David Lorimer

Hello electric_nan, and hats off for looking sensibly at your future costs. We expect to become liveaboards later this year, after five years of long (3-5 month) spells on board, so the exercise is of direct interest. You will probably receive many replies from more experienced boaters but here are a few thoughts: a. Mooring fees for 3-6 months look a tad high. We pay little more than that for a 57' boat in a marina near Braunston. b. Paintwork £2,000 every three years sounds very high. c. £100 for a year's worth of gas sounds very low! I'm very much looking forward to what the experts weigh in with. And good luck to you!

Lovely video, congratulations!

I said on the "what do you think" front page that volunteers are the public face of CRT and they need to be treated very well! (Edit: treated very well by CRT, I meant!)

Lovely to hear these stories, magictime and mike the b... because it reminds us that (for a change these days) there are real people at the other end of the line. And it puts all the other CRT-bashing in perspective.

I replied to the survey. On the whole I think C&RT are doing a good job; I was a bit surprised at the "how happy are you" questions but understood why and answered honestly.

David Mack, thank you. That's what I suspected, and it looks like too much work on a boat we may well be selling next year.

Back to the practicalities of replacing a pump-out system with a cassette one, I wonder if anyone here is familiar enough with Thetford cassette toilets to say how one might fit the toilet so as to easily remove the cassette itself. This is a picture of an identical bathroom to ours; the waste tank is on the other side of the bulkhead with the mirror on it, under the bed. All the diagrams of Thetford cassette toilets I've seen show the cassette being removed from the BACK of the unit, i.e. reached from the other side of a bulkhead. Is that the only way they work or can the entire unit swivel for removal?

Mike, I'm a long time out of the industry but I think those orange blobs you refer to are just launches used to transport pax and crew to shore when the ship can't actually come alongside. Evacuation at sea would more likely be via rafts - those pods you can see below the orange boats.

A sensible post at last! Agree entirely, with emphasis on "very close thing". Transferring mostly elderly persons from a ship to a boat in still water is perilous enough; doing so in a 2m swell is close to suicidal and, in the weather this ship was in, unthinkable. I do rather doubt whether any changes to safety regs will come about. Quite simply, difficult to imagine how much safer cruise shipping can be made without putting it far beyond the pockets of its market.

Alan de Enfield, quoting from fitoutpontoon?

Scary territory for buyers, particularly those of new wide beam boats with dimensions making them exempt from 20% VAT. Best to be leery of indemnity clauses where the buyer's responsible for errors and omissions concerning VAT. roland, that went over my head. Were you referring to 156 current wide beam adverts on AD and, if so, "slightly tarnished"?

Alan thanks, I get it. You've just described how my house makeover was paid for! matty40s that 5:1 ratio of wide beams to narrowboats looks more credible than 9:1. Even so, where are they all going to fit!? What are the marinas doing to accommodate them all?

Thanks for the updated replies. Alan de Enfield, thanks for the cottage industry explanation and the comment on the VAT threshold, turnover of £85,000. Although I'd be interested to meet someone who could turn out 2-3 sailaways or even shells a year and still live on what's left over! Anyway, the consensus appears to be that it continues to be a seller's market for narrowboats. But my curiosity's still piqued and I'll continue digging when we get back to the UK this summer. The logic of the SE England housing shortage fuelling demand for alternative housing is easily understandable, but there must be a bunch of other factors influencing prices. Brexit, early retirees/redudancies, homeowners cashing in on the housing shortage, and more. Something I heard in one of the narrowboating vlogs a few days ago was that a boatbuilding mate of the vlogger had told him nine out of ten boats being built today were wide beams. Exaggerated?

David Mack, are you saying that small builders don't report sales to the government? I rather think they're obliged to, irrespective of size, and that their data eventually reaches the Office for National Statistics. By the time it does reach the ONS, I'd agree with you that narrowboat data is mixed in with other types of craft. Membership in industry associations, though, is usually optional, and will involve membership fees; a small builder might prefer not to participate. The UK industry body is British Marine, who say: "BM Members represent over 75% of the UK marine industry revenue, which annually is worth in excess of £2.8 billion, of which 33.1% is exported." BM represents the UK industry and is, in turn, a member of EBI, the Europe-wide association and again in turn, of Icomia, the world federation. Look what EBI say about statistics. From: https://www.europeanboatingindustry.eu/facts-and-figures Quote The boating industry in Europe is a dynamic and competitive sector and a significant contributor to the European economy. The industry is made up of boatbuilders, engine manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, trade and service providers and consists of approximately 32,000 companies, directly employing over 280,000 people. Prior to the financial crisis, the boating industry achieved an annual average growth rate of 6% and a turnover of over 23 billion euros (today its turnover is approximately 20 billion euros). The boating industry is mainly made up of small and medium-sized enterprises (97% of businesses are SMEs) and a small number of large companies (over 1 000 employees). On its own, the boatbuilding sector consists of 3,000 companies employing over 66,000 people. The production of recreational craft is very diverse and ranges from series to one-off boats, which are built-to-order. The boating industry is also a highly internationalised sector. Traditionally, European companies have exported mainly to other countries within the EU and to the US where the export ratio is 3:1 in Europe’s favour. New markets are emerging, however, and European companies are increasingly exporting to Asia, South America and Russia. With over 27,000 km of inland waterways and more than 70,000 km of coastline, Europe offers the perfect environment for the 48 million European citizens who regularly participate in recreational marine activities (36 million of whom are boaters), as well as countless numbers of tourists. Over 6 million boats are kept in European waters while 4,500 marinas provide 1.75 million berths both inland and in coastal areas. Source: ICOMIA Statistics Book 2010 - For sale on www.icomia.com Boat Sales Statistics Programme In view of the lack of reliable and accurate statistics for boat sales in Europe and in most of the export markets, boatbuilding companies proposed that EBI run a specific programme. The Boat Sales Statistics Programme started in 2015 and is fully compliant with the EU and US competition Law. It is run by European Boating Industry for a group of companies meeting the participation criteria set in the Competition Law Guidelines of the Programme. Under this Programme, companies provide sales information to an independent third party contracted by European Boating Industry, which will process, aggregate and disseminate the anonymised results to the Participating Companies for statistical purposes. The report, available only to the participating companies, is a an important tool for business intelligence. For more information, please contact sd@europeanboatingindustry.eu Unquote Frankly, I think the CRT would be a better source of market information, if it were made public. After all, it is with the CRT that we register our boats.

nikvah, the discrepancy probably has to do with how the ApolloDuck search filters were set up. The feeling I'm getting from monitoring both AD and as many brokerages as I can find, is that AD don't really have a high proportion of all the boats available. I.E., many brokerages don't bother to copy their adverts to AD. In sum, it's incomplete data from all sides.