pete.i

AND Hammerite is only ordinary paint these days after the EU got hold of it and made the manufacturers take out ingredient that made it good. Once you had to buy special thinners for hammerite but not any more. It thins down with ordinary turps now and is absolutely no better than any other oil based paint. It used to have to be thinned using trichloroethylene but the EU nannies got hold of it and that element has been taken out so now it's rubbish but still expensive. Okay I know trike is dangerous but so is crossing the road.

Why is this even being discussed? The gas guy is 100% right. Why is it so hard to remove the curtains and fit a roller blind. Suggesting that the OP should just remove the curtains and then put them back after the BSS is stupid and highly dangerous.

I don't know about other buyers but when I was looking for my third boat I turned down three because they had been overplated. I suppose it depends on how desparate a buyer is to have a boat.

Thing is there isn't a lot of point in whinging about it on here. Rishi wotisface knocked 5p off a litre and told garages to drop their prices immediately, they didn't. The oil producing conglomerate said they would increase the number of barrels produced. That sent oil prices into a tail spin but garages still did not reduce their prices. Funny thing though almost to the day that the idiot putin walked into Ukraine petrol prices went up. I call scammers of the highest order and don't ask me to prove any of that just because you lot are to idle to look at Google. Check for yourselves.

This is a windup and if it isn't then all I can say is that some people, and there are a significant number, just should not be on the waterways.

Quoted my post because this idiot forum software wont let me edit after after a while. Anyway I meant SA31. See I haven't been here long.

We have just moved back down to Wales to be near our family, SA32. Maybe a bit too near as we have 7 grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren and life can get hectic. I am an educational volunteer for the Canal and River Trust and spend quite a bit of time at Brecon Basin. I have had three boats in my time but they were all when we were living in sunny Yorkshire. I never lived on any of my boats, they were purely for pleasure. We were lucky to live very near a canal at the time, the Selby Canal, so I made use of it frequently. Unfortunately Brecon is not really within every day travelling distance from me otherwise I would seriously think about having a boat on that canal. I am in my seventies now and never really had to do any locks. The three or four that I did do very occasionally were quite hard work I thought. One was at the River Aire end of the Selby, one at Beale and one at Knottingly. That took me on to the Air and Calder where the locks were all electric or I could have gone straight on to the Leeds and Liverpool canal which I never did although my volunteering did take me on to the Leeds and Liverpool but not in a boat. I thought that this web site might be of interest to you. I am just down the road from you so if need any advice PM me. Oh and if you did want to go further afield you cannot unless you put your boat on truck or buy one with a trailer. The Brecon and Monmouth canal is not connected to the main system. https://www.breconbeacons.org/things-to-do/attractions/natural/monmouthshire-brecon-canal

Now you know why Edge is NOT an upgrade, neither is Windows 11 for that matter and I wont even touch on Apple junk.

Another vote for Tony Brooks's website assuming you or him/her have internet access.

I think this a far better solution. Buy or borrow a stand alone battery charger ( you can buy cheap ones just for what you want to do) and use that to charge the borrowed battery. Much better than faffing around with your boat stuff which might all go tits up. Believe me I know all about that.

Then, perhaps, CRT should just say "to hell with it" and hand the waterways back. Then where would we be. The only interest any political party would have in the waterways would be to fill them all in to make room for extra cardboard houses.

All deaths on the inland waterways are, more often than not, avoidable but none the less, especially to the families and friends involved tragedies. Now whilst I fully appreciate that the Canal and River Trust cannot save every life that is lost it can and does try to make people and children more aware of the dangers involved with any water. The Canal and River Trust do a completely free water safety presentation for schools and uniform groups. The take up of this absolutely free service in the ten years that I have been doing it has been abysmal from schools and groups. I attended a Welsh water safety meeting a few weeks ago as the CRT representative. There were big wigs from the fire service, RNLI and other interested parties and water users at that meeting and in amongst all the other stuff that was brought up was the fact that schools do not seem to be particularly concerned about the safety of their children which would seem to be born out by the fact that the take up of the free water safety presentations that the CRT and other bodies do has been so low. I am assured that the Canal and River Trust do contact schools but they do not seem to get many responses. I know this will bring out all the criticizers/moaners/anti CRT posters that seem to frequent this forum but the fact is that The Canal and River Trust, along with other water borne organisations, do try to do something to, at least, make people aware of the dangers associated with water.

Yeah that's what I did for years and years, both in the army and when I worked for the government, I was a communications engineer. Unfortunately my teeth suffered and now my two front teeth have all but dissappeared and the others are not in good shape and I cannot find a dentist who will do anything for less than £4000 that's assuming I could find a dentist anyway who hasn't cried "COVID" and gone to ground.

1 I would. 2 I wouldn't use old batteries as ballast.

The only way to COMPLETELY dry your bilge is to get down on your hands and knees with a bucket and sponge or a mop. As said there will always be a small amount of water left and even if there are no leaks (hopefully none) condensation will put a surprising amount of water down there especially on boat that isn't lived on for long periods.. As long as the bilge pump is pumping out enough to stop your boat from sinking then it is doing it's job.

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I agree but what do you expect from most of the "regulars" on this forum. All too eager to jump on the bandwagon of decrying anyone else on the waterways who do not meet their overly exacting standards. Luckily the, mostly curmugeonly, "regular" posters on this forum are a tiny tiny minority on the waterways.

You only need one if the tie off point eyelet is in the middle of the roof as was mine on my boat. If you use the handrails to tie your center line to then you will need two center lines, one each side. Either way keep the lines near to you on the roof where you steer from aka the sternor back bit. That way you can step off the boat with the center line in your hand when you are mooring up. The center line should then be used to pull the boat in to the side and to temporarily moor it whilst you moor up properly with the bow and stern ropes. Nothing worse than stepping off your boat in a brisk wind with no ropes in your hand.

Detonators were still used on the railways last year. We lived in a Yorkshire village called Thorpe Willoughby very near to a railway and the Selby canal. We were still hearing detonators going off on the line even though there was no fog. However at the time there were extensive signal repairs/upgrades going on. We have since moved to Wales in May last year and we are now no where near a railway line or a canal now unfortunately.

I would suggest that people like LadyG are not going to listen to any reasonable discussions. I would also suggest that LadyG, and other cyclists. read the towpath code which clearly says that pedestrians have priority on the towpaths. https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/news-and-views/our-campaigns/stay-kind-slow-down/our-towpath-code Take note of item 2.

Definetly little bubbles there so the head gasket is leaking but it is miniscule at the moment. It will get worse the question is when. As Tony says I would leave it for now but it will get worse sooner or later. I would think that as the gasket is already leaking re-torquing the head wont do much if anything and could make matters worse.

You will know when your ready and you will know when you have had a gut full. I wasn't a live aboard and wouldn't live on a narrow boat or a wide beam for all the tea in China but I did have three boats in my ten years on the canals. Even as a leisure boater it was hard work and expensive. The upkeep of all three of my boats was a lot of work and even brand new boats need to be molly coddled to prevent them becoming eyesores or worse and that molly coddling has to happen more or less every two or so. It was cold in the winters and you need to be hardy to withstand the conditions sometimes. I did enjoy my time on boats and, really, the main reason I gave it all up and sold up was because I wanted to move nearer to my family and there are no canals near me now. I was also getting annoyed at the apparent lack of any attention that the Canal and River Trust seemed to be giving to boaters who, regardless of what others may think, is the reason CRT and BW before them exists. Anyway my advice is hire a boat for a couple of weeks and see how it goes. You will know when your ready but it is a very expensive and frustrating experience if your not ready and you buy and then find it's not for you.

Forget going to brokers and "sitting in one" at least initially. Hire one for a week or two. Yes I know stupidly expensive but, really, it's the only way to get a feeling for it. Boating these days is not as good as it was ten years ago when I first started and, in my opinion, things are deteriorating rapidly that is why I have now given up on boating, at least on the inland waterways. I boated for ten years and whilst I didn't go too far I could see the degradation of the inland waterways infrastructure. Many reasons for this and all are documented somewhere on this forum if you care to use the search facility such as it is, If you still want to go boating THEN go and kick some tyres.

When my houdini hatch leaked on my fibre glass cruiser I made a box out of wood and siliconed clear acrylic on the top to give me light. I then taped that down with black Gorrilla tape until I could get round to sealing it. I also used black Gorrilla tape around the windows, most of which were leaking and that was still on and water tight when I sold the boat 18 months later.

My android phone is set up with a google account but my pictures are not in photos.google.com. I wouldn't use that anyway as I back my stuff to two computers and an external hard drive but it would seem that phone photos are not automatically backed up to google, they have to be put there by you or the automation has to be set up by you. I couldn't see any way to do that though.