magictime

Blimey - I can't remember the exact figure now, but I believe Debdale 'only' charged us about £4500 for grit-blasting our (55ft) hull, spraying it with molten zinc, then applying two-pack epoxy. I thought I was splashing out on an expensive and arguably unproven hull treatment; if your figures are right, I pretty much paid the going rate for grit-blasting and two-pack and got the zinc-spraying free!

It's always a bit annoying when anglers park themselves on lock landings, but this just about takes the cake: this afternoon we encountered a GRP moored at one end of the lock landing just below Castleford Flood Lock with two fishing lines running not out into the river, but alongside the whole of the remaining 80ft+ of lock landing. Both snagged on our boat before we knew they were there, one persistently so, leaving Captain Considerate running around with his rod trying to get unstuck. Should a boater not know better?

That's odd. My dad has a lung condition with similar-sounding effects - shortness of breath, limiting how far and how fast he can walk - and he got a blue badge a short while ago. (It's not his only health problem, but I'm pretty sure it's the one that earned him the badge.)

Good to hear that they don't just take a "computer says no" attitude. I wonder if the CRT letters being displayed are an 'available on request' thing. I didn't get one when I had permission to overstay on a VM while recovering from brain surgery last year, but then that was only for a few weeks.

Congratulations and enjoy!

Seems a funny time to be having this discussion since I'm clearly a "genuine" CCer by anyone's definition, but I suppose it never hurts to remind people that "Continuous Cruiser" is really just a nickname for a boater without a home mooring. The guidance relating to such boaters doesn't spell out any requirement to do anything on a "Continuous" basis, so it doesn't much matter what I think "Continuous" means really, as long as I understand what CRT requires of me in terms of bona fide navigation and the 14 day rule. Which I do. And yes, Bristol is on the wish list, along with many other as-yet-unexplored corners of the system. Maybe not next year (think we might 'only' go as far as the Llangollen, Liverpool and the Lancaster), but before too long.

Yeah, me too! We had a long-standing booking at Debdale Wharf in May, so that dictated the pace on the way south (having spent winter on the eastern Leeds & Liverpool); and we'd told our daughters we'd try to be closer to them over the summer to help out with childcare and whatnot (both have had a second child this year), so that was the reason for heading back up north at a similar speed. Plus we've done most of those waterways previously and wanted to squeeze in some detours just for our own interest - Nottingham, the Ashby and Chester. But like I say, we certainly don't want to maintain anything like that pace.

692 miles and 500 locks.

I'm starting to wish CRT would introduce a maximum distance for CCIng! We set off from Leeds on 25th March and cruised along the Aire & Calder and Calder & Hebble to the Huddersfield Broad and Narrow, then via the Ashton and Bridgewater to the Trent & Mersey, which we took all the way to the Trent at Nottingham (with a detour up the Caldon), then went via the Soar to the Leicester LIne of the Grand Union (detour along Market Harborough Arm), then via the GU to Braunston and on to the Oxford, Coventry (detour along the Ashby), Birmingham and Fazeley, Staffs and Worcester, Shropshire Union to Chester and back round to Middlewich, Bridgewater, Leigh Branch, and finally the Leeds & Liverpool back to what we consider roughly the beginning of our 'home' stretch, Skipton. We'll now slow down over summer before heading out from Leeds again for an autumn cruise maybe in September. In that four months, the boat has also spent at least three weeks in total in a boatyard/wet dock having bits of work done, so it has been pretty intensive on the whole. All good fun but as we settle into the liveaboard, CCing life, we're certainly going to want to slow up quite a bit and either be less ambitious about how far south we cruise, or less attached to familiar areas (and family ties) in Yorkshire.

...although it doesn't really manage to say anything about what CRT actually do. You wouldn't glean from that advert that CRT are actually responsible for maintaining infrastructure, managing navigation, running museums, etc. They could just be a sort of 'tourist board for the waterways' for all the ad spells out. (I'm not saying this a bad thing, necessarily, but I suspect a lot of people could see the advert and yet walk along the towpath the next day thinking 'the council should come and trim these verges' or 'I wish Bristish Waterways would do something about the graffiti on those lock gates'.)

But he's only going to bother, surely, if he thinks a new set of trustees, or another institution (the IWA? The National Trust?), is going to do a better job of meeting essentially the same targets. What if he concludes that there just aren't enough potential donors out there to make another round of recruitment under a new set of trustees worthwhile (for instance)?

Most of that seems pretty consistent with what I said, just broken down into specific targets. (Not the bits about volunteers and donations, but the bits about visitor numbers, awareness etc.). And given the extent to which CRT are falling short, especially on the targets directly related to their ability to self-fund ('Friends', donations), I do wonder if they've got one eye on a future where they have to say to the Government, "We gave it our best shot, it wasn't enough, BUT here's a compelling case for you continuing to plug that financial gap" - with the ability to demonstrate public support/benefit a large part of that. Personally I don't know why the Government finds it so hard to reconcile itself to the idea of just stumping up £50 million a year (or whatever it is) on an ongoing basis. It's a drop in the ocean in terms of Government spending, and surely offers at least as much benefit as comparable spending on other public spaces like parks and recreation grounds.

Maybe they're saving that for Barge People 2: Urban Mutation

I assume the idea, of this advert and much of what CRT do in general, is essentially to promote the waterways to the general public as something of value to them even if they don't happen to own a £50,000 boat or have a fascination with 18th century goods-carrying infrastructure. The more CRT can do to attract visitors to the canals and then demonstrate the value people place on them and the positive impacts they have on people's wellbeing, the better their chances of winning future support from the Government and perhaps other grant-giving bodies.

Fed up with all those TV shows tempting new people on to the canals with their idyllic image of boating? At last we have a movie designed to put people off! I expect to see much less congestion after this.

Very illuminating, thank you. Ah, OK. Just been Googling now and I can only think I'd read something referring to the European or American markets, where I believe red diesel/gas oil is the same as 'domestic heating oil'.

Same stuff isn't it?

Ah, that explains it then! If only I had a back garden...

How/where do you buy the blooming stuff in small enough quantities to store on a boat though? Every time I've looked online I can only find companies wanting to sell me hundreds of litres at a time. We've only got a 50 litre tank and two 20 litre cans.

Well, having been through a lot of short, leaky northern locks multiple times, I can honestly say ours seems just right to me at 55ft - given the choice, I'm not at all sure I'd even add the two or three feet to take it to the usually-quoted 'maximum' go-anywhere size.

Did the bar just get a lot lower for how much you'd have to make from occasional trading to make a business licence worth buying? For people doing a lot of cruising, I mean, who might be looking at an extra £500 or more in diesel costs each year because of this change.

Ours (a Midway 235) did have a stove actually, and a small front deck. It was a great little boat actually. I know this seems a bit ridiculous when even the largest narrowboat is so small compared to a house, but I do think a lot of people must have boats far bigger than they need! We appreciate our 55 footer, but that's because we're living aboard all year round and need to store all our stuff and have the space to use and enjoy it - films, books, board games, musical instruments, cooking stuff, four seasons' worth of clothes etc. If we went back to leisure boating, even months-long leisure boating, we'd go back to something much smaller in a heartbeat.

I certainly think there's an element of diminishing returns when adding boat length. Our first boat was 24ft with a 14ft living space inside, and managed to squeeze in a perfectly useable kitchen area, fixed single 'daybed', wet room with shower, convertible dinette, and a surprising amount of storage; our current boat is 55ft with a 38ft(ish) space inside and though of course it does feel more spacious, at the end of the day it's basically still only got the same functional areas plus a fixed double bed. I wonder if there isn't a bit of a jump once you get above 50ft though. I'm talking more about boats I've seen online than in the flesh, but a heck of a lot of 40ft-50ft boats look alarmingly similar in terms of offering a small bathroom, a small bedroom, a small galley and a small saloon... whereas above 50ft you start to see more actual extra living areas (in our case a dinette) rather than just an extra foot or two of space or an extra cupboard dotted here and there throughout the boat.

Yeah, I can imagine so - and fair enough. Although I personally like the look of Caldy in that picture, I can see that it means something of interest and value has been lost. But if we're talking about modern leisure/liveaboard boats, any attempt to look 'traditional' seems basically futile to me. You can't make a typical modern narrowboat look 'traditional' just by painting it red and green with cream coachlines and nice signwriting, because at the end of the day it still has a whacking great steel cabin all the way along, full of windows through which you can peer in at modern kitchens, living rooms etc. It could never look like a 'traditional' narrowboat, any more than a yurt could look like a 'traditional' English house if you only printed a pattern of bricks on the canvas. The painting of modern boats is more a matter of convention than tradition, I would say, those conventions having been established only in the last thirty or forty years.

Just to say we haven't been egged or booed at all since we had the new paintjob. Lots of positive comments and smiles - I think most people like to see something a bit different, even if it wouldn't be for them.