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AidanLincs

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Occupation
    IT consultant, programmer, whipping-boy
  • Boat Name
    St Theodore
  • Boat Location
    Newark

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  1. 16A. Split into 10A and 6A lines on the boat. The charger and the washing machine are both on the 10A feed. They do not play happily together. Even less happily if the kettle is on. It's not an insurmountable obstacle: it just requires a bit of consideration about what is plugged in where, and when.
  2. Hi Lea, I am a single man, with two dogs, moored in a marina in Newark. I have a 57' trad, which suits us well. I could probably get by with a few feet less, but everyone is different. What is a lot of space for me, may be unbearably cramped for you. And vice versa. Residential moorings in Lincoln and Newark are very hard to find, and have got rarer in the last 12 months. This time last year, there were two resi moorings free at Kings Marina in Newark, but now I understand that there are none, and there are several boats on the waiting list. There are other marinas in the area which allow "heavy users" (let the reader understand), but with councils now taking a more proactive approach to council tax collection, I am given to believe that this is not as workable as it once was. This summer was unbearably hot, both for me and my dogs. For most of the summer I worked from the boat, and I have recently got a small office that is less than 10 minutes walk from the marina. Thus I was able to come back several time a day and check on them. Fortunately, I have fairly good insulation on my boat and it was cooler inside than out for most of the day. Two powerful (240V) fans also helped: one at the back to suck air in, another at the front to push air out. The worst time was actually between 6pm and 8pm, when the humidity became absolutely intolerable, and I was forced outside to cool off (and obviously, the dogs came with me). An aircon unit might have helped, but the shoreline is only 16A, so that would be another energy drain to be balanced along with the washing machine, fridge, and so on. This is a difficult thing to judge, because you won't know how effective your boat's insulation is until you experience it for yourself. And that usually means that you won't have time to take corrective action the first time around. Sorry if I sound negative. I don't mean to - I absolutely love living on my boat - but it's important to consider the potential problems even more carefully than the benefits.
  3. Pah. They are all expensive. I judiciously smear a bit of gravy from dinner around the worktop, put one of the dogs up there, and let Nature take its course. The dogs do the dishes, too. Perfect results, every time.
  4. Another vote for the Science Centre. Also, pop into the (mostly) 14th Century Church of St Mary, Redcliffe. Stunningly beautiful building, and absolutely dripping with history.
  5. Ah yes. I thought that too. Lasted six months.
  6. About 20 years ago, while still at university, I had a part-time job in a solicitors' office: running errands, fetching and carrying boxes of files from storage, and what have you. It was a nice family firm, and I enjoyed working there. The office was in one of those old Victorian three-story terraces, with a shop downstairs, living quarters on the first floor, and a billet on the top floor, only accessible by a flight of steps in the back yard. The shop and the first floor had been long converted into offices for the solicitors and support staff, and the billet was where files were stored when they were no longer "live" (this usually meant that they would sit in an office for months, then I would be told to take them upstairs, and then a week later I'd be told to fetch them back...). I became intimately familiar with the that two-story flight of steps outside, as I would go up and down it several times a week. There were stacks of boxes around the wall, and a few low piles of boxes in the middle of the room, stacked about waist-high. On one occasion, actually shortly before I finished working there (due to impending finals), I was staggering up the stairs with two boxes of paperwork, in a very un-Health-and-Safety manner. I was half way up the second flight when someone hurtled past me from behind, leaping up the stairs like nobody's business. I very nearly dropped the boxes, and was rather preoccupied with not sending them over the railing to land in the yard below, so I didn't pay any attention to who it was. When I had stabilised my load, I hurried upstairs to give whoever it was a tongue-lashing. As I had already been up and down to the store room twice in the last few minutes, the door was unlocked and wide open. I went inside. There was nobody there. I looked around to see if someone was hiding behind one of the piles in the middle of the room: nobody. I opened the door into the bathroom (which contained the usual offices, all long un-plumbed, and nothing else): nobody. At this point I suddenly realised that I hadn't heard the sound of footsteps when the person passed me, and whoever it was didn't actually touch me either, even though the staircase was only just wide enough for two people to pass. I scarpered out of the store room pretty quickly, I can tell you. I waited in the yard for a few minutes until I had stopped trembling, and then went back into the office. I must have looked pretty awful, because everyone asked me if I was feeling ok. I made some noises about feeling a bit sick - I certainly wasn't going to tell them what I had saw. I am an open-minded sceptic about ghosts and the like, but that experience still occasionally troubles me today.
  7. I have one window that drips in persistent rain, and one window that drips if it sees a cloud. During the storm last week, I had rain pouring through the mushroom vents. It was coming down so hard and fast that it was simply overwhelming the lips of the vents and running inside. It won't go down in history as my most enjoyable hour afloat ever.
  8. Well we've just experienced the most horrendous weather here in Newark. 3 hours of rain coming down so fast and hard that it was pouring through the vents, and gusts of wind so strong that they nearly took the cratch cover off. Watch out, those of you on the Fosse Ditch!
  9. When I repaint my boat, I think I'm going to cover the entire outside in aluminium foil....
  10. Which are in turn driven away in frenzied terror by Gary Lineker trying to steal their crisps. Not a pretty sight.
  11. Mythbusters is fun, but I think I'd like to see a few more experiments. There are two other interpretations of the figures they give at the end of their experiment: i) The chamber without the bag of water had 75% more flies than the chamber with. ii) The desire of the flies to enter a chamber "protected" by a bag of water overrides their natural inclination to avoid it. The flies were presumably attracted by the strong scent of rotten meat. Most households (and boatholds, one would imagine) tend to contain fewer sources of putrefaction. Is there a difference in behaviour when comparing flies on a scavenging hunt, following several scents, with flies making a, uhm, fly-line to a clearly identifiable source of food? I'm not convinced that a few pennies in a bag of water will deter flies, but I'm not convinced by Mythbuster's experiment that the hypothesis has been disproved. I have a rubber ducky in my cratch, and another rubber ducky in the engine room. No flies flying through either opening. Make of that what you will.
  12. If you're planning from working from the boat (which I usually do), then you also need an iron discipline to actually WORK, and not spend the entire day watching and feeding the ducks and fish.
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