viking

I finally got through this stoppage yesterday after 5 nights quite pleasant nights down at Swarkestone - the longest we have ever stayed in one place with the exception of our home mooring! I had expected a bit of disruption on the Saturday morning, but in fact there was none, it was very quiet, although abandoned boats were much in evidence on the Willington side of Br 20 - there must have been at least 6 Canaltime there as well as private boats. I spoke to one of the maintenance men and he told me that the trailer was grossly overloaded (11.5 tons was the figure he quoted!! although there may be an element of exaggeration there) I believe he said the bridge weight limit was 3 tons. Despite all that the actual arch of the bridge still appeared quite robust, it was only the side wall that had collapsed. The biggest problem for us was the lack of information, particularly after Friday night. The office was closed of course by about 4pm and the website still hasn't been updated on Sunday morning. The guy I talked to onsite said that the repair was complete by 3pm on Friday and they had staff at the lock to help with the anticipated rush of boats whereas in fact only 2 boats passed through on the Friday. I pointed out that this was hardly surprising since, although he knew it had reopened nobody else did! I phoned on the Saturday morning and got an answerphone which mentioned the 0800 emergency number. I rang that number and was told brusquely that "We only deal with emergencies, not stoppages" which was less than helpful. I said that if I did not get some information about it I would start emptying my rather full toilet cassettes into the canal and asked if they would consider that an emergency. This resulted eventually in a call from somebody at the bridge site confirming that the bridge had reopened. Altogether though less than inspiring communication. Anyway I can continue my journey home now and once again rejoice that I took early retirement and all my time is my own!

The Trent and Mersey canal is closed between Stenson Lock and Willington village due to a bridge collapse at Bridge 20. Apparently some farm machinery that was crossing the bridge at the time is also in the canal. A crane is on site to start removal of the debris but no information yet on how long it will take. I guess I will just have to sit and wait at Swarkestone - turning round to go home will take about a month at my speed! bbc news video

Do yourself and your pocket a wonderful favour and don't have one fitted at all. When we moved from hire boats (40 years) to ownership we were absolutely adamant that we wanted a pump out toilet. We were told by boat builder after boat builder not to go there but we laughed at them all because we knew best. Well we didn't. I think our pump out toilet was something like £800 extra on the cost of the basic boat. It has been the biggest liability and the worst waste of money of my entire life. We are now planning to spend probably a roughly equivalent amount to have the whole thing removed next year. Why? They smell abominably - simply do not believe anybody who says they don't and there is no way to stop it. The cost of pumpouts is ludicrous even the bwb self pump outs. Boatyard pumpouts are very often in the most inaccessible places and the very act of asking for one seems to guarantee that you will be treated like some kind of pariah and placed to the back of a long queue - even if there is nobody else there. They very often are not available in the winter. If you go to a hire base and ask for a pumpout then you had better not choose any of their turnround days (and nowadays that spans about half the week). The space occupied by the pumpout tank will be far better used for storage. We wrestled with our pumpout toilet for two years before we gave up on making it remotely sanitary and believe me in that time we tried every trick you could ever imagine, short of having it exorcised by a priest, in an attempt to make it acceptable and it never was or ever will be. About a year ago we gave up using it all together and now exclusively use a porta potti which never smells, is remarkably convenient, and costs nothing to empty. Of course you will laugh at this as we did, have a pumpout toilet fitted as we did, and eventually regret it, as we did. Good luck.

Hi Chris, I do use a longer cable and attach it to the window but like yourself I still get gprs most places. I too have heard that '3' are going to share with t-mobile, and I too share your pessimism about rural broadband, although having said that I suggest you have a look at the '3' coverage map for wherever you live or cruise, it is fairly impressive in my home terrirtory, more so than any other operator, in fact at my home postcode they tell me I can get speeds of 2.8Mb/s which is more than I can get through my telephone line! Then again as I hinted before, telco's coverage maps tend to be about as reliable as politicians promises.

Sorry about the extremely long time it has taken for me to reply to this, but here I am now. In response to Lesd, I am using Vodafone via a USB modem. By necessity this sits inside the boat (I doubt it is waterproof, the cable isn't long enough to reach outside, and as with all these devices they have no connection for an external antenna). So given that a narrowboat is a pretty good signal insulator maybe it is not surprising that I have such poor results. As an example I have been on a 15 day cruise over Christmas and New Year, and during that time I visited 1 location that had a 3g signal. Now admittedly it was an out and back cruise so I went everywhere twice, but I still don't rate that as very good. So much so in fact that I am now looking for an alternative to Vodafone. I have looked around the coverage maps for various providers and in my area and the one with the best coverage (or perhaps I should say best coverage map) is '3', not only that, but it is also much cheaper (£15pm for 3Gb, I am presently paying £25pm for the same allowance). The problem there is that I know full well that coverage maps have even have more artistic licence in them than estate agents house descriptions, so I wonder if anyone that uses '3' could comment on how good their coverage actually is, or possibly how good (or bad) the company is? On the same line of thought is there some kind of meter that you can buy that will accurately tell you what a particular area is like for signal strength? I am thinking a hand held, battery operated device with a signal strength gauge on it. I have searched for these online but have never managed to find one.

I just had to reply to this thread. I am a computer nut as well as a narrowboat nut, I spend 6 months/year afloat, travel hundreds of miles and connect to the internet every day. I can say without fear of contradiction that broadband on the cut is a myth, at least it is if you ever want to go anywhere. I have never conducted any scientific analysis of this question but my gut feeling is that I get a 'broadband' connection about 5% of the time that I connect. The other 95% is all gprs (ie. about dial up speed). So forget broadband on the cut unless you want to stay in the same place all the time - it doesn't exist and probably never will because it is not in the interest of any broadband provider to provide the necessary infrastructure to make it happen. It exists in cities of course, but then if you go flashing your laptop around there it will probably get stolen anyway so is it worth it? Am I a cynic or what?

Thanks for that Richard. Having had time to mull it over, I think we will turn round and retrace our steps via Foxton, Norton, Braunston etc. There are two factors involved, the first is that I hate sitting about in what is effectively a traffic jam (although there are no boats where I am at the moment!) I would rather maintain the illusion of traveling, even if it is in the wrong direction. The second is that we have the boat booked in for bottom blacking in July and so if we sit here waiting for too long we might miss that as well, that is really the deciding factor.

Just got an email from BW to say they have closed the Soar ufn. Just my luck I am sat just south of Leicester about to enter the Soar in order to try and return home (the Macc). There hasn't been that much rain today and the forecast for tomorrow is pretty good, so does anyone have any idea how long 'ufn' might actually mean? I have never experienced anything of this sort before in the summer, and I have to make a decision. Do I sit it out ( I happen to have a superb mooring at the moment, though nowhere near any facilities), do I turn round and go back the way I came(it is going to add a good few days to the trip and involves more lengthy queues at Foxton and Watford) or do I put the boat in a Marina somewhere and go home? I could phone BW of course, but I despair as to the kind of answer that I may get from Darren and Sharron or whoever answers the phone. Since I started typing this it has begun to rain heavily

You are right about Birmingham being the closer of the three, but you would still need some onward transport from there. Some hire companies have been known to collect overseas customers from train stations/airports, have you checked with your hire company? I think only you could decide if multiple flights were worth it or not. Have you considered a one way car hire? Plenty of info on that online. It is about 87 miles from Heathrow to Rugby about 30 more from Manchester. However you get there I hope you enjoy the trip.

The wires don't have a habit of coming loose, they did so once probably because the builder didn't tighten them properly. Since I tightened them myself they have not shown any sign of coming loose again, but this is a bit off the point, I just wanted to know what people thought about the wiring problem. It seems so far at least that the way my wiring is put together is fairly normal.

I agree but what if it happens on its own? Don't laugh it already has. We were plunged into darkness one night because the connections on the domestic isolator had vibrated loose and fallen off. Therefore the engine was probably running with the battery isolated for some time before we switched off the engine and found out we had no domestic electrics.

I've just come back from the boat where we had an electrician attend to a small problem we have been having - it turned out to be a faulty alternator controller that was replaced under warranty. Whilst he was there he expressed surprise at the way our alternator is wired, ie. it is wired to the battery across the terminals of the domestic battery isolation switch. He said that if he was doing it he would hard wire it to the battery to prevent the alternator being damaged in the event of the circuit being broken whilst the engine is running(by a loose connection or somebody swithcing off the domestic isolator) . I don't know enough about it to judge if this is good advice or not so I though I would solicit some opinions here. He did tell me how to rewire it so that this is achieved so that wouldn't be a problem.