Alway Swilby

We've always (about five times) found pleasant moorings available in Jericho just above Isis Lock on the canal in Oxford. A short walk into the city from there. To turn a 60 footer you go down Isis Lock turn around and come straight back up.

Leaving all paddles up on two locks isn't vandalism???

Yep, we had plenty of room in the tunnel.

Hawne basin had just had a delivery on Friday (two days ago), 65p per litre. Very freindly people there. They let us stay overnight on a spare mooring for free. Water and rubbish bins available along with elsan and pumpout. Also showers and a bath! Lovely place to visit. If they have room they'll put you up for a week for free.

I use EE. £45 for unlimited data on 3 sims, boat router, house router and phone. I used to use Three but gave up because of slow download speeds: too many unlimited users on the network especially when the kiddie winkies got home from school.

Wish I'd read this post this morning instead of this evening. We were going up the flight and the lock above the tunnel needed emptying so the pound was high and the grab rail took a beating. What's really annoying is that back in 2014 I'd managed to scrape off a nav light in that tunnel. So today as I was shutting the top gate of the lock below after exiting I thought the pound looked high and asked myself the question "Shall I drop the pound a bit?", then thought "Nah, it'll be alright." But lets look on the bright side, at least I didn't bash the nav light this time.

Enterprise prices have gone up a lot recently. Hertz seem to be a bit cheaper but now I look around for a local independent. Shame because the Enterprise pick up service is good.

How long have you had that diesel in your tank?

I'm sorry to go on about this but you are giving out wrong infomation. On a weekday at Warwick Parkway there are 12 trains to London between 10AM and 5PM. Warick has 7. In the other direction towards Birmingham Warwick Parkway has 11 trains and Warwick 10. Dorridge does have a much better service towards Birmingham because London Midland trains stop there as well as Chiltern Trains.

There's 47 trains stopping at Warwick Parkway today so more like an hourly service. On a weekday there's 66 stopping trains there.

She's been sitting low in the water on the mooring obviously loaded with oil since the breach. I wonder if there's a use by date for the cargo. I saw a video on FB today of her moving somewhere on the S&SY and she was much higher in the water.

Has Exol Pride managed to unload its 8 month old cargo of oil yet?

There's Armco piling for a couple of boats just by Hatton station. There was one boat moored there when we passed today.

ABNB have moved from Crick and are now at North Kilworth Marina. So that explains why the boat is on brokerage with ABNB but it doesn't explain why someone would have a new wide beam craned in there!

That's not the same boat, we've passed both of them today. The one near you is a very shiney Aqualine that was in Braunston yesterday and moved to Flecknoe very early this morning. I had a conversation with them as we passed and it turns out they moved early in the morning to avoid upsetting narrowboaters!

Choice of network is important too. In my experience EE is much faster than Three. The Three network is overloaded with many many "unlimited" users who don't care about how much they download (someone here mentioned leaving Spotify running all the time). This overloads the network making it slower. I used to be with Three, switched to EE and now get much faster speeds and more reliable connection.

Ok. People with composting toilets are obviously not liked here and are bullied into making no further comments.

I don't see the difference between banning composting toilets because some bad people put the contents of their toilet in the bins and banning engines because some bad people put their engine oil down an elsan. Why is my comment stupid?

Someone has posted on Facebook about someone filling and blocking the elsan at Cropredy with engine oil. Perhaps we should ban engines. I saw an old fridge by the rubbish bins at Cowley, perhaps we should ban fridges.

I presume the survey you quote is the one taken on the "Compost Toilets for Boats and Off Grid Living" facebook group? If so that survey is about 6 months out of date. We took part in that survey and at the time we did bag and bin as previous advice from CRT allowed us to do so. Seeing as how we are no longer allowed to do this we have changed our habits and now store the composting poo and then take it back to our house and put it on the compost heap. We know quite a few fellow composters who used to bag and bin. All have changed their habits as a result of the new rules, some do like us, some have replaced their toilets with cassette versions, some are hot composting (a much quicker process). None of them continue to bag and bin even though until the end of the year we are allowed to do so. So you need to find some new figures to massage if you wish to continue to slag us off.

We had a much more pleasant time going down those locks into Manchester than going up. Was like a different flight! The volunteer lockie was brilliant and very knowledgeable. He met us at lock 65 and saw us down to Piccadilly.

OK, I'll be more specific, what about the EA bins on the Thames, most of which seem to be Suez bins?

What about the EA bins on the Thames, Nene and Gt Ouse?

Are there any current BSS requirements that have nothing to do with boat safety?

Crane came at about 9am. Lock open at about 11.15.