Arthur Marshall

I'm sure my friend's old 70ft working boat has turned there.

No you can't, not now and probably not again. Officially, anyway. The last sentence says it all. So scheduled isn't better, as you've lost the chance of an afternoon passage. And CRT can halve the cost of manning the tunnel. You think that'll come back?

Same here. You get just enough free time to nip into town, do your shopping and shove off. Otherwise all the moorings, inc the towpath ones where you get hit by boats fairly often, all have to be paid for. It's a precedent, that's all.

We may be different in our politics, but over boating (which is more important as we have some control over it) I don't think we disagree much! Random, as far as i could tell. Just in the order they arrive, with an occasional juggle at the whim of the gatekeeper or request of a boater. Anything else would be a bit chaotic. In other words, exactly as it worked without a booking system...

Quite likely, I should think. Charges for any manned facility. Our free usage of Anderton, I suspect, will never come back. They already charge for mooring at Llangollen, which sets a precedent for charging for moorings at any town centre. It'll be like the Caravan Club system - book your pitch and don't moor anywhere else. Wandering about with a rucksack and a tent used to be the norm when I was a kid,now it's virtually illegal, and they even have a name for it, same as they do for swimming anywhere unpatrolled. Buggering about in boats used to be fun, now you need email, phone and a stopwatch. I'm quite glad, really, that I'm not going to be doing this for much longer.

No, you can't blame CRT for inconsiderate boaters, it's blatantly obvious what is meant. Theres quite enough signs already, and possibly too many stupid boaters!

Maybe takes a whole one to see why loading huge PDFs onto a forum read mostly on phones and while travelling using mobile data, is a bad idea. Some rules are there for a reason.

Depends who's on the door. Boats turning up on spec have been told to book and wait till the next day. Some of the guys are helpful, some are jobsworths. And if volunteers, are going to stick to the letter because of inexperience. Not really a problem for me as it's the start and end of a cruise, but it's unnecessary and irritating.

Privatising the probation service didn't help much. And i suspect that a lot more than 3 out of 10 broke the law again - they'd just learned enough tricks inside so they didn't get caught!

Doubt it. I've written to them twice asking for an explanation and suggesting that not everyone on boats is on the net, and pointing out the difficulties it'll cause and not had a reply. I don't think they're bothered about boaters finding stuff unfriendly, or, in fact, much about boaters. Shame, really.

Thought so. No more free access to the Anderton Lift either, I guess. It'll be an improvement. Lots of them about. One of Parkinson's laws says that in any organisation, sooner or later, the organisation is organised to run for the benefit of itself and not for its ostensible customers. A variant is Arthur's Second Law, which is that every improvement makes things worse.