Arthur Marshall

The man reckons its the crankshaft oil seal. It's lucky I'm rich. Well, it would be, if I was. I'll have to repeat three times after meals "I like boats..."

When I stopped at Macc on the pontoon (where there aren't such notices) last Sunday at about 9am, someone was happily running a very noisy engine. It's right opposite a big block of flats, and the noise bouncing off them back to where I was at the other end of the pontoon was unbearable. In my view it's thoughtless and unacceptable behaviour and no doubt signs will appear on the pontoon soon.

You're almost certainly right. It was said by the guy who rewired me in such a way I had to do it all again four years later. Another of my series of boat experts who have done stuff that cost me twice as much later to get put right...

I've got a meter like that on mine but the electrician told me it didn't measure the amount that the alternator was putting in but, I think, what the leisure battery was putting out. It goes up a bit when the engine kicks off, but very shortly reverts to around 12.something. He said it was basically pointless.

Is five hours running really enough to recharge three batteries? Even with that bank of batteries, running a 240v fridge on an inverter for the 19 hours you aren't running the engine would, I'd have thought, run through power at a fair old rate. I know even just running the lights used to wipe mine out pretty quick during the long nights of winter.

Could be. I rather suspect a gasket as it's worse when cold. As the engine heats up the leak gets less, presumably as the thing expands. I'm surrendering it to a boatyard in the hope they can track it down and sort it. Nuts and bolts are tight. I'll mention all these suggestions to the yard when I finally get in there...

It's coming out where the arrow's pointing below. It's not running down from the rocker covers, or, as far as i can see, anywhere else. It started as a small ooze of oil but over an eight hour day is now losing about half a litre. Not sure if this is where you mean?

I also seem to recall that it was overturned, at least in part, on appeal.

Can't say I noticed much difference from BW days, apart from a tightening up of overstaying rules and less maintenance due to budget cuts. It's just a managed decline.

I d contact RCR, tell them about the wrong diagnosis and see if they'll reimburse you. Won't hurt to ask.

Which is exactly what has now happened. It was obvious I'd hogged one of the few straight bits so I moved up so someone else could get in. They did, moored, opened the doors, went and sat in the boat leaving a very smelly engine running and blowing straight into mine. Of course, it's noon, they are perfectly entitled to run it till 8 if they want and I have no cause to complain. I've moved. And that's why people leave big gaps - it's not just the leavers who don't consider others.

I never moor near anyone's stern if I can avoid it. I'm sick of the inconsiderate buggers starting their engine without warning and flooding me with fumes. I leave the biggest gap I can, keep an eye out for anyone trying to moor who can't get in and move up happily. Currently at Sutton, with a gap big enough for a seventy footer on each side, and as far away from the bloke running his engine as possible while avoiding overhanging trees. I presume the fact thst your exhaust while mooring up probably made his boat unbearable for an hour or two didn't worry you? Unless of course it's one of the vertical ones, in which case it wouldn't have affected him.

Assuming the person monitoring is awake and not some poor untrained sod on a minimum wage doing his third job of the day. If you want an example of how well remote monitoring works, take your life in your hands and try driving down one of them new smart motorways.

Isn't it that the plants weren't the initial problem, the water hitting the side wall was the problem. That caused excessive turbulence in that particular area, and then add in the fact that the plants had weakened the structure enough to allow the water to batter it's way through, though they may of course have added to the turbulence too. For the rest of the spill, the water might have been belted down at unprecedented rates, but it didn't have the turbulence or drilling effect of the side wall area. Whatever the cause, I'd lay odds that we'll never hear the results of any investigation - it'll be kept secret "for commercial reasons" or simply to avoid frightening the natives.

Same here. I'm now at an age when I simply can't safely get down into the bilge round the engine and expect to get out again without a fair bit of long term pain. And my original engineer is older than me... That being said, the parts I really worry about are things like the starter, alternator, flexible coupling and gearbox, all of which are covered. I don't think my current oil leak will be covered at all as it's probably wear and tear anyway, or possibly the result of a botched previous repair, but then I haven't actually broken down and can get to a yard under my own steam. If i couldn't, they'd tow me. If I'm anywhere near either of my longterm engineers, I'd rather call them out myself and pay them for the job because I know what they can do, but if I'm not, having the insurance of RCR is reassuring. The guys they use are variable in quality, that's all.

To me it seemed that he hadn't been briefed at all. He had no explanation whatsoever for the failure and appeared to have very little idea about anything. While the questioning was pretty pathetic too, you would have thought he could have given some impression that he knew anything at all about canals. He just looked and sounded nervous - not a reassuring look.

I've probably had half a dozen callouts with RCR over the past seven or eight years. A failed started motor was replaced quickly although the bloke had to phone someone up to check how to wire it. A gearbox problem led to the engineer they sent saying he knew nothing about Listers, refusing to read the manual and walking away, leaving me stranded. Another made a valiant effort to fix a broken fuel pipe, failed and again left me stranded - as it turned out because he'd simply used the wrong washers. Two absolutely excellent guys sent on two other breakdowns, both Lister experts (which I always ask for) and both got me going in about half an hour. A gearbox failure led to advice for me to limp home if I could rather than get a tow as that would save me money in the long run - RCR contributed £1000 twice to gearbox repairs, even though it cost me nearly as much to repair the damage that one of the engineers did to the rest of the transmission when he replaced the mended box. The last pair who did an engine service this year for me (never again) did a reasonable job but managed to insult the mooring owner while messing up his yard, for which I asked for an apology which has not been received. So all in all, a mixed bag. I stay with them for the security of knowing I can get an engineer out if needed, with a bit of luck one who knows what he's doing. If i break down completely, they'll get me to a yard and if in their schedule contribute to some of the costs. I think they do their best, a lot depends on the pot luck of who is available to be sent out. Generally, their blokes aren't knowledgeable about old engines - I gather they don't pay well, so most are young and fairly inexperienced. Once they know what they're doing, they tend to leave and go self employed.

I rang them early last week to warn them of an impending claim and they said they had been flooded with breakdown calls because of the heatwave, and there could be a two or three day delay in getting an engjneer to a breakdown.

Entrusting it to a private company would be worse. Their only responsibility is to their shareholders. Anyway, it would probably go to someone like Capita...

The design wasn't fllawed - it was fine when it was designed. Without being a po-faced self-righteous plonker, no one then expected us to trash the planet, or could even imagine that it could be done. However, politicians and professional designers (and inspectors) of weather dependent stuff have known about it for years, taken their salaries and lied. Too late to do much about it now.

Trouble is, you can delete as much as you want but if anyone else has quoted you, it's there for ever. And in the various bits of the web that index old sites and info. The thing that has changed because of all this is a trade-off of data and free use against privacy. Nothing really ever comes free, it just gets paid for in ways you don't see. Even as I write, Mr D Hutch is preparing to flood my inbox with trombone-related porn... You know it's true, however much he will deny it...

If the inspection was anything like the building regs inspection recently done on my house, I'm not surprised the dam failed. It consisted of a bloke from a private company with a clipboard spending two minutes in the garden looking at the work and signing it off . No doubt he was a fully qualified whatever, but his job was basically to ensure the builders got paid without any hassle, whatever the quality of their work (which has turned out to be shoddy in the extreme). The underlying assumption the dam inspector would have been working on (and the pressure from his superiors ) would have been to make sure this inspection wouldn't cost crt any money, or they'd find another company to do the inspection next time (I'm assuming there's more than one company doing this). Their priority is to keep the money coming in, not the safety of a town or two.

It's a shame that none of these so-called climate experts, with their expensive education and endless degrees, have ever mentioned over the last couple of years that we can expect much greater weather events and variation, or that we can expect hotter, wetter and stormier weather. I mean, if they had, someone would have done something, wouldn't they? Nope, it was, as you say, completely unexpected and unpredictable.

My original ISP went bust twenty years ago, the buyers threatening everyone that unless they paid up with big increases everything would be deleted. My old website is still there, glowering away across the years...