Arthur Marshall

Obviously. CRT doesn't have enough money to run the show , so what do you expect? Economic zen master, he say in monopoly situation with locked-in consumers, costs go up, non-consumer income go down, prices they go up. Zen master he also say, tin floaty toy be luxury item, you not want pay whack, you go play trombone instead.

Be a bit more than that in a few years time, with the surcharge up to full rate and basic licences up10% a year. Can't blame them. I don't want to pay 10% on the licence and 5% on the mooring, either. There again, I'd rather not pay anything at all and have the system run like clockwork. Magic , that's what we need.

Think you're right, looks like it's just trawled the site, found an old thread, pulled a sentence or two off it and made a pointless post no human would have done.

I suspect most woodburners are actually multi fuel. Mine is always referred to as the former, but is definitely the latter. Currently burning mostly wood as I had an ash tree cut down two years back. It also burns copies of the Grauniad recycled into compressed bricks, and you can't get more Guardianreaderish than that. No near neighbours apart from a herd of cows and they don't seem to mind.

This rubbish about dividing boaters has been going on for thirty years , and it was rubbish then and it's rubbish now. There was bs about shiny boaters being hated by scruffy ones, and liveaboards by them what didn't, and tin boats versus yoghurt pots, and how we all hate cyclists and fishermen and dog walkers. It's a civilised discussion as to the rights and wrongs, or the effectiveness, or the law or whatever, that's all. I've never met a moorer who said he despised CCers, and plenty of the latter come up and chat when I'm out and about. I've shared locks with all of them. Several of my friends are CCers, some have been both at times. Who cares? Strangely, we all get on. Especially, as you seem to forget, when you're out on a boat, there is absolutely no way of telling whether someone's got a mooring, or a share, or just cruising. None of us really give a toss, in the real world. This is social media, and a discussion forum. It's not real.

Of course it's quite legitimate, and so is spending twenty years dawdling between the bottom of Bosley and the bottom of the Macc, but what it isn't, by any definition, is a cruise, or what the original act imagined was one. Whatever CRT's supposed justification for the surcharge, usage of the system doesn't have much to do with it . I use the infrastructure ten times as much as one of the bunch you describe, and so does a hire boater in a week. The surcharge is being introduced because CRT needs money, and it needs it because the original calculation of the proportion of CCers to home moorers has been put right out of kilter by the sheer quantity of the former who are taking advantage of an interpretation of the law which was never intended. It's as much BW and CRT's fault as anything by simply not providing moorings where people want them, and then never having the bottle to define what they mean by a cruise. Prior to whenever, there was just a licence and we were all treated the same, though some of us paid for a mooring and some didn't. BW charged the mooring providers a fee, same as CRT usually does now, which the landlord factored into the rent, so all home moorers contributed that bit extra to the authority for the right to stay put. I still think the split into the two categories of boater was a mistake, complicating the whole business unnecessarily. The surcharge is just heaping more mess on to it.

Sorry if I got wrong end of stick. No worries...

I was just replying to a post that implied licence costs would have to double. No need to get shirty... But you could as well argue that I'm being penalised because a load of freeloaders are neither paying their way nor following the spirit (and often) the letter of the law. I think there's little doubt that it's a small minority of CCers who actually, genuinely cruise rather than hang about in a twenty mile zone, avoiding locks as if they were inventions of the devil. A couple on the Macc have been doing it for as long as I've been here, and good luck to them (it's a lovely lifestyle) but it sure aint being on a cruise. And before you ask, it wouldn't suit me. I'm not actually arguing either way, I'm quite happy paying for my mooring, my mooring fees, and my licence. I'm just taking part in a discussion. ETA if you'd bothered to try to follow my argument instead of getting instantly nowty, you'd have noticed that it was implying that the unused spaces being paid for by the marinas would lower the need to raise licence costs for all parties, not raise them. But then, you're not really interested.

I don't think it would work like that. If I moored in a marina, 40 foot boat, would the marina be passing on £800 of what they charged me to CRT? I suspect it would be a lot less. So the licence wouldn't need to go up by so much as that for it to balance out. I'd guess a 50% increase all round would do it and save a small fortune in paperwork.

Agreed. There should never have been a differentiation between moorers and CCers in the first place apart from giving the CCers the 14 day mooring right. Just leave the home moorers to pay whatever they get charged for the facilities they want. Much fairer all round.

The problem with insurances is that once you make it compulsory, you give the companies a licence to charge whatever they like, with no relationship to the service provided or its actual costs. Competition doesn't bring prices down because they , like all major companies, operate as a cartel and, due to the glory of small print that either nobody reads or understands, it's impossible to compare value of their various offerings. All you know is that they will do their best to refuse any claim you make, and then use that claim to justify a further increase in premiums. Of course, the BSC works on exactly the same principle, so we should be used to it by now. By the way , if anyone wants to use my mooring location as a ghost mooring to save money on their licence, my renewal EOG fee to CRT is just over £800 this year for a forty foot boat. I'm sure CCers will be queueing up to save money...

Insurance is a racket. It's just another gambling system , like the stock market.

Not sure that we ever had a "green image" after the invention of the diesel engine.

I have a vague memory of doing the same, probably for the same reason - been 3rd party with Basic Boat since the requirement came in. They still do wreck removal cover.

That's all they need to know until there's a claim, which I imagine are few and far between. Otherwise, the only person likely to suffer from lying they have a policy when they don't is the boat owner. All insurance is, after all, is a gamble when someone else decides the odds. Mostly , it's an expensive waste of money, except when it suddenly isn't. Even then, the losing party to the bet will do their best to avoid paying out.

I don't really know why insurance is regarded as being so important, as far as CRT is concerned. If they have to recover your boat after it sinks, I presume they would either sue you for the money or you'd pass them to your insurer. It's to the owners' interest to have some form of insurance, not CRT's. But insurance companies always supply details to third parties, that's how knock for knock works. Yiu don't specifically authorise it, it's implicit in the contract. Many people still seem to be labouring under the illusion that they have a right to privacy, and to keep online information from being freely available.

And there is probably, buried in the small print of your insurance policy, a note that you agree to your details being passed to any legitametely interested party. They share your details between themselves to decide liability, so why not CRT.

If you do Chester, think hard about bothering to go down the staircase into the basin, unless you want a run to the Boat Museum. I never bother any more, it's noisy down there from the pub (fine if you like late night music). Good moorings as you come into Chester, quieter than you'd expect.

Ease of access? Marina owner keeping a couple open for his own use? Could be loads of reasons.

For a bit of peace and quiet and some lovely bits of scenery, the Middlewich branch is hard to beat. The Chester run is good, too.

I'm a bit surprised my site doesn't do it. He knows I'm away most of the summer and another couple of boats are away most of the year. Maybe in our case it's an insurance thing as we build and maintain our own landing stages, which we occasionally fall through.

Rather depends on your contract. It would be at my mooring as it's for my exclusive use. What happens at a marina if the berth's been let to a visitor and the holder comes back? I would imagine it's only fraud if it's sold and claimed under false pretences, which in the "ghost" cases it is. Simple as that. Luckily, unlikely ever to happen as simply not worth the hassle to any of the parties concerned, as we've seen. Bit like this discussion. You could have included budget airlines who sell more seats than their planes have, too. That's not fraud either, though I've never been quite sure why, but the reasons are obvious.

It is, but mostly they know what they're doing and get the boats through without too much fuss. It's worse when they aren't there - last time I got there before them and boats coming down refused to turn the locks, so about six came down in a row. Bloke at the front of my queue nearly hit the guy on the last one. Luckily the lockie turned up and stopped the flow, much to the aggravation of the seventh at the top.

Four days is a pretty short trip. Doubt you'd manage the Montgomery, bearing in mind you have to book the locks and they aren't open all the time. You might just make the aquaduct if you don't get held up too long at Grindley. It is quite a short canal and a lot quicker coming back than going up - you almost come to a halt in the bridgeholes going up.

Well, there's fraud by the boat owner, stating that he has a home mooring when he doesn't, especially if there's a signed* agreement that the mooring is never going to be used! He gains the financial advantages and also the relaxation of the 14 day rule, although not under the current t&cs, of course, as he wouldn't ever be returning to the mooring. That in itself, I suspect, would alert CRT to the fraud. And the site owner making the agreement, because it's made to enable an illegitimate financial gain, is also committing fraud. Both sides' actions are inherently dishonest. It's obviously a hypothetical discussion, because if anyone was seriously considering it, the last thing they'd do would be to state it on a site like this. There was a spate of discussions about ghost moorings a few years back and I think the general consensus was that they just don't exist. I think the flaws in, and the risks of, such a scheme are obvious. *you'd need a signed contract because relying on an unwritten agreement for something fraudulent wouldn't be worth the paper it wasn't written on.