Peter X

In Central London, eh? Who'd'a thunk it? Luis, I suggest you seriously consider all the legal problems outlined above, look at the cheapest flats available in places like Croydon, Thamesmead, Barking, Chatham and Luton (and the fares for commuting to wherever you need to get to) and do a dispassionate comparison of all the pros and cons, including the practical considerations of security of tenure and access to utilities from boats. You may come to the conclusion that life afloat is not such a wise move for you.

I thought the court decision was merely to require QMP to repay its debt to CRT, which was soon followed by QMP going into voluntary liquidation? And that it was just CRT which terminated the NAA and demanded the entrance be closed, saying if it wasn't done by 14th April CRT would do it? I am too lazy to re-read the whole topic to check this ultimately unimportant point, but I think it was in one of the early pages? I think the IP has already transferred the only significant asset, the freehold, to Mr Steadman, but QMP still exists in liquidation. Somehow I think CRT either can't or don't want to force the IP to organise stop planks himself. Otherwise they'd have done so long ago.

Back in the early years of my career in IT (1977 onwards) online, with no hyphen, meant directly connected to the computer (and I mean the computer, lots of companies only had one) with a keyboard+screen dumb terminal or "VDU" rather than just feeding programs and data in on punched cards. Times change... Whether a boater wants to be in a marina or on-line is surely going to depend on individual circumstances, and it seems to me the wise course for the CRT is to find the balance of licence fees which suits the most boaters; not forcing everyone into marinas but not letting any part of the cut become too clogged up with lines of parked boats. My brother keeps his (fairly shiny!) boat in a marina primarily for its security; it's used about half the weekends in a year and for the odd longer trip on his annual leave, so the rest of the time when it's unoccupied he wants it out of harm's way. But once aboard on a Friday evening, if there's daylight left he'll get it out of the marina, go a little way and moor on the towpath for the night just for the change of scenery. I prefer that too; it somehow feels more like boating when I'm not sleeping in the marina, and the view from the window in the morning is better. The weekend boaters will probably always want marinas for security, so they won't be coming out en masse anytime soon to clog up the towpath. Except from Pillings Lock maybe. The number of people who want to live aboard a boat and never be far from central London is, from all the anecdotal evidence in this forum, steadily rising, and inevitably this means that prices fetched at auction by any mooring which can be used (or misused) for this purpose will rise too. It goes without saying that CRT must have proper security procedures in place to ensure the auction process cannot be rigged, in order to protect their income, but that's a separate issue from any questioning of whether auctions are the right policy. I happen to think they are, because it's the fairest way to allocate a scarce resource and it makes CRT lots of badly needed money to spend repairing locks and embankments, dredging etc. all over the network. Not that I want to see the Regent's canal become just a lucrative marina full of static boats, they should keep and properly enforce enough short-term visitor moorings so that everyone gets the opportunity to bring their boat through London and experience the probably rather scary trip up the Thames. I've seen the river enough from the embankments, bridges, a few larger boats and office windows over the years to know it's not natural narrow boat territory. Another group of boaters, not that everyone fits neatly into categories, is those who live aboard with no mooring and wander all over the system, often referred to as the "genuine CC'ers". These people are the salt of the earth I suspect, often the ones who know and care the most about the canals, and I get the impression that the CRT know it and value them.

Does anyone have a list of CRT's revocations of licences, or know even roughly how many there have been, ideally broken down by year and/or area? If someone lurks around in a non-compliant fashion in a less popular area, keeping a low profile by not obstructing navigation or facilities, would CRT just turn a blind eye?

You do mean ...for a mooring? London's a pretty desperate place all round, I'm descended from generations of Londoners but would leave if it were not for friends, family and work all being in Sarf London. At least I'm in the relative peace and quiet of Croydon, where I can afford a house with a nice garden. Most of the time I don't go north of the river. I suppose that mooring might appeal to someone who has a house/flat somewhere else but wants a "pied a riviere" so to speak with an easy commute to the City/Docklands. For comparison, for £9500 a year you might be able to rent a one-bed flat in the cheapest parts of London?

I think CRT will probably need some sort of lock and chain arrangement or a well secured boat; if they just insert stop planks, it surely wouldn't be very difficult for someone to remove them undetected during the hours of darkness when no-one is there to see? The CRT might have a very strong suspicion that someone acting on instructions from PL did it, but that's not sufficient evidence for a prosecution if everyone denies knowledge. Somehow I can't imagine PL himself out there at night doing it. If they omit the top planks, maybe Piilings Lock could go into the punt hire business? You only need about 9" depth as far as I remember, especially if there are no passengers. They could get on/off from the towpath. I haven't heard of people punting on canals; is it permitted and does a punt need a licence? I've taken a punt through locks on the Thames, but I would expect safety problems (a) in all but the shortest tunnels and ( from water coming over the side from boat wash. The latter was a nuisance from speeding cruisers, we had to get a passenger busy with the bailing pan sometimes. Maybe Pillings Lock could be provided with a special top plank with a few holes to let water through but block canoes etc.

My apologies to Miss Pittam for getting her name wrong. I see that I picked up the name Leotard from Athy's post #7, and that the source for that is not explained. Unless it's a reference to her short dress, which is not the same thing as a leotard. In my defence, it can be a genuine surname, some years ago a Francois Leotard was the Defence minister in the French government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_L%C3%A9otard Can you clarify this point for me please? I thought that many of the banks on CRT waters, especially where there is a towpath, belong to the CRT, and that where this is the case, CRT permit mooring wherever the boat is not on someone else's residential mooring or obstructing something or overstaying? I would have thought that if the owner of the pier could negotiate having more berths, they would already have done so in order to get the extra income.

Are there many people who have covered every mile of currently navigable canal and river in the connected waterways, including all the arms? Here I'm excluding for example the Medway and the South Wales canals where you'd have to brave some scary estuary waters.

It's a simple matter of supply and demand. Demand is rising but the supply of moorings in prime central London locations is limited, and believe me Chelsea=prime. My grandmother was born there, in World's End which was then rather cheap, but there are no cheap parts of Chelsea now. Just expensive and super-expensive. Ms Leotard can count herself fortunate to have been able to afford to live there for a few years at all, but soaring property prices are no doubt reflected in the prices of moorings in the same area. That's life and she'll have to live within her means like the rest of us. My mockery of her false sense of entitlement has nothing to do with the type of boat she owns. The only difference that makes is that her choice of boat means she can't go on canals but can go to sea, so her possible choice of mooring locations is different. Bee says she has "virtually no chance of getting another mooring", but is that really so if you don't put "in Chelsea" on the end?

My experience so far, to put this in context: Some rowing in eights and quite a lot of punting on the Thames and Cherwell at Oxford Crewing on my brother's narrowboat on several weekends, about 10 days, 40 locks and 4 long tunnels A little steering on easier stretches and while the skipper takes a loo break As a recent beginner, I think I was fortunate in going out as crew with a skipper who'd had his boat a year and done a few hire boat holidays before that. Not vastly experienced, but enough to instruct me, and new enough to boating to understand what I would need to be told. With each trip I'm steadily getting more confident and doing new things, and loving every minute of it secure in the knowledge that the skipper is watching and will probably intervene in time to prevent any disaster. Provisionally I'll be crewing again for the 4 days of Easter, and I'm much looking forward to that.

I very much doubt it will ever come to a permanent sealing off of the entrance. Once the CRT block it as announced, that will concentrate the minds of Steadman/PL/RR and the remaining boaters wonderfully, and I anticipate at least a partial resolution of the problem will emerge in perhaps a month or two. There are various possibilities, but it won't be a resolution which PL will be happy about.

Having done rowing for a few months myself long ago at Oxford, I can say you are absolutely right. I only ever rowed in eights, at bow where if the cox doesn't speak up it can be difficult to hear, especially if the boat is going into the wind. In a four that should be less of a problem. The ideal crew for rowing is 4 or 8 gorillas and a loud intelligent midget, and my problem was being in between those sizes. I was put at bow because I was the lightest oarsman in the boat, which is standard practice to balance the load. In my day, in an all male college, the boat club would ply the weediest little bloke with beer and talk him into becoming a cox, but nowadays coxes are often female because they can come in even smaller sizes. It is of course the job of the cox to steer and to instruct the oarsmen, who are only there to follow orders and power the vessel. In your case it sounds as if the cox was too dim and/or quiet, or the oarsmen disobeyed orders. If there really were only three oarsmen the one who had a side to himself would have had to work much harder than the others to stop the boat going in circles. Being a much faster vessel and coming up behind you it was very much their responsibility to prevent a collision; an experienced crew can do an impressive emergency stop. The outcome of the collision is no surprise; racing craft are fast, lightweight and flimsy and an end-on collision will crumple the bow badly; I was once in a low-speed collision into a landing stage which mangled the bow, the result of an error by the cox, and I can well imagine that a full-on collision into your heavy boat would be disastrous for the four.

She is soon, so she's practising what it feels like to be at the wheel. Over the next week or two I expect she'll progress to turning the ignition, a short blast on the horn and finding out what the other controls do. Maybe even a short test excursion to Battersea.

And they say teenagers don't get enough exercise nowadays. Is it your strategy to take a young super-fit crew so you can plan a route involving the maximum number of locks?

You can always tell that someone is losing an argument when they make comparisons with the Nazis, unless of course they really are talking about blatant military aggression, genocide etc. The article says "Here is a quote from a consultation response to one of Sally Ash’s proposals from 2008:". This person, who may well be another member of KANDA, calls her the "Adolf Eichmann of the waterways". Sally Ash should sue them.

Magazine timetables being what they are, the ad was probably placed and paid for (no credit given?) weeks ago, but well after PL knew the CRT's intentions. I wonder whether PL has been repeating his version of past and future events so often that he now believes it? It might be possible if CSH and a few others around him are reluctant to tell him the reality, particularly as is seems that so far only a trickle of boats have left the marina. More might go over the next two weekends, after all if someone pays for a marina mooring it's because they'd rather be there, so they might as well enjoy it while they can. There's no harm in them planning to leave on Sat 12th April just in case some miracle happens to save them the bother. Is he offering to crane in any trading boat? Depending on CRT's timetable for letting boats out, they may need their free mooring for a while until that opportunity arises. Who are the band? I suggest it should feature Greg Lake, Mr Steadman on strings, Roy Rollings blowing his own trumpet, and PL on the fiddle.

According to the Wikipedia article on the Canal of the Pharaohs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Suez_Canal it was around 274/273 BC in Egypt. Looking at Mike Clarke's website he is evidently a man who knows his subject, so I'm sure he'd be aware of that. Maybe his article doesn't go into the efforts of the ancient Greeks and Romans that much because their locks are not considered to be proper locks like those developed in mediaeval Europe and China?

F1 ? If you like something involving that much speed and noise, are canals for you? However I have no wish to drive you away.

You must be mistaken, the real battleship Potemkin was scrapped in 1923. Talk of "Russian mega-yachts" is the Evening Standard's hyperbole, as Roman Abramovich's yacht certainly wouldn't get under London Bridge and I imagine would probably not fit through the Woolwich barrier. What Ms Leotard actually said seems to be: "I expect you will see big Russian oligarchs down here in about five years’ time". So she was talking about the size of the owner rather than the boat? Seriously, yes she seems to be yet another person trying to talk up their entitlement to a prime residential London mooring at way below market value, when no such entitlement exists. The article didn't mention any denial from her of the landlord's accusation that she'd failed to provide insurance documents. "People are terrified" she says. Yeah right. Just move the boat to a cheaper location and stop whinging. Better get it insured first if you plan a voyage to Salford! Or sell it and buy the flat you say you can't afford... does she know how cheap flats are in say Croydon (a pretty easy commute) compared to central London?

No stone left unturned to bring you the answer; it's in Anguilla: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_Ground

As the owner of a private marina, Tim Coghlan has a strong vested interest, but yes it does seem that back then BW were intent upon buying up marinas and used their monopoly in some areas to push up prices. But there are several flaws in the argument: BW didn't pay connection fees to itself, but while the marinas were in the same organisation there was no point. If they were charging similar mooring fees to other marinas, effectively the connection fee was part of the profits transferred to the rest of BW. If BW mooring fees were lower (were they?), that would be sharp practice, rather like when British Airways temporarily cut their transatlantic fares and traded at a loss on those routes in order to drive Laker Airways out of business. Since TC wrote that article, BWML has of course been separated as a company owned by the CRT and most of its marinas enjoy the advantage of not paying NAA fees. That's not a level playing field if BWML uses its size to undermine rivals as BA did, but as has been frequently pointed out in Dispute at Pillings, anyone setting up a new marina knows when they plan it that they will have to pay NAA fees, so there is no moving of goalposts. It's still the case however that we can regard part of BWML's profits remitted to CRT as effectively being a NAA fee in all but name. It's OK by me that CRT doesn't have to pay rates on its canals, given that they're a non profit-making body and there is a national consensus that canals are a Good Thing and should be preserved. Is it still the case now, since BWML was separated, that private marinas pay business rates but BWML doesn't? That would definitely be unfair. I'm guessing he meant business rates and that council tax is applied in the same way to residents of any marina, with enforcement just depending on the attitude of the council in question? I think it's desirable that any residential moorings in central London are much more expensive than elsewhere. It raises money to pay for maintenance of the canal network, and anyone who thinks they deserve to get one at the same sort of price they'd pay in say Birmingham is living in a fantasy world. If these moorings were priced so low, demand would vastly exceed supply because half of London would be keen to live cheaply in a prime location. How on earth then could the limited supply of moorings be fairly allocated? I'm sure those already on one would say "first come, first served" but then they would, and why should everyone else effectively subsidise them? I have nothing against people who want to live cheaply on the canal system, indeed I think it's good that many do, it's all part of the rich variety of the system. But they can't expect to have their cake and eat it by hanging around cheaply in areas with high demand, whether on a residential mooring or by moving about just enough to stay within the much-discussed CRT rules based upon the 1995 Act. Something's got to give if these areas are not to become so clogged up with boats that navigation is no longer possible, and CRT find themselves with little alternative but to enforce their rules and to hope no-one can make a successful legal challenge.

As he sang in the video about it being half past twelve where he was, apparently in the southern states of the USA and hence the EDT or CDT zones, technically it probably wasn't 5 o'clock somewhere, not 5pm anyway. There might be some odd country in the South Pacific using a time zone with an odd half hour though to produce 5am, can't rule that out.