You are completely right in your concerns about safety. 2. There is no way you can successfully change the situation at the present. The entire system is against you (as confirmed by the attitude of some posters on here.) 3. When you have been at the marina for some time and have got a reputation with them for being reliable and sensible, then you might be able to suggest improvements without being immediately suspected of trying to undermine everybody. But this will take quite a while. Years.

There seems to be some confusion about the role of HSE and health and safety law. HSE and local authorities enforce health and safety (H&S) law, they don't make it. H&S law is made by parliament and the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a duty on employers to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the health and safety of their employees and those likely to be affected by their work. Thus, a marina is responsible for the health and safety of its employees and those using the employer's premises. i.e the marina. (That's a bit of a generalisation, and it is couched in terms of what is reasonably practicable, but you get the gist). (See also, Marina development safety | Canal & River Trust (canalrivertrust.org.uk) ) I hope that helps. James (a retired HSE Principal Inspector)

Buy a load of bubble wrap from Amazon, turn off the gas, wrap yourself up and stay on the sofa, should be safe there.

A marina I was moored in had the misfortune of a visit from the health and safety police. They were alerted to a so called problem when a moorer broke their ankle whilst trying to get on their boat. This boat owner had only been at the marina a few months,after having their boat craned in. They had absolutely no clue about boats and boating and had no interest in finding out. They seemed surprised that boats and pontoons actually moved. Not wishing to take any responsibility for what had happened,they tried to place blame on the marina owner, and eventually got the H&S people to visit the marina. The result was that the boat owner was asked to leave,the owner was forced to undertake some upgrades,and the mooring fees went up for everyone else moored there to pay for these so called improvements. The boat owner wasn't actually able to move their boat themselves,and had to pay for it to be moved. The marina is no safer than it ever was, but thankfully has one less idiot mooring there. It transpired later that the person who had complained was intoxicated. It amazes me that some people arrive at a marina and instantly want to try and 'improve' it for themselves at the expense of others who are happy with things as they are.

So you want to be asked to leave the marina in double quick time then. If you fell into most marinas (not all) you can easily stand up with the water barely up to your waist. When you are on your boat, I would expect you to have your own life ring/throw line ready for use, and you also have the fire extinguishers demanded by the BSS. If you have a modern boat, it should have been built with a means of climbing back onto it. if it is older, you can do as I did and supply & fit my own. Why is a fire assembly point so important to you? Do you have one at home? Work out how you will deal with a fire on your boat or one moored close to you, and it is job done. If you don't feel safe there, then rather than try to force your views on others, just find a marina with all that you require.

Why not, I extended my mooring from 55ft to 70 feet of usable space this Summer..

More like this has the smell of an individual who has got used to being told others should take responsibility for their safety/wellbeing instead of thinking for themselves.

Well, I think your expectations of marina safety are very reasonable and I am surprised by all the negative responses.

Apart from some boatbuilders getting it wrong, one problem is that people who don't really understand this -- especially how LFP batteries and electric motors and props work together! -- post stuff on the web (often in blogs) which has some fundamental errors, for example why electric motors are brilliant for boats because they generate maximum torque down to zero rpm (true but irrelevant), or that motor power rating is what mostly matters, or that putting a much bigger prop onto a motor (because bigger props are obviously *better*!) will magically make everything better with no real disadvantages (definitely not true!), or that LFP batteries risk burning your boat to the waterline, or that it's dead easy to just drop these in without changing anything else. And since they sound convincing lots of other people who know even less take what they say as gospel (and even quote them in discussions like this...) and then come a cropper, possibly when their batteries die long before their time or something else nasty happens like an alternator burning out or a load dump blowing other kit up... 😞

I did some work there on their steam engine. One of the benefits was the weekly visit to the museum's tasting room.

No, no, no.!!! You've got it all wrong. In this day and age it's always somebody else's fault. How else would the compensation culture thrive? 😇😇😇

I don't think there is a default mode, you have to choose one when setting the controller up. According to Ricky torque mode is a bit more difficult for doing this than speed mode and needs more optimisation for the particular motor/prop being used, which is presumably why a lot of boatbuilders don't do it -- I know he said he had to do some tweaking of the control loop gains with my prop (16" 4-blade) because it's not the one he normally uses. The big advantage is that if you use speed mode on a boat you also have to program in torque limits in case the prop ever gets jammed, and doing this so that it doesn't kick in in normal operation at any rpm/power level but does cut the power when blocked isn't trivial. When cruising along normally torque is only about 30% of maximum anyway, and if the prop jams and stops it can just hold this value forever with no damage -- though I haven't tried this I know Ricky has... 😉 Usually in a diesel boat the governer will inject more fuel to try and keep rpm the same. If I get a prop foul the first symptom is the boat slowing down and the prop wake getting noisier/more aerated -- I haven't checked but I expect power would drop slightly along with rpm. But this isn't very obvious, on the last trip I went down the weed hatch after going through a lot of weed on the Stourbridge canal and found a bit of string and plastic round the prop -- which I suspect had been there for days and I hadn't noticed, because the wake bubbling was noticeably reduced after I removed it... 😞

One of the other marina pontoons was ripped in half and destroyed in March gales. This was replaced on insurance by the marina owner. The removed halves were left on the bank, so I stripped down all usable wood supports, found some old scaff poles and clamps, spent £250 on new decking, and 2 weekends working on it. I'm not an engineer, not ever been in construction and have no van. (...but yes, I have a boat FULL of tools says Kathy..)

I don't think there are ANY requirements. My rationale is that "marina" covers a broad range of moorings, from the simple 1-2 boats end of field, to a larger online mooring, to a finger-pontoon style broadened stretch of canal, to an offline marina. Sure, they could impose a stepped set of rules/requirements depending on size, but I don't believe they do. My advice would be to equip yourself and your boat with whatever you feel you need for your own personal safety - be it a decent torch for the winter months, lifejacket, better/more appropriate footwear, rescue ladder, liferings on the boat etc. It also has the advantage its near to hand if/when you go cruising.

I think you are in the wrong marina! Might be a good idea to find one which meets your requirements then you won't worry as much as you obviously are at the moment.

A very interesting 'discovery', though possibly one I should have made myself years ago. We have a Sevcon 4 which controls to constant shaft speed so was, presumably, set by our motor supplier (TEMA) to Speed Mode. What is very noticeable, particularly as the leaves start to fall, is how much the power is increased by quite minor fouling of the prop, something that probably wouldn't happen in Torque Mode (or in a diesel boat) as the prop would simply slow a little.

I had a 15 Litre accumulator from memory, the pump used to run for the best part of 2 minutes after I turned off the tap. However the pump rarely came on in the night after using the toilet (the pump was under the bed) and never cycled. So I would go for a 12 or 18 from those choices.

I guess if the 'electronics are quietly sitting in the background turning 230v AC to 5v DC waiting for something to be plugged in there will be some 'losses' Putting your tester into the outlet ports would not show any current as you are going to be 'after' the electronics bit.

It is compared to 13" x 9"... 😉 There are direct-drive PMAC motors around which are matched to bigger props (e.g. 16kW/700rpm/23" x 18") but these are even bigger/heavier/more expensive -- and AFAIK nobody is using them yet. Also using an even bigger prop means a deeper draft boat which needs more power to push it through the water, especially on today's poorly-dredged canals, so this is not really desirable for electric boats where every kWh used has to come from somewhere... 😉 (though you could use a 20" x 20" 4-blade for the motor above which isn't so bad...)

It would be still more silent with a low-speed watercooled motor instead of a high-speed aircooled motor/fan and belt drive... 😉 (though maybe on your wideboat it's far enough away that the steerer can't hear the whine, that certainly isn't the case on some narrowboats)