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Only because after Terry Darlington made it sound dangerous in his book (it wasn't), no-one would insure narrowboats crossing the Channel any more. We did take Snail out to sea in Europe a few times where she behaved very well, even in chop. Unlike Chris Coburn who has achieved all kinds of exploits in his very ordinary nb, we had ours especially made with a 15mm bottom plate, ballast cut to fit so they couldn't slide, 67hp engine, PRM260 gear box, large prop (22x22), double sized skin tanks, all portholes, trad stern, tender that was always available for use if needed, easy to tow along behind on the big European waterways. Snail easily makes 10 kts, (we tested this on the Gent-Terneuzen Canal,built in 1823 which is 200m wide and capable of accomodating ships up to 125,000 tons, with a draught of up to 12.5 m) not a lot of use now we've come back to the UK canals. My blog and book illustrates what's achievable.

The Tunnel leading up to Tuel Lane Deep Lock (Sowerby Bridge, Rochdale Canal) had some sort of comms system so the Lock keepers could signal to waiting boats (as boats should not enter the tunnel while the lock is emptying). It broke. Now the lock keepers have a whistle, they bend down towards the tunnel and blow the whistle and the sound travels through the tunnel quite well.

I didn't carefully avoid your question I meticulously ignored it.

Water was so low at the T&M summit last week that I couldn't get into one of the Stoke locks, and it has rained a bit lately. The CRT bloke who came to sort it out blamed vandals for opening paddles overnight - I did point out that the gates on the flight leaked so much that a lock someone had just emptied (and mistakenly shut the gates on me as I approached it), was half full again by the time I'd walked up to it. Others on the flight, filled by someone going up just before me, were almost empty by the time I reached them. It really doesn't bode well for the summer. Until a few years ago there were anti vandal locks on the top couple, too, presumably taken off because vandalism isn't really a problem.

its 1 year ago today we laid the baseplate and whilst the first 6 months produced quick results, the last half of the year have been thwarted by rain, wind, floods and generally pretty poor weather. So what to report..... Well, we found her original stern dollies and rudder. Sadly they're on a bota on the K and A, made from the stern of the GUCCCo butty Satellite, called Adrastea, so they won't be reunited, and the unique Anderton profiling on the rudder top has been reprofiled to a more standard semicircle. So, we have machined an unmatched pair of dollies as they originally were, and also made a new T stud as the location of that is also unknown. We've also fabricated the majority of the deck beam on the bench, to weld into the deck beam frame which is where the first large wooden knees would have been under the deck board. The other job we squeezed in between rain clouds is starting to make the templates for sections of the hull we can't achieve with parallel planking. We can but hope the weather will somewhat improve over the coming weeks....... we're not holding our breath. Photos showing progress as of today

On that, I was idly looking around a car lot flogging VW campers. I looked at a particularly nice one with £7,995 on the screen and I thought blimey that looks good value. Then I looked again and it was actually £79,995, lol!

Ah, almost every sensible contribution to a debate needs a bit of racism to spice it up, doesn't it?

As one of those young whippersnapper new liveaboards people love to moan about, I'd say we've done pretty OK over the last 90 days...

If water spouts up past the stock it will run down through that rusty gap into the fuel tank as well as rain, ''if the rusty gap is through to the interior of the tank''. Said he tried to tighten the two nuts as well. Looks very dodgy to me

For those that have access to Facebook here is a video of automated stop plank installation https://www.facebook.com/reel/1583824312407975

Can anyone tell me what this is / represents? If it makes a difference it was up on the Leeds / Liverpool near Foulridge.

If you have the password and your email address for 3 go to my 3 for everything including your gorilla bite usage for your conracts.

Today at sunny Streethay

Bruges is lovely. used to tour around Belgium on my motorbike visit the the Groeninge Museum if you get the chance. lots of well known medieval paintings,

We are heading the Bruges later in the year. Not been before but it looks very nice. We will definitely be going on a boat trip while we are there

It doesn't require net energy to make it. The production of biofuels such as HVO is still energy positive. If carbon neutral energy is used to make it, then it is indeed carbon neutral. Let's say a factory produces 1000 kJ of biofuel, and it uses 100 kJ of dirty energy to make it. The factory produced 900 kJ of net energy, 90% carbon neutral. If the factory uses 100 kJ of that biofuel's energy to make the next batch of 1000 kJ of biofuel, it has now made carbon-neutral biofuel. (If you want to be extremely technical, you can say it's now 99% carbon neutral, and the next batch will be 99.9%... so you can mathematically say it tends towards carbon neutrality. But, I think, this is pedantry rather than a helpful classification of the fuel by carbon impact). I'm feeling confused by how you think my use of the term carbon neutral would be used to describe batteries. Would you be willing to explain what you mean so that my need to understand can be met? I can understand this point of view, and there's definitely a practical aspect to this as we make the necessary changes - for now, most lorries use dirty diesel, and so transporting biodiesel by lorry means the practical usage of biodiesel isn't really carbon neutral. However, it is more helpful and more accurate to point out that while the biodiesel itself is in fact carbon neutral, it's the transportation that is the problem in this case. All the carbon sequestered in it was captured from the atmosphere, not extracted from the ground - and releasing it back to the atmosphere should not be considered a failure or a tragedy. The releasing of carbon captured recently should be considered a neutral activity. There are lots of reasons why biodiesel isn't the complete answer (land use change, expense, local pollution) but carbon emissions aren't one of them. The carbon emitted during production and transportation applies to dinodiesel too.

I don't have a select the traffic lights in picture to confuse him

Yep. They are not cheap. A new one of our van is now knocking on the door of £90k. And that's a mid range van. High end manufacturers are well over £100k now. Not a cheap choice anymore. Used vans are holding their prices well because new ones are so expensive.

I guess you can call it this. I would call it fossil fuel companies promoting a misleading use of the term. Perhaps you'll find it more agreeable if I talk about carbon that's part of the carbon cycle, and carbon that's not (mineral carbon). I'm trying to shift a perspective that is common and unhelpful. No, because a forest is part of the carbon cycle and always will be, the mine is not and never will be. We should stop entertaining the idea of "offsetting" ancient carbon with carbon that's part of the carbon cycle, because it's just not realistic. The quantities are just too great and the land required is just too huge. Plus it involves trusting that the forest will remain in perpetuity. Cutting a forest down is not a neutral activity, but I would call that land use change. Burning the wood (or letting it decompose) is part of the carbon cycle. If you replant the wood continuously to replace the chopped down wood, there is no land use change, and this is a carbon neutral activity. As it shouldn't be, because we're just releasing the same carbon that we removed from the atmosphere by growing our biofuel (food). It's carbon cycle carbon. Of course if you count the agricultural machinery, the transport, etc, then no it wasn't carbon neutral, but it's unhelpful to call food carbon emitting when it's not the food's "fault", but the fossil fuel's "fault". You're pointing the finger at the wrong things. Food itself can't be anything other than carbon neutral because humans are fueled by the very same energy chemical carbon bonds that were created by the sun converting carbon dioxide into food. It does, but in theory, if you were to fuel the ships with those wood chips, then it would be carbon neutral. In the context of an extremely integrated carbon based energy economy, I guess not, but the point of the term (for me at least) is to separate out those things that would be carbon neutral if not supported by a whole bunch of peripheral carbon releasing activities. Otherwise the term isn't helpful. If I grow a broccoli in my garden, eat it, then breathe out carbon dioxide, this is a carbon neutral activity. You could of course argue that because I drove to the shop in my ICE car to get the seeds, that it isn't, and while you're technically correct, it's not helpful because it's the DRIVING THE ICE CAR that's the issue, not the growing of the broccoli. Fossil fuel companies know that conflating the two helps their case, if you can't even grow a broccoli without carbon, then what's the point in even trying to reduce carbon emissions. Heck we even breathe out carbon (!) I couldn't agree more, but that's beyond the scope of what we can do personally.

Thing with super duper systems is they tend to fail on a regular basis, look at the Anderton Lift as an example, and when they fail the specialists have to be called in at great expense, and the super duper system always needs an upgrade, perhaps a bell on either end of a 3 mile piece of string would be fine,

What I do know is under this shower i.e. lightweights who created the current system and who don't maintain the paddles, very few boats can get to the tunnel to use any comms system.

My heaviest internet use is posting rubbish on here.

I ran mine with one of these: Step Up Converter,KUNCAN 5V to 12V 1A USB Step Up Voltage Transformer DC Power Cable with Barrel Jack Booster Module https://amzn.eu/d/ffrCr6c Needs a 2 amp usb socket to run it.

This is not a description of the canal, no more than of its history - those you can find easily elsewhere. It is an indication of the vessels you could have expected to meet on a transit of it during August 1990. It is about boats and ships, with the waterway in the background. Most of the vessels I will describe have gone. Since I have no idea whether it will be of interest I will start with just a couple. If there is interest I will go on. If not, no great harm done. We start at the sea lock at Corpach on the West side. Just around the corner, beyond the lighthouse, ships would come into the loch to load timber from the forests nearby. But in this case it is a fishing boat, the Smallwood, which is coming into the lock. Looking for lobsters, and having gone aground, she is going across to the East coast, for better luck. In her bridge, the skipper has a print out of his sonar, which shows a large dark shape far below on Loch Ness. Was it Nessie? or a shoal of fish? He thinks it is Nessie. He says he thinks it is Nessie.The Smallwood, a trawler built of steel in Ramsey, Isle of Man in 1966 had had successful days -" in 1984 Smallwood and Bahati hauled 1800 boxes of cod. They had to tow the net into Stonehaven and it took 30 men 3 days to gut them all." By 1991 she no longer appeared in the registers. Locking up with Smallwood in the Corpach flight, the Vic 32. Built in 1943 by Dunstans of Thorne, one of the 63 VIC type puffers built for the Ministry of War Transport on the lines of the Lascar of 1939. A steam lighter powered by a water tube boiler, she is thought to have worked out of Corpach for a while, taking ammunition from barges and supplying the Atlantic fleet at St Christopher's naval base. Also at Scapa Flow delivering aviation spirit, and as a day boat at Rosyth until sent to Inverkeithing in the 1960s for scrapping. Bought by Keith Schellenberg to serve his private island, and then by Nick Walker who operated her from 1975 to 2002. With a crew of mate, cook, engineer and general help, he took hundreds of people, steam enthusiasts and some not quite enthusiasts, all around the Western Isles and up and down the Caledonian Canal in clouds of sooty black smoke. A master at melding people together, he had to be. In 2002 he gave the Vic 32 to the Puffer Preservation Trust and I believe she is still operational as the last steam puffer. And passing along the canal, just after the last castiron swing bridge in its two halves, a bright red hulled fishing boat the Green Brea. Built in 1973 as the Laurisa BA145 by Herd & McKenzie at Buckie for one Jimmy Gibson, a herring trawler of 54 feet, powered by a 230 hp Gardner diesel, of wood. Of her, said that we can now put a man on the moon but we cannot make the likes of her. A photo of her launch. She lasted in to this century and to I think 2010. Right, that will do for now. If there is interest, I will go on a bit further.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68880171 Downing Street says spending would increase gradually over the next six years, reaching £87.1bn by 2030 - £7bn higher than if spending stayed at its current level of 2.3% of GDP. That 0.2% of GDP increase -- not the total! -- is about 30x higher than CART's annual budget. If they'd increased it by 0.197% instead of 0.2%, that would have paid for a 50% increase in the total CART budget, probably enough to make all their maintainance/funding problems disappear... 😞

That question shows that you seem not to have even looked at any of the online maps, guides or bought a guide book for the area. A guide book like Nicholsons will show where the marinas are located and TEMPORARY moorings are. They will also show that there are NO other canals/rivers available for power boating within 25km of Oxford apart from the Thames, its backwaters, and the Oxford canal. There is a short disused anal above Oxford, but it has not been navigable for years, and the last time I went pas the riier banks around its mouth were full of what looked like squatter boats. Your biggest problem is the 25km distance limit, if you ignore that you get the Kennet and Avon navigations so, as said, Reading and Newbury. I would mention that Thames and Kennet marina is on the non-towpath side of the river so you can't walk along the towpath into town. It is at the end of a long track at the outskirts of Caversham (south Reading) which is then a bus ride or cycle ride to the station. All day car parking at the station is expensive, so just adds to your costs. If you ignore the 25km limit the Burghfield Moorings operator was on here last year saying they had spaces for live-aboards, that is on the river Kennet so subject to flood flows. No such a long walk to a bus stop for a probably hourly service into Reading. Two marinas in Newbury, I think, and walkable to the station, but that means a change at Reading for Oxford if a car is not to be used. I fear that you have picked an area which is very popular with live-aboards, with all the problems that causes.

Marsh Lock on the Thames yesterday morning🙂

i have this semi-trad as a vector drawn in Illustrator that i did to play with colour schemes, not massively accurate for shapes but gives an idea

Perhaps you should invite them to deal with the issues as a matter of goodwill if it is outside the warranty period, and in exchange, you will show goodwill, by not attending the Crick Boat Show next year, with a selection of photos for prospective customers to look at.