IanD

The Panama canal is even bigger... 😉

Yes that's all possible, and *very* occasionally (how often?) kills people. So does crossing the road and driving a car -- in fact far more people die from falling down the stairs than drowning on the canals, so maybe I should get a bungalow? Life is not risk-free... 😉 If you want to wear a lifejacket on the canals in winter or all year, go ahead, that's your choice (so did you do that before you left the canals?) But please don't imply that my decision not to is ill-considered or uninformed, because it's neither, it's my choice -- and as pointed out above, one that is shared by the vast majority of canal boaters. (CART workers wear them because it's a condition of their employment (elf'n'safety), volockies do because it's a requirement to be one)

No.

"Squabbling" was in quotes because it wasn't my term... 😉 It was in response to you bringing up life lifejackets -- to which my answer would be "no, I'd wear a lifejacket on a river" based on my assessment of the risk of falling in and drowning 🙂 I'm on my phone in Toronto Airport so not so easy -- IIRC the exact term wasn't "transit only" but that was the meaning.

That's what the policy I posted said, the implications is if you want to be on rivers or tidal waters all or most of the time you need a different policy, not the "narrowboat" one.

I'm sure they do vary, but none of the narrowboat policies I could find (I posted an example) said that an anchor was required to go out onto rivers or tidal waters, but did say these waters were "transit only" -- presumably a different policy suitable for a cruiser or yacht would be needed in this to spend more time on them, and maybe these would require an anchor (but I didn't look).

All this "squabbling" is demonstrating is that different people have different attitudes to risk, and different risks to start off with, and that just because something is "right" for one person doesn't mean it's "wrong" for another one -- in spite of what some people think, and then try and tell others to do as they do... Which is exactly what I said... 😉 P.S. I forget to say, thanks to all those who provided information about their experiences -- on both sides of the discussion 🙂

So if that's your experience, make sure you have an anchor -- it's your choice 🙂 Other people have said that they've boated on rivers for many years and never had to deploy an anchor in an emergency. YMMV... 😉

It's not the loops going under the rope that are the problem, it's the first two turns if the second one is above the first one (the easy way) and then the boat rises... 😞

Maybe, but even a boatmans/lightermans hitch -- assuming that's what you mean -- can lock up under those circumstances...

That was pretty much what happened, the bottom turn locked over the top one. All due to advice from a CART worker who suggested (to a novice daughters boyfriend) that he should put two turns round the bollard, not the one he'd been doing with no problem previously... 😞

Yes. Yes. Not under flood conditions obviously, it would be stupid to take a 60' boat with 20hp and a top speed of maybe 7kts onto a river in those circumstances. But even if you did, I'm not convinced an anchor would be that much use if it did all go a bit Pete Tong... 😉

Me too, except it was just two turns round a bollard and a half hitch, as the boat rose the two turns locked tight. Cost us a bottle of gin and a bottle of chilli source -- both together unfortunately, nothing recoverable... 😞 Could have been much worse if the rope hadn't been cut though, the boat was *well* heeled over by this time...

FTFY 😉

Or maybe bigger still, depending where the skin tank is. For example Beta Marine not only recommend a bigger area tank (like you said) but recommend you fit one this big on each side if the generator is going to be run while stationary, to allow for circulating water flow outside being blocked by the canal bank or bottom. For propulsion engines 4bhp/ft2 is normally recommended, for a BetaGen 10 (6kW continuous) the recommended area is 4.4ft2 which would be 17hp for propulsion, but the engine in the generator would only be outputting about 10bhp which would need 2.5ft2 for propulsion, so generator tank area is 75% bigger -- and with one tank each side, 250% bigger (8.8ft2 total). https://betamarine.co.uk/generating-set-keel-cooling-calculator-tank-design/ The boat Finesse is building for me only has one skin tank, but IIRC it's pretty big, not far off the "double-size" Beta recommendation which comes out at about 1.5ft2/kW -- excuse the mixed units... 😉

Nope, haven't changed my stance at all -- it's pretty much what I said in the long post just above, if you only go out onto rivers a bit of the time you don't *need* an anchor -- but if you want one in case of the tiny chance of it being useful, fill your boots. My opinion ("I think it shows...) is still that in this case (not all) it's a waste of space and money, your opinion may be different -- and that's fine 🙂 I disagree with your second line made as a statement, as do the facts -- for an individual boater the risk is very small, otherwise we'd see loads of sunken boats or drownings given the number of boats out there who do venture onto rivers, given the number of times anchors reportedly don't work very well (or at all). As I said before, you don't seem to understand risk (or the difference between opinion and fact), regardless of claiming that you do... 😉 Now I expect more insults... 😞

Which was precisely my point -- different strokes for different folks 😉 Anyone wanting to make a decision like this -- whether formally like an insurance agent, or informally as an individual -- does some kind of risk analysis. For example a professional fish filleter will wear a chainmail glove on their left hand because they're filleting fish all day every day, and no matter how careful they are there's a significant risk they'll cut a finger off sooner or later, where an amateur cook at home won't because this is a task they very rarely do -- maybe an average of a fraction of a minute per day even for a keen cook, so their risk is at least 100x lower. And probabilities all multiply up together, so the range between low and high risks can be even bigger than this -- for example for boaters with anchors. Let's try and put some guesstimate numbers in -- note that these are all very rough guesses to try and work out low/typical/high risk cases, so there's no point worrying about whether they're accurate or arguing that they're "wrong"... [if you're bored with this and hate maths and probabilities, look away now...] Let's start with how much time boaters spend on their boats, how much they move around, and how much of this is on rivers or tidal waters. A liveaboard who spends all year on their boat is "high risk", a holiday boater (like I'll be) is "low risk" because they probably spend 10x less time on the boat (I'm assuming 5 weeks per year), a retired non-liveaboard ("typical") might spend 4 months or so per year on their boat -- so high-risk is 3x bigger than typical, low-risk is 3x smaller. Someone who spends most of the time on the move (e.g. a holiday boater -- let's say 6 days a week) is "high-risk", someone who moves the bare minimum to meet the CC rules is "low-risk" (e.g. 1 day per 14 days), a more typical CCer might move 2 or 3 days per week -- so again high-risk is 3x bigger than typical, low-risk is 3x smaller. Then there's how much time they spend on rivers. I've done some looking back over the years and I reckon I spend something like 95% of my time on canals (meaning 5% on rivers). Someone whose home mooring is on a river could well spend 100% of their time on them, but let's assume 50% because they go off onto the canals too. An in-between typical figure might be 1 day per week of cruising (15%), so yet again hi-risk is 3x bigger and low-risk 3x smaller than typical. [there's a pattern emerging that there's about 10x difference between individual high and low risk cases, which is actually often used as a rule-of-thumb for risk estimation...] Now lets see how likely the boat is to get into the "no propulsion" case. Causes for this include prop fouling, boater error (fuel tap turned off!), inadequate design (skin tank too small) or maintenance (blocked fuel filter), fuel contamination (water or dirt) stirred up by boat rocking, and I'm sure there are several more. Let's assume that 3/4 of cases (75%) are down to the boat (because this is most often mentioned) and 25% to prop fouling. Out of those 75% due to the boat, most can be avoided with "normal" precautions and skill, and probably all of them by either a diesel boat with lumpy-water-quality precautions (like Alan might make) or an electric boat properly designed and tested to sustain full power for a couple of hours (like mine, hopefully). That means that if you do everything possible you'll still get 25% of failures (prop fouls), a "normal" boater might get 50%, and an uncaring/unskilled/inexperienced one 100% -- so this time high and low risk are 2x worse and better than typical. Then there's what happens when you deploy the anchor -- or not. With no anchor you'll have a problem 100% of the time; an undersized (i.e normal=typical) Danforth might work (set and hold) a third of the time (could be more), an advanced anchor might work 90% of the time. Again high risk (no anchor) is 3x worse than a typical one, and an advanced one 3x better. All this then has to be multiplied by the absolute risk -- how often all this happens, and how often the result is catastrophic (sinking/drowning) as opposed to ending up in the trees. But let's leave that until later... 😉 If you take all the above factors and multiply them together -- because that's how probabilities work -- then we get the following: Typical risk case (extended CCer, moves 3 days a week, 1 day per week of cruising on rivers, decent design/maintenance, Danforth) : risk = 1x Highest possible risk case (liveaboard, on the move all the time, half the time on rivers, poor design/maintenance, no anchor) : risk = 160x higher (let's call it 100x since all numbers are guesswork) Lowest possible risk case (holiday boater, minimum moving, mostly canals, excellent design/maintenance, advanced anchor) : risk = 160x lower (let's call it 100x since all numbers are guesswork) Of course these are the extreme cases which are never likely to occur together (e.g. holiday boater who hardly ever moves, liveaboard who moves every day) and I'm sure that anyone can work out the numbers for their own case, but with more realistic cases you still end up with high-risk cases being maybe 10x worse and low-risk maybe10x better than typical. Funnily enough, that's where we started with the fish-filleting... 😉 None of this is my opinion -- though the numbers are my guesstimates, and might well be wrong -- because the methods used to work out risk are factual and well-known. To get the absolute risk we'd need to know how many canal boats end up sinking or drowning people on rivers due to engine/anchor failure, and I expect the number is pretty small (does anyone know?) -- if it was more than one or two per year it would be all over the forums. Statistically most of these will be "higher-risk" boaters -- those who spend a lot of time on rivers and/or are incompetent or bad at maintenance -- but even for them the odds must be pretty small, we could guess that there are maybe a few hundred boaters like this, so perhaps the risk of a disaster per boater is a fraction of a percent per year? So even for them, over a lifetime of boating the odds are they'll never have a disaster like this -- but given the consequences, an anchor is a very good idea. However if you're a "lower-risk" boater the chances are much *much* smaller, far smaller than many other things in life that we accept without thinking. So whether an anchor is a good idea or a waste of space is completely dependent on the individual and their circumstances, because the risk can certainly vary by at least 100x -- and this is true even before you consider the "always look on the bright side of life" or "if something can go wrong it probably will" difference in attitude, which is basically down to how risk-averse people are, which varies massively. For some people -- like Alan -- the "correct" answer is a modern high-performance anchor, and knowing how to deploy it. For some people -- like me 😉 -- an anchor is almost certainly a waste of space, it would almost certainly (probability again...) never be deployed in an emergency even if I boated till I was 100. For many people it's not going to make a fat lot of difference, the odds are that they'll never deploy it but a few will be unlucky, and for those cases even a Danforth (which they'll most likely have) is better than no anchor at all. A modern anchor is considerably better still but it's down to the individual whether they can afford one and think it's justified. Which means that boaters should make their own informed decision depending on their circumstances and attitude to risk -- there is no single "right answer" for everyone... 😉 P.S. Going by earlier posts I expect the usual complaints and insults (Boring! Wrong! Muppet! Non-boater! Stupid! I know better than you! Shut up!) from the usual suspects. It won't make what I've just written any less true, though... 😉

If you want to moor in places like the Wash -- or anywhere else with no bankside mooring -- then obviously an anchor is essential. And it's a good idea if you spend most or all of your boating life on rivers, especially bigger ones, where you may be forced to moor like this unexpectedly, or get stuck out there in bad conditions with nowhere else to go. But my original question was specifically about the oft-cited reason -- as posted many times on CWDF during discussions about anchors -- why narrowboats need an anchor, which is emergency use, usually due to engine failure or prop fouling, to avoid being swept over a weir or dolphins some other horrible fate. As far as I can see it comes down to personal choice or optimism/pessimism, and how you use your boat. If you take the "always look on the bright side of life" viewpoint and/or aim to stay mainly on canals with the occasional planned excursion onto rivers for a few days or a week or so (not under red or yellow boards), then the fact that several posters with 20 years combined boating on rivers/tidal waters (in well-maintained boats like Alan's) have never had to deploy an anchor in an emergency -- and several posts like the one above where problems occurred but an anchor wasn't actually used -- could well lead you to logically conclude that you don't need one. If you take the "if something can go wrong it probably will" viewpoint and/or aim to spend a lot of or all your time on rivers or tidal waters under all conditions (including floods and red/yellow boards), then posts by the people who have had engine/prop problems under these conditions and used/needed an anchor will probably convince you that an anchor is needed. And since you're planning for the worst to happen, as Alan says this should be an advanced anchor with long/heavy chain/rope capable of easy deployment and stopping and holding a 20t boat, not the much more common 14kg/20kg Danforth which is basically not up to the job -- a 30kg (or heavier) one might be but is essentially unusable for most people. Both are perfectly valid viewpoints based on real life experiences and neither is right or wrong for everybody. Personally speaking I'll either have no anchor or a modern one (e.g. a Fortress) that's up to the job, the usual Danforth is cheap and easy to stow but those are the only points in its favour... 😉

IANAL, but I believe there's a fundamental difference between negligence or neglect leading to a claim -- failing to keep a boat "in good order" -- and not having an optional item of equipment, safety-related or otherwise. If the laws said that the equipment was compulsory then that would be different, but AFAIK anchors are not required on any of the rivers under discussion (e.g. the Ribble Link, the Trent) -- and neither are any of the other recommended items of equipment such as VHF radios and flare packs, which I don't think anybody would suggest not having could lead to an insurance claim being refused -- for example, see section 4.1 here... https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/media/original/30977-ribble-link-skippers-guide.pdf A driver -- or boater -- cannot be punished by an insurance company or have a payout reduced or refused because they didn't carry optional equipment. Any suggestion that they can be is basically scaremongering... 😉 Unless the boat insurance policy requires such equipment to be fitted to sail on rivers and tidal waters, which I don't believe they do -- but if this assumption is wrong and anchors are required by insurance terms then what I said above is wrong, and everyone must have one to do this. But there's no such clause here, for example... https://www.gjwdirect.com/media/1366/gjw-direct-narrowboat-and-barge-policy-document-1021.pdf