DandV

A thoughtful contributor to this community. He will be missed.

We went as far as Bedford on our last year of cruising your beautiful inland waterway system after purchasing a gold licence for that year to start the season with a St Pancras Thames cruise. What we had thought was "doing the leftovers" was actually a highlight of our 5 years. Such a contrast with hill top boating up north. The upper levels of the tributary rivers are lovely, and so much space. The fens themselves fascinating. Go forth and enjoy.

The power output sounds very modest for the size of boat. Not only do you need to consider motoring against the water current but depending on your windage, hull, topside and appendages, motoring upwind could even turn out to be a struggle especially if the fetch was long enough to create windbourne waves smacking against a bluff bow. This could make handling a challenge if it could reduce your speed enough to make the rudder ineffective through lack of water flow.

The boats are expensive to keep up. Most of the boats are either owned by charitable trusts, or syndicated ownership. The costs though of participation on trust owned boats is incredibly modest. Some labour painting and scaping, plus fixing stuff that breaks, like the heads, as well as about £13 a sailing day, preferably paid by subscription. Because they are locally important heritage classics onboard sponser advertising is frowned upon, but commercial suppliers do find ways of supplying at less then fully commercial terms. The boats are heritage buff magnets, but the skippers

I've seen green mould though.

It is a bit like truck racing. Lots and lots of power, but lots and lots of weight. Waitangi and Thelma are over twenty tons. Both boats mainsails are 1200 sqft and 240 sq ft topsoil above. No winches so the mainsheet is 170 ft long. Hence the large crews. Because the backstays need changing over each gybe, gybing duels are avoided.150 ft of mainsheet in, tighten leeward backstay, helm over, let go leeward backstay and release 150 of mainsheet.

Yesterday was day 1 of the annual classic yacht regatta in Auckland. Unfortunately my camera ran out of memory on a new, but incorrectly loaded memory card, so no on board photos to show. Lovely days racing was though recorded by a boating press photographer. Some stunning photos of beautiful century old big gaff rigged yachts racing. https://hummingbird-photography.smugmug.com/Classic-Yacht-Regatta-Day-1-selection/ I can be distinguished by wearing a red life jacket on the big black gaff rigged cutter. Shame on me for not buying a black life jacket. Unfortunate

As I see it the container would a separate vent and an inlet. Not insurmountable. I think some polyethylene fuel containers are so equipped but from memory the vent might need enlarging to use them. And I forgot to add the discharge PPE fro the head passes up to an inverted U piece complete with a syphon break, such fittings are readily available from chandlers. Good luck.

Yacht Waitangi has a sea toilet pumping up to a holding tank well above the level of the head. Yes the contents of the outlet pipe do drain back into the bowl, incentivising a couple of seawater flushes after the payload to keep things sweet if the boat is left for a week or so. The difficulty I see is the holding tank, must be vented to displace the foul air above the contents to make room for the new load. In our case this is via a charcoal filter that requires frequent replacement, and loop up to just under the deck to drop to a hull penetration fitting well above normal water level. Y