Alway Swilby

They do come in useful when doing a flight of locks. You can switch off the engine and use the nice quiet electric drive as you work your way through the locks. You can also, if you wish, turn the prop slower than if it was driven by the engine at idle speed. Once you are out of the lock flight and cruising on the level you can use the dies engine to propel the boat and charge the batteries.

We have an EE sim in our router and EE block wifi calling over it.

If it was an accommodation bridge over a railway Network Rail would have spent far more than £2 million rebuilding it.

Virgin Media have been having problems all day. Nothing to do with bill payments. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/apr/04/thousands-of-virgin-media-customers-in-uk-hit-by-outages

If everyone had composting toilets we wouldn't need a sewage system. (If I could find a tongue in cheek emoji it would go here)

Well that was fun while it lasted.

Yes, it is quite propaganderish. But there are occasional useful bits of info. For instance last week he announced the trial of contactless card readers on the CRT pump out machines in the North West.

Damian gave us a heads up about this in last Friday's Boater's Update. And he said that it woukd come from a Snap email address so it is genuine. Look out for our annual boater survey, which is being sent out next week to a random third of our boat licence holders. It’s a great opportunity for you to share your thoughts and feelings about the Trust and our upkeep of the waterways, so we can get a good sense of how we’re doing as a charity and where we can improve. Please note the link will come from a SNAP email address, not a Trust email address.

Our dishwasher on the boat is a cupboard for dirty dishes, mugs etc that fills up slowly over the course of the day. So filling it is easy. The emptying it after it has been run is a bit of a pain but no more so than putting away clean dishes off a draining board.. In our house we used to have two dishwashers, one was slowly being filled over the course of the day while the other one slowly emptied. If you needed a clean mug it came out of the clean dishwasher then when you had finished with it it went in the dirty dishwasher. When the dirty dishwasher was full the clean one would have become empty, the dirty machine was turned on and their roles reversed. That was in the days when I worked and had money!

We have a 500 litre water tank on our narrowboat which lasts two of us about 5 days, less if we use the washing machine. A 2000 litre diesel ⛽ tank sounds large. Ours is about 200 and lasts about 4 weeks. The wee tank on our separating toilet is 20 litres and lasts about 3 days. There is a 25 litre solids bucket that lasts about 3 weeks before it gets put on the roof to "cook".

Yes, it looks like a nice cottage but even the estate agent admits that "The property requires full renovation" so it must be in a bad way.

Rather than "people" I would say "some people"! I always use the correct eye.

We have one of these. It means you always have the long throw with you when you need it.

I remember getting the paddle steamer ferry from there on numberous occasions. There were three boats: the Lincoln Castle, Tattershall Castle and Wingfield Castle. You used to drive along the railway platform to get to the end.

I've just seen a post on facebook from someone who had booked a free mooring in Liverpool and is now being told they have to pay the £10 per night or cancel the booking. I think the £10 rate is fair and we will definitely visit again but the way CRT have gone about it is bad. They should at the least have put the charge on thier booking system before people started booking for this year.

If you want to get your narrowboat to Europe here's what you do. Sail your boat to Goole and moor up next to one of the big ships that has a crane. Talk nicely to the captain and ask them if they wouldn't mind hoisting your NB on board and taking it to wherever they happen to be going. Hopefully it will be somewhere with access to the European inland waterways. When you get there they hoist you off and there you are. No expensive lorries or ferries. Simples 🙂

Zero must be good surely?

Cardboard box?

The Humber Pride is now called Exol Pride and carries oil products from Hull to Rotherham. It doesn't carry gravel to Leeds. Edited to add: Unless things have changed in the last 6 months and Exol Pride has been converted into a gravel carrier.

Ah! 😁 The other Tim was on this thread earlier and I got confused. Easily done.

I'm certainly not suggesting that Tim is lying. I've met Tim a couple of times at St Pancras Cruising Club events an if he says he's taken a 70 footer through Thorne Lock then I'm sure he did. It is just that when entering that lock in my 58 footer I thought "How do you get a 70 footer through here?". There was a lock keeper there and I asked him and all he did was laugh. He didn't say you couldn't, he just laughed without answering the question. I'd like to see how it is done, thats all. And another thing, since the new lock gates were installed at Thorne last winter can you still operate each gate independantly?

Could have come off the Ouse at Goole or Selby.

Yes. Good point well made. 😀

I have heard this before but having been through there in my 58' boat I find it difficult to picture how. I asked the lock keeper how 70' foot boats fit through and he laughed!

Furthest north is Leeds if you go up the Trent and round Trent Falls. If you don't fancy big tidal estuaries and instead up go up the T&M then Hebden Bridge on the Rochdale is the furthest north. In both cases you would have to go back the way you came.