TheBiscuits

I thought there was a 40' lock somewhere on the Middle Levels?

Nah. Two bottles of Merlot help me sleep I may be going out on a limb here, but I am guessing your kids don't get to take the boat out on their own with "friends" and your Whisky collection ...

You drag 'em up the best you can, and then the ungrateful so-and-so's end up being real people with their own opinions. It wasn't like that back in my day! Grr ... mutter mutter ... Nurse!

Yes, but see edit to previous post!

You suspect wrong. ETA: but ours are not 12 yet, so time may tell!

I think that might depend on the parents ...

There are whole verses skipped here, so I wouldn't worry about the odd line here and there!

I'm surprised it took you that long to bore them! Have you considered getting a modern engine?

I like extreme boating, but I know for sure I would not want to be in an inflatable liferaft heading for those rocks!

That's because they didn't launch the lifeboats!

No. All the short locks on the L&L will take a 62ft boat with no problems, if the boat can shed water front and back. I would happily (if slowly!) take a 64ft boat across the full length of the L&L, and I could share all except 1 lock with a boat of 45ft or less. ETA: For what it's worth, I live on the L&L except when I am playing out on other waterways. You can choose to believe occasional visitors if you want though. They are not exactly wrong, but they are used to them soft easy shallow narrow Midlands locks

Maybe, but here on this forum will be your best shot at it! Where are you?

Meg, you are very welcome. Nobody I know would even consider pulling an articulated lorry on a bit of string, but most boaters try to without understanding it! The helmsman's courses will help, but if you want to know how to do it properly try and find an old boatman (or boatwoman but they are much rarer!) My training technique boils down to "if you think you are working too hard, you have done it wrong." Don't fight wind wave and boat - use them to help you do what you want to do. Sometimes that means you need to turn the boat the other way so the wind helps you. Sometimes you need the correctly placed rope to "spring off" when the wind is pinning you to a bank. Sometimes you need to use a rope to turn the boat tighter than you think it will go. All of this comes with experience and practice, and the chaps that did it for years are the ones whose brains you need to pick. Ignore the golf bores from the local boatclub - they are usually full of ... themselves, and most of them just shout at their wives when it goes wrong. MrsBiscuits took a pair of boats down an unfamiliar lock flight last week, steering a boat she has never driven before. Her first comment at the bottom was "That gear lever needs adjusting - it's too stiff." It is all about practice and expectations, and most of the blokes who try and tell you otherwise have only ever steered one boat ...

Norway cruise ship arrives at port after passenger airlifts A cruise ship that got into trouble off the Norwegian coast has arrived safely at the port of Molde after the dramatic rescue of hundreds of people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47685595

I'm a bloke over 6ft and over 16 stone, but I was trained by ex-working boatmen: "You've got a friggin' engine and some bloody rope! Use 'em!" There isn't a bloke on the planet that can stop a 40 ton laden L&L shortboat by pulling on a rope that isn't strapped round a bollard or fed through a ring, and you can't always rely on them as the coping stones get ripped out! My technique is to slow the boat right down using it's own power, and then give it just that little bit longer so it is actually stopped. I despair at seeing 4 ft 6 stone women being screamed at by their 6ft 20 stone husbands that they are not pulling hard enough. Don't apologise for being female - just use the brains us blokes were not given(!) and don't try and make excuses for lack of upper body strength. It's much easier if you learn some of the more advanced rope & engine techniques ... for example tie the centre line to a bollard with some slack and then just power forward until the boat touches the side all the way along it's length. ETA: Not a dig @BlueStringPudding, just a general thing about women not handling boats like most men (who usually do it wrong anyway!)

I still think that overdriving the voltage isn't going to help long term. Is it 72V you are feeding to a 48V motor?

Where the flue hole is? Ely Chandlers. Where it should be? The manufacturer!

He did say he would post pictures tomorrow Tony. He probably does not know the answers as it's a new-to-him boat, but we can help him find them over the next few days. That's enough of a leak to drain the pump housing that holds the impeller (the rubber fan that pumps the water). If it gets dry, it rips itself apart with heat and friction (the raw water cools the blades), and you can get blades off it stuck in hoses that stop water coming through. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt! That sounds like what is happening to me - the 15 minutes or so is just long enough for the engine to heat up, and you are getting steam off the coolant. Note that keeping doing this without fixing it will damage your engine if you keep running it without fixing it.

I have checked this photo and am pleased to see everyone has sandwiches. I was looking for the distinctive shape of a noodle pot! I can't see what the photographer is eating though ....

The official motto of the US Coastguard is "Semper Paratus" (Always Ready). The unofficial motto is "We gotta go out, but nobody said we gotta come back." My brother drives an RNLI inshore boat, and he thinks the offshore skippers are nuts!

Road trip is it?

Make sure you don't hit the final boat (mine!) or you'll have to pay the donations per boat