IanD

Nice of you to volunteer... 🙂 Alternatively you could read what was posted instead of just being a sarcastic keyboard warrior, all the information you need is already there... 😉

Yes... 😞 I expect all the people and volunteers who worked hard to stop the canals closing and then restored them would be appalled at what some people now seem to hope will happen to them... 😞

So if people are saying there isn't enough money for maintenance and they're not being prioritised but don't want to pay more, how do they think this is going to be fixed -- money from a magic canal tree? Or are they just going to carry on moaning about how the whole system is going to hell in a handbasket with blue signs on, nothing can be done, and that's why they're going to sell their boat and leave the canals? It's almost as if they want to see the canal system fall apart just so they can sit back smugly and say "I told you so"... 😞

Nice polite answer -- not... 😞 They don't care whether the locks and paddles work and the canals are properly dredged and other things needed by boaters who actually move round the system work properly. That's what everyone is complaining CART aren't spending enough money on, because they're prioritising "towpath users" -- or CMers, or boats-who-never-leave-marinas -- who don't care about these things.

You're missing the point. The rest of CARTs income comes from other sources who don't care either way what happens to the canals. The question here is who should get priority for spending money on the canals, "boaters" (meaning, everyone who wants to keep the canals usable as canals) or "non-boaters" (meaning -- in this case -- everyone else (walkers/cyclists/canoeist/fishermen/gongoozlers) who pays taxes which the DEFRA grant comes out of). It's a question of who gets the benefit of which way the money is spent, and who puts in how much money. Everyone keeps complaining about how CART seem to be prioritising "non-boaters" and issues like wellness, cycling, walking -- mostly to do with the towpath, really -- instead of fixing locks and dredging, which only "boaters" care about. If you want to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a boater or whether the names I'm using are wrong, feel free to come p with your own -- but this is avoiding the fundamental problem seen by many posters on here, which is how to get CART to take more notice of what "boaters" need (working locks, dredging, maintenance) and spend more on this and less on "towpath tarting-up" (blue signs, resurfacing...). The numbers Alan showed is that everyone who is likely to fall into the "complaining about broken locks and paddles and lack of dredging and..." group ("boaters") is paying less than the DEFRA grant, which is funded by the "we want nice towpaths to walk/cycle/fish on" group ("non-boaters" -- or taxpayers). I don't see how else this can be interpreted... 😞 If this is correct, probably the only way to get the government (and DEFRA, and CART...) to change their priorities is if "boaters" -- those who want the canals to work properly and be able to move around on them, presumably including most posters on here -- pay more, because money talks. Assuming the government doesn't respond by cutting the DEFRA grant, this would also give CART more money to spend, which -- if they use it "properly" -- has to be a good thing. Doesn't it? Or do people just not want to be told that if they want better-maintained canals they need to pay more money -- is that the real problem?

Thanks Alan, there's a lot of information there, none of which I would argue with -- at least, in the situations it refers to 🙂 Most of this does indeed refer to seagoing boats, as can be seen by the length/beam ratios in the first table you gave. There are other factors which apply to seagoing anchors but not the "emergency narrowboat" one, for example the need to stay secure if the pull changes direction (like in the YW review where the some come out quite badly) -- this matters not a jot for the "stop me going over the weir" case. Another one is shock loading, which is not just intended to deal with what happens when the anchor is dropped but what happens when a boat bobs up and down in a rough sea and pulls the chain tight and slack -- you don't want this to make the anchor gradually drag each time the boat rises. Again this doesn't matter for the case in question, if the shock load is bigger than the anchor can hold it will drag and slow the boat down until it does hold, assuming it sets and stays that way after dragging (so maybe not a Danforth then...) If you take what was said in the YW article about it being beam that matters -- which will be true for both wind and water loads -- and we then look at the tables you just posted, these quote a 20kg/44lb anchor (without specifying type...) for a 16m boat, and that this might have 14'-16' beam with a 1600lb load for a "working anchor" -- which is about 700kg. This would be about right for a widebeam canal boat, but much bigger than needed for a narrowboat. Note that Danforth quote 1600lb holding power for their 25lb anchor, which seems *extremely* optimistic going by test results... And you're perfectly right that the whole anchoring system needs taking into account including the scope 🙂 Completely agree with you that one of the new-age anchors (e.g. Kobra -- not even that expensive...) is a much better choice than a Danforth, especially because of reliability of setting and holding. How big to use is the question -- having one that's easy to stow/unstow and deploy is a big advantage, because if it's a PITA to get out and get ready you're less likely to do it, human nature and complacency being what it is ("the river/weather looks fine, I won't bother getting the anchor out this time") -- and having a big heavy anchor that some of the crew might have difficulty lifting and dropping over the size doesn't help either. The other point of view is that loads and loads of boaters use 20kg Danforths, and even a 10kg Kobra is better then this on test from *all* points of view -- reliability, holding power, maybe even cost. From the Kobra website: "Tests carried by French magazines Voile Magazine and Moteur Boat Magazine gave clear evidence that ”a 6 kg Kobra anchor held a 600 kg traction load, in a mixed sand-mud seabed”, which corresponds approx. to the traction exerted by a 42-knot wind on a 9 m boat, where a 12 kg anchor is traditionally recommended." -- so a 10kg Kobra would replace a 20kg Danforth. In the end it'll come down to how heavy an anchor you think everyone can easily lift, and possibly how much space you've got to stow it -- for example if it's going into a bow locker (mine will), it has to go through the hatch. My suspicion is that -- for the purpose under discussion, emergency use on a river for a narrowboat -- a 10kg or bigger Kobra will be absolutely fine, and 20kg is definitely overkill and will be no safer but much more of a PITA to use... 😉

I think this also includes everyone whose priority is keeping the canals functioning -- dredged, maintained, with working locks -- as opposed to being a place to live cheaply or use for recreation where this is of no interest. So it would include hire companies and the few canal businesses who rely on (moving) boaters as customers -- and any marina boaters who ever emerge from their berth. I think "boaters" and "non-boaters" are as good short names as we're likely to find, even if each isn't 100% accurate. And looking at the numbers posted (thanks Alan), boaters overall pay less than non-boaters (the DEFRA grant). On the principle of "he who pays the piper calls the tune" and that money is all the government seems to care about, it's hardly surprising that CART seems to put boaters below everyone else in the priority list... 😞

That would indeed be the "painless" way of doing it for homeowners who've recently taken out massive mortgages. The problem is that it would take a *long* time to bring real prices down, still not good for the "have-nots" -- and being brutal, it leaves all the other homeowners (including me...) sitting on massive piles of unearned (and largely untaxed) cash from the huge house price increases since they bought them. A fairer solution would be to tax *all* property more, especially property bought for investment, because the taxes on this are somewhere between zero and a lot less than that on income. Other countries with less broken housing markets seem to make this work with a property tax of a couple of percent of value per year. That would automatically bring prices down somewhat in the short term, and bring in revenue for new house building. I'd happily pay such higher property taxes if it meant that the resulting money was used to build decent quality affordable housing, which probably means the local authorities doing it not developers -- and it not just disappearing into the government slush bucket to spaff up the wall on things like HS2. But I guess a whole lot of homeowners would scream blue murder and claim that it was unfair to put new taxes on them to build houses for feckless benefit scroungers and asylum seekers, even if it fixed one of the biggest problems in the UK today... 😞

I don't think there's the slightest doubt that thought the Danforth may have been been good in it's day (i.e. better than an Admiralty pattern anchor!) there are far better anchors around today, the Kobra being a good example. The question of how big an anchor you need (for a narrowboat on a river) is another interesting one; all the usually quoted sizes (e.g. X lbs for a Y foot boat) are for seagoing vessels, and are intended to give safe mooring under poor conditions e.g high winds (see the YW article, table below). Here an 18m boat (which is often taken as the figure to be used for a narrowboat) shows 900kg force in a 30 knot wind -- but the footnote also points out that "strictly speaking it's the beam that matters not the length". So based on this a narrowboater might select (for example) a 16kg Kobra 2 with >1000kg holding power. However this would really only apply to a wideboat which has similar beam to the type of boat referred to, you might expect a narrowboat with half the beam to need a rather smaller anchor than this, maybe only half the size? Another way to look at this is to ask what the anchor is being asked to do here; not holding a seagoing boat offshore against a very strong wind, but stopping a boat and holding it in place against the flow of water on a river. If you imaging a boat going upstream and suffering an engine failure, it can't possibly take more than the available engine thrust to keep it in place (since this was enough to drive it upstream) -- and for 20hp, at 100hp/ton bollard pull this is only about 200kg. (actually it would be even less than that since the boat won't be stationary under full power, since drag force varies with the square of current it would probably only be half that again, maybe 100kg -- but then again you need more force to stop a boat than hold it in place, and there are shock loads to consider when the rode tightens...) All of which explains why Danforths seem to work OK in many cases, a 20kg Danforth will stop an engineless narrowboat most of the time -- but not *all* the time if it fails to set or drags, which they're prone to. A modern anchor like the Kobra is better, but in this case mostly because it's more reliable at setting and not dragging rather than being able to withstand double the pull, which isn't needed under these conditions But it sounds reasonable that even a 10kg Kobra would be fine for a typical narrowboat, more reliable setting than a 20kg Danforth, similar or higher holding force, and half the weight so *much* easier to stow and deploy. Thoughts? (no accusations please, I'm not saying what I will or won't do or who is right or wrong, just looking at the facts...)

I don't think the letter was saying that 300k was the right target for today, just that it's often been said to be and that the only time this actually happened was a long time ago. My suspicion is that the number needed today might even be higher than this, because there has been such a shortfall for so long. But this is simply never going to happen so log as "the market" is in charge of housebuilding, because the interests of "the market" and a large part of the population are in direct opposition. Though of course a lot of people would be horrified if large numbers of affordable houses started appearing because this would undoubtedly cause the prices of their properties to fall from their current ridiculous values to more reasonable ones, so it's also a case of the haves vs. the have-nots.