whammy

Hi Maverick, Depends on your budget etc, you can get cheap receivers that will pick up sky sat at 28.2 degrees east on ebay - good model is the pace ds430n but for channel 4 and 5 you will need a free sat card from sky, other makes worth looking at are the Technomate range you will then be able to pick up other satellites such as hotbird at 13.0 degrees east, mostly european country tv. Cant remember how much the freesat card is from sky - about £20 - one off payment. Either way if you put pace ds430n or technomate into the search on ebay you will get a good idea of prices.

Dave, go for the satellite option and in particular the kerstan dish as mentioned above, we have cruised the country and find with a little thought you can allways find a mooring with view of the satellite at 28.2 e for sky telly. Depending on your receiver you can be up and running for under £200. We have found freeview a bit hit and miss but we only have a multi directional aerial on the roof, to get good freeview you would have to have aerial strapped to a pole etc, dont be put off by having to align the dish as stated above it takes minutes.

Interesting thread, I will add my two pence worth and the reason we went for new. I am a bit of a cheap skate and wanted to buy second hand cos it was cheaper at the time, we visited a lot of brokers and marinas looking for a second hand boat we were looking at a budget of about £40,000, we were looking for a live aboard as I was coming up for retirement and wanted to try a life on the ocean wave. We were very dissapointed with what we saw in the search most of the boats were very shoddy and looked uncared for and more or less abandoned to the brokers, Most of the brokers appeared to be of the cant be bothered variety, I suppose they get quite a few time wasters and could not see we were genuine buyers, anyway thats going off topic. The way I see it you have to be really lucky or be in the right place at the right time to get a second hand boat that has been well cared for and looked after or maybe I am just too fussy about what I pay for what I get. Anyway we bought new from the New Boat Company and have not regretted it once. Cost me an arm and a leg though but that is the cheap skate coming out again

I think BW have a out of sight out of mind policy - If the section of canal goes through a town the tow paths are tended and everything in the garden is smelling of roses, if not you have got no chance - they are too busy thrashing the grass on the Cain Hill flight within half an inch of its life, and I agree with you about the BW flotilla - they just abandon barges and tugs anywhere that takes there fancy. Mind you I am going to contradict myself now, have just come back from Ellesmere Port on the Shroppy , the tow path is all tarmac in this area but the canal is full of crap, I have never seen such a dirty stretch of canal in my 15 months of cruising the system, sightings included a fridge, computer screen and numerous shopping baskets. I dread to think what joe public thinks of the canals when he goes on his 30 minute boat trip from the Boat Museum. RANT OVER - Have a nice day

Dont want to teach my granny to suck eggs but with the dish from towsure which is fixed permanently to the roof you might have to watch bridge heights of your preffered cruising area, might be aan expensive crunch on some bridges I have been under. Tad expensive as well. The kerstan dishes recommended above are first class and are cheaper, the receivers I use are pace ds430n for sky and chan 4 and 5 and technomate receiver for the sport/footy on the other sats.

Hi Tosher, as well as the EA national licence which everone needs to fish anywhere in the country you will also need a further licence to fish the particualar water you choose. This maybe owned by a club or leased out by the owner to the club or maybe private. Seeing you are based at Nantwich you cant go too far wrong by getting a British Waterways Wanderers permit, this allows you to fish many of the canals in the N.w. including a good stretch of the Shropshire Union and the Llangollen canals. The permits currently cost for the year - Adult - £15, kids and oap - £10 but you can also by day and monthly tickets if you wish but the annual prices are very reasonable. You can purchase the tickets from The Service Manager, B.W. Northwest, Navigation Road, Northwich, Cheshire CW8 1BH Tel. 01606 723905. Hope this helps

HI Blue Skies, we are con. cruisers and have just gone through our second winter, as long as you plan properly the stoppages are not a problem we spent the last few months on the Llangollen canal - very nice, why bother getting a winter mooring we find the freedom and space on the canals during the winter months is a whole new experience and at times very peaceful.

When I was ordering my boat from the boat builder the subject of the B.T. came up, I did not know if I needed one or not so as I had the money I had one put in. I use it a bit more than most people would like to admit to but there you go, if I have paid for it I might as well use it ,I find it useful. The original question was from someone fitting out a boat and I have spoken to other boaters about the fitting of a B.T. and the consensus is that it is far easier to fit one during the initial build than to fit one once the boat has been finished or several years old so this might be a point to consider for the original poster of the question.

Hi All, I am a live aboard and wanted internet connection so I went for a data card which slots into the side of my laptop and uses gprs and umts to connect to the internet, I have no ISP as such and use Yahoo for email. I pay £20 a month to T mobile for the service which I dont think is too bad for unlimited surfing the net, I think I have a 2GB download monthly limit but I hardly download anything so thats not a problem. As for coverage I have had no problems all over the country and things have improved again since I bought a signal booster from ebay for £15. I have found on my travels that on the canals that wifi hot spots are not within range so it would not be wise to hope that you are near one when you wish to connect.

I AGREE

We did the K and A last summer, The Barge Inn, Honey Street, Pewsey would be an ideal venue, it is right on the canal side, has a camping, toilets and showers within its grounds and had a marquee next to the campsite, its a down to earth country pub in a beautiful location on this fine canal and according to the Nicholsons guide it is the International crop circle centre - mind you we did not see any aliens when we were there ?????

Have now arrived in Llangollen and spent a night on the online moorings which have 240v posts, we had to go into town and buy a BW electricity card from hardware store - cost £12.10 - After one night we moved up to the new basin, only one other boat here, the 240v posts are different here they are not the same as the online moorings i.e. you cant put the BW electric cards into them, so I have now deduced that the electric is included in the summer time mooring fee of £5 a night (its free to moor for 48 hours in the winter but as I have said before - no electricity) which leads me to believe that the reason for no 240v in the winter is because BW cant afford to employ someone to collect the £5 in the winter so they cut the 240v supply to boaters (mind you the 240v posts arfe lit up like christmas trees). I was speaking to another boater the other day and she told me that the new basin does not have full support of local residents who are worried about noise levels from boaters - it is strange then that the noise from boaters running their engines to generate electric in winter does not cause more complaints from them. just a thought Anyway despite this the area is very scenic, the Lamb shank in the Bridge End pub is delicious and we are off to Horse Shoe falls tomorrow.

We will make use of the online 240v when we do go in but the basin moorings appeal to us more for various reasons and I just wanted to know the reason why they switch off the 240v in the winter

Two or Three inches on the Llangollen, views across the valley are first class, still snowing now

I would be very dissapointed if BW do have a policy of discouraging residential boating, I have been continuous cruising for just over a year now and from what I have seen so far there is room for us all if we abide by a simple rule - treat everybody the same way you wish to be treated - Still dont know why they switch the 240v off in the basin in the winter - maybe they should explain it in the notice they have slapped on the noticeboards in Llangollen. It mus be a bit hectic in the summer - glad I am here now, have only seen 2 other boats moving in the last few days.

We are cruising the Llangollen Canal this winter and have found it to be as great as everybody says it is, we are a short way from the end of the line at Llangollen at the moment a decided to pedal into Llangollen today to see the lie of the land as we had heard that the new basin did not provide electricity to the pontoons in the winter and as I was intending to give my batteries a treat on the 240v we thought we would take a look. Got there and the online moorings were about half full and they did have the provision for 240v. We then went up to the new basin - NO BOATS, EMPTY, NADA, MOORINGS FOR MAN AND BOY = BUT NO ELECTRIC. BW have put signs up saying no electric available at the new basin but you can moor there if you want. As I stood staring at the empty basin my first thought was they have paid all this money for a trendy new mooring facility and then shoot themselves in the foot in the winter. I am sure they could come up with a reason why they dont supply 240v in the winter - does anyone know why ???? I just thought what a waste of resources. I am sure if they made half the pontoons temp winter moorings they would have their hands bitten off, they could leave the other half for winter visitors which I assume are not very numerous - just a thought !!!! Anyway the Llangollen valley is looking superb and will probably look better tomorrow with the snow !!!!!!!!

If you are not bothered about chan 4 or 5 I recommend the sat boxes from TECHNOMATE you can pick on e up on ebay for less than £100 and the built in software makes it very easy to locate the satellite you require - it comes pre set with loads of satellites and you just select the satellite you want and the on screen strength and quality meter lets you know when you have located the satellite, I can tune into the astra sats at 28.2e for the english programmes and 13.0e for the hotbird sat for european tv and all with a very small kerstan dish within minutes, as for where in the sky the sats are whats wrong with the sun rises in the east and sets in the west regards

We are on the Llangollen in Shropshire, very very windy, had a worrying moment when a roofing sheet came off near by farm building and whizzed through the air and embedded itself in field next to the boat, global warming - what global warming !!!!!!! Just had email from B.W. stoppages advising against any boats navigating the Llangollen till further notice. Who would go out on a day like today ?.

The guage fitted in relation to my pump out tank shows the level but only starts to register when the tank is nearly full becuase the sender unit is fitted near the top of the tank and the float is fitted to a short arm but it serves its purpose, it is also a under bed tank as is yours

I may have missed something here but why does john have this opinnion of live aboards, what are his reasons

Hello Theo, I am a live aboard and cc, my views are only based on my experience, when my boat was built it was fitted with a modern 240v fridge run through a 2.5kw inverter, when we showed the electric set up to a experienced boater his comment was that he really feared for us with electricity consumption due to this 240v fridge set up, we thought we would suck it and see and off we went, we soon found that he was right and found that the 240v fridge was whacking the batteries big time and found ourselves turning the fridge off overnight to save power and stop the inverter kicking in in the middle of the night (inverter was next to our bed head). I know this was maybe a false economy as when the fridge was turned back on the following morning it would take more out the batteries starting up and getting up to normal working level but it seemed the only way to do it. Anyway in the end we bit the bullet and forked out £400 on a Shoreline 12v fridge which we now keep on 24/7 and have no problems with keeping up with supply. We did think of a 3 way fridge but these are even more expensive and we had no gas connection on that side of the boat and we did not want to start messing with the boat to get a gas supply to that side of the boat and then there would have ben the problem of venting a gas fridge. So in summary I think you can guess I am in favour of the 12v set up and would advise against 240v fridge - Hope this helps