GUMPY

I must miraculously pick stops where there is little local competition. I do agree that stopping in a crowded marina is not the best place to be for many reasons. 🤭 Ringstead was particularly bad, may be better now there is a 5g mast there.

You mean cart found someone who knew where the pumps are located an how to run them😱

I use 3 as a main system in the caravan and on the boat before that and have done for years. I carry a 1p mobile SIM but rarely have to activate it. What I do notice is in some rural locations my Smarty SIM in the phone often can't get the internet at all but the main router is running at 15mbps. I guess it's just down to how good your equipment is whether you get usable 3 or not. Still I'm commited to 3 until November 2027 at under £2.50 a month😉

Hardly surprising when you consider where the masts are.

So they have a valuation of the boat to base their total loss figure on 😉

Looking at the plots from the 3 mast. the coverage is mainly on band 20 The coverage from the EE mast is mainly band 3 so faster The two maps only show the positions of the masts not the coverage. You can find more details Here A lot will depend on who is using which service at the marina

I know, that was the beauty of it, I hadn't seen it before, Had you?

Angela Rippon is fronting a series of six programs on the River Seven Today was the source to Gloucester one part of the program was a trip on Holland down the river. It will be on iPlayer. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002fzb7

Remember waiting ages to get up Napton/Marston Doles, didn't get through on the first day so had to wait overnight below the two. Had my 13 year old daughter with me and she fell in whilst disembarking to work the bottom lock at Marston Doles. Surfaced holding aloft my windlass that I had owned for over 20 years proudly announcing that she had saved it. I still have the windlass at home.

I am trying to remember when we actually had people to stay on the boat, other than cos they were too drunk to make it home. Nope can't remember anyone coming to stay over the last 25 years unless they brought their own boat. As for the toilet that's the one thing that has a warning light on it to tell when it's full but then I always carried at least two cassettes just in case

Much as I love a gadget I never saw the point in water or fuel gauges. The water always lasted 8 days so I filled it every 7 so no need for a gauge. The fuel I did have a calibrated stick for but rarely used it as I again could guess within 20 litres how much fuel was in the tank due to the rough tally of engine/heating hours I kept in my head. For me gauges only really come into their own when you are using a large amount of fuel/water capacity in a short space of time.

I remember trying to get down the arm to Aylesbury before the locks shut for the day to be greeted at the last lock by the lock keeper laughing as he put the padlock on stopping me above the lock, there was no love lost between the lock keeper his son and ACS. This meant I had to leave my little marine ply cruiser tied to the towpath whilst I went away to work for a couple of weeks, I took the outboard and boat contents home with me. Sometime in that period my mother had a call from the police asking my whereabouts as the boat was sunk and they were concerned I might be inside. She assured them I was OK and the boat remained where it was for the time being. A while later duly returned with the boat trailer ( I said it was small at 14ft) put the trailer half in the canal, there was no hard edging, tied the trailer to a tree, winched the boat onto the trailer, then winched the trailer out of the canal and assed the damage. There was a spark plug sized hole neatly drilled in the bottom of the boat so I screwed a spark plug in there and relaunched the boat and took it down to the basin. Over the following weeks I discovered through the grapevine that it was the lock keepers son who had drilled the hole and I worked out a way if getting my own back. He had a motorcycle that he used to leave on the road and one night I filled his fuel tank, there were no locks on tanks in those days, with cement. Took him ages to work out why it wouldn't go and to correct it. I was 24 at the time and a bit of a rebel🤔