Arthur Marshall

I'd completely forgotten due to approaching senility that I'm going up there at the end of May myself, complete with wife for once. If you're still up there and see a small tatty boat approach, wave...

Obvious one I know is the water point and rubbish point as Barbridge junction, both gone. Services at Hurleston were closed due to constant elsan blockage, presumably by boaters. Same at Westport Lake in Stoke though there are facilities close by. I understand that the water point and elsan at Chester dry dock have gone, though as they were so well hidden (as the Westport Lake ones were, while they lasted) it might just be that nobody can find them. I moored round there for years and never knew they existed. From the CRT post I gather the services at Marple are open again, which is nice if true.

Definitely parrots. I'm still scarred by the memory. Ignore my remarks about the Montgomery, I'm in a minority of one, I think, everyone else seems to love it. The Llangollen is popular because it's a lovely canal. You will find, going up, the boat will almost stop dead in the bridgeholes, and crawl through the tunnels. It's a bit different coming back. The aquaduck is an experience not to be missed. Terrifies me, but wonderful.

That's the one! I'd been afflicted by parrots, attacked by dogs, hit by (apologetic) boaters, had to follow the most remarkably incompetent boater across the aquaduck and watch him ram every available boat in sight. In hindsight, it's funny. At the time... And personally I wouldn't bother with the Monty. I loved it thirty years ago, four years ago found it very boring. Best bit is right by the locks going down.

Ellesmere is really nice. Good moorings in the arm, very pleasant little town. I've been up and down in the peak season and whatever people say, it's never that busy. The hire boats hurtle about but there's always plenty of places to moor, though behaviour can get a bit fraught occasionally. I've had several very pleasant jaunts up there and only one dreadful one - the latter being, for some reason, horrendously awful from the day I left my mooring till the day I got home six weeks later. I nearly sold the boat that year... Can't blame the Llangollen, though, it was just one of them trips!

I'd be surprised if the lockies weren't there. I have a vague memory that they start at the beginning of April. There used to be a proper lockie there all the time, I think - dunno if there still is. Once the hire boats start whizzing along, you need them to control the numbers going up and down.

I think he's working down the chip shop. Apart from that, you've summed it up rather well.

Arthur Ransome: "Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won't drown". Always made sense to me.

You can't really keep politics out of everything as, in the end, everything comes back to it. A fairly lighthearted couple of comments and responses isn't really a matter for troubling the mods. If it got serious, maybe... I think this got veered into by a discussion of the chances of a private company investing in repairs to the canal as opposed to a publicly owned one doing the same. However you look at it, there's a political angle to that, whether you approve of public facilities being used to generate private profit or for the benefit of society as a whole. Of course, you may, along with MtBs heroine, believe there's no such thing as society, or, like most of us, including I suspect MtB, think that a compromise is the only solution.

No real problems for doing it solo. The lockies at Grindley Brook are great - you have to do the lower ones yourself as they just manage the staircase but they keep the traffic moving. It's usually busy enough so if you don't fancy doing the lift bridges yourself, just wait till another boat comes along. There's not too many, and they are all manageable solo once you've worked out how to get off the boat either onto the bridge or, if there's room, the offside where the gear is. I shuffle off with the centre rope, pull the boat half through with that, get back on to drive it through then jump off with the stern rope to close the bridge. Quite fun, really... I've been lucky in that I've never met another boat in the narrow bit. But I usually do that section at 6am or late at night.

Really? Certainly has for landowners. Not sure about the rest of us. Would a genuinely wealthy country (as opposed to a country with wealthy people in it) have roads falling to bits, foodbanks everywhere, decrepit schools and hospitals unrepaired, councils going bankrupt and an unparalleled number of rough sleepers? I suppose it all depends where one points one's blinkered eyes.

I can't remember ever reading what the Harecastle casualty died from. I'd assumed it was a heart attack or something and he then fell off off the boat, presumably a trad deck. I really can't see how you could hit your head on the roof unless you had your eyes shut. I'm over six foot and don't even have to crouch.

I don't think it's contentious at all except for the odd person with a chip on their shoulder who looks for an opportunity to complain. Most boats these days are more like floating cottages than the old working boats. I can't believe the vast majority have no washing facilities on board. Expecting a hard up organisation to provide extra, unnecessary luxuries that incur endless maintenance and vandal repair costs is daft. Whinging about it is just silly.

There's an elsan at Venetian marina on the Middlewich link by the marina, and a water point.

The last few words sum up why they haven't got showers any more! You get what you pay for, and if you choose to travel light, that's your choice. You wouldn't expect showers and laundrettes to be provided for you if you decided to cycle from Lands End to John oGroats, why should canoeists? I don't think any boat that can be lived on doesn't have some kind of washing facility. As CRT point out, they were introduced when boats were a lot more basic than they are now. And they get trashed all the time (as, of course, do the elsans).

Last time I went through Colwich it was impossible to open the gates without using the boat to push them. Couple of years ago the same was true at one on the Llangollen - the coal boat advised me to go full tilt at them. He'd reported them to CRT the previous year.

Ah... nor did I...

Quite a lot of the Macc is built on small embankments, and the piling is in pretty poor repair on most of it. One place I passed this morning had a fairly large section of rotten piling with water happily flowing through it into a developing hole under the towpath. It's adjacent to a section which has been fettled with bags of concrete, presumably due to a previous leak, or the danger of one.

That's assuming anyone bothered to report him. Usually everyone just assumes someone else has.

What are you posting but the same old stuff? You haven't posted anything either constructive or different in years. Give it a rest.

I think it's the switch. Headlight not working at all on main beam last night, fine this morning. Worked fine on the dip (it's an old car headlight - one of the two remaining original features of the boat!).

It's just his usual attention seeking clickbait. At least it makes a change from another thread about the commission. I wonder if he's ever thought about starting another forum where all the anti-crt whingers can get together?

Indeed. And, of course, once the emergencies start building up (as they are bound to in structures that are centuries old and have been underfunded for donkey's years), you have to spend all your money dealing with them and haven't either the dosh or the staff left over for routine maintenance. That's why the country's full of ruined castles and decrepit mills and factories. All once busy and productive. It's what happens. It's called time. Actually, it's happening to me, too...

I think the real problem is that the mods are volunteers and I see no reason why the behaviour of a few ill mannered louts should add to their workload. When (presumably the same) people got banned last time there was a lot of outraged handwringing by their supporters, but since then we've been pretty well behaved. Perhaps these unnecessarily nasty posts should just get reported immediately rather than either left to fester or argued with, as the latter just feeds the trolls. Enough reports might get them booted out again.

I think it only might become relevant when you want to sell the boat and if you then do it via a broker. I don't know much about it as my tub is so old the people who invented the RCR weren't born. I'd be surprised though if sticking a solid fuel stove in would make any difference to anything except increasing the value of the boat. There's a long thread about RCR if you use the search icon for "RCR again". I'd post the link but have no idea how to do it...