Arthur Marshall

You should know by now nothing gets fixed until it's completely broken. Half the locks on the T&M doubles are out of action and a fair few of the others have bust paddles. What with a landslip on the Shroppie, any hire boat trying to do the 4 counties in a week is stuffed! How long has that first paddle been bust? Must be a year by now.

Why would they buy a licence? They get reciprocal free time on CRT waters, and that's what they need to book.

One problem I have is that the draw off pipe gets clogged with, probably, rust. Then the pump pulls air in, I get a mixture of air and water. It's never pulled no water at all through though. Those filters can be a problem too. They can block and suck air in. Try it without it. As it seems you can look down and see into the tank, if it runs dry too quick again, check the water level is still above the draw point. If it is, the problem must be somewhere else! I'd start by taking the inlet pipe off the pump and see if water from the tank pours out, which it should if its all below the surface. If it does then shove it back on the pump, take the other pipe off and run the pump. If no water comes out, it's the pump. If water comes out of the pump, shove the hose back on. If it still doesn't come out the tap, it's going somewhere else. Mind you, you've probably thought of all that already.

Surely there is decent access to the tank, if only for periodic cleaning. There's a whacking great hatch on my front deck - I have to get right inside the tank to clean and repaint it.

But CRT are stating that this goes both ways, and BW boats will have to book to come on CRT waters. Why this is an improvement we should be grateful for when for years we have been doing it freely with no hassle, baffles me.

My tank has an almost invisible hole in the filler cap which acts as the vent. Might be worth having a look at how the water gets out. If it's a replacement tank, there might be a fixed pipe halfway up with a bend in it to get to the bottom of the tank and the pipe has split somewhere so you're only drawing from the top half. I'd empty it and have a ferret around with a torch! ETA crossed with post above

Yes. That's why it's an improvement, and we should be proud of CRT for agreeing to it. Edited to add: That's irony, if not sarcasm.

It would appear to be reciprocal, but of course the critical bit is enforcement.

Be both. CRT are probably fed up with BW boats spending too long on their waters. Once something gets regulated like this, sooner or later it gets charged for, usually on the grounds that they've made it so much more convenient for you. With a promise of course, thst it's only a nominal fee... Like the safety certificate... How long till you have to book online visitor moorings in towns generally? I'm quite glad I've only a few more years boating left in me. It's got less and less enjoyable over the past few years for a number of reasons and every trip now I contemplate packing it in. This one up the Llangollen might finish me off!

If you're going to quote me, quote the whole phrase, because it matters. I said, "nobody ever set out to make the world a worse place AS THEY UNDERSTOOD IT". Stalin thought he was doing that, so did Pol Pot. Idealists are usually misguided and cause great trouble, but they don't intend to do anything but improve the world. Usually, they don't, but that's the result of the idealist/pragmatist dichotomy, not their motivation.

The Harecastle folk expect it to be permanent there, and I'm sure this will be. Me neither. And it's being sold as an improvement?

It's the having to book that I object to. That's the Harecastle (was turn up and go), the Anderton lift (was free if you turned up), now the BW. Be every manned lock soon - one holdup on the way to make you late and you're stuffed. You'll be spending half the day on the net panicking about getting confirmation of the booking and the rest of the trip stressed that you won't make it in time. And that's assuming their computers work and won't try and charge you anyway so you spend the next week sorting that out. But luckily we all know that they never go wrong.

Oi. I made my living out of that, and now you've gone and told everyone!

So, due to this improvement in the arrangement, instead of just going onto the BW for a few days, we now have to book online. I presume they'll tell us where sooner or later, but for boaters without internet? Perhaps they'll provide a terminal at the stop lock. This is another example of Arthur's Law, which is that every improvement to anything makes it less efficient and worse in practice. The ultimate example it a TV set, which now costs ten times as much as it used to and has terrible sound.

It was the directness of the writing, at the start, and then the combination of great tunes and imagery in his rock period. If the stuff hadn't been good, it wouldn't have been covered by so many people. He made a lot of money as a songwriter, as well as a recording artist.