Stewart Kirby

Lots of answers to people’s questions on their website but search for BWML Floating Homes, a search for Aquavista brings up water things. The price is not too bad, £179,000 at Sawley and £230,000 at Bedford. You are buying the building but not the water or land underneath it. There is an annual service charge of £2,759 at Sawley and £3000 at Bedford.

Ignorance is bliss. We left Keadby with a New Zealand couple who had just bought a narrowboat from Thorne the day before. They had half a days experience, no anchor, no VHF, a crappy single page chart. They had no problems, but it could have been very different.

I have not been through Top Lock in a while but I thought it the first of the 57’6” locks. Even if it’s a bit longer there are platforms on the inside of the bottom gates that reduce the available length. I know because I nearly got my tiller stuck under one of them while i was being distracted by a gongoozler.

You have to have the permission of the marina owner to live aboard without paying council tax and of course the marinas will not advertise that as it’s against the law. A face to face meeting might bring an agreement. Sawley have some scam, sorry scheme, where you have to move berth every six months to pay a lower level of council tax.

Or Still Waters, or choose any name from Lord of the Rings, they are all out there.

Sawley is a BWML site which has residential moorings at which you will pay council tax. See their website for details. Lots of facilities but it will come at a cost and it has flooded in the past keeping people off their boats. i don’t know what Mercia Marinas policy is, ring them. Their leisure mooring rates are reasonable but you can’t officially live aboard.

It’s all guesswork anyway because she doesn’t have a boat and hasn’t said where she wants to be based which is why I suggested looking at the CART mooring website. I think some of your numbers are a bit dodgy but I’m not going to troll you about it.

My least favourite was on the Aire & Calder. Avdunnah.

It was a leisure mooring and it was a few years ago. There were people living permanently on their boats but I don’t know if that was on an official residential mooring.

Hi Ruth, have a look at CaRT moorings to get a feel for prices in the area you are interested in. It will be more expensive in honeypot locations and in Greater London. A budget of £4000 pa might be enough, mooring fees and licences are dependant on boat length, my last boat was 45ft and insurance was about £170, licence £750 and a mooring in a marina near Lichfield £2,400. You need a Boat Safety Certificate every 4 years, prices vary but budget for £150. The bottom of the boat needs to be blacked every couple of years, prices vary but call it £400. Expect to replace the batteries on any boat that has been lying around for a while, say up to £140 per battery. Engine service every 200 hours on many engines, if you can do it yourself less than £100 for oil and filters, add a couple of hours labour if you can’t do it. Many people use a company called RCR (rRver and Canal Rescue) for breakdowns, the price depends on the level of cover. Have you tried living in a 6ft wide tube? It might be a good idea to rent a boat for a week but you will probably need another person with you as the boat hire companies do not often rent their boats to one person. The hull and engine are the two most important things to get right but there are so many hulls built by different people it’s hard to recommend a sensible list, same goes for engines. Maybe you can find something you like the look of on Apollo Duck and post it here so we can critique it, be ready for blunt responses.

Hi New Beginning. I suggest you spend some time looking at boats to get a feel for what is the right layout for you and what kind of equipment you want. You say want to be a live aboard, would you want a mooring or become a continuous cruiser (use the search function of the forum to find out what that entails). If you have a permanent mooring with electricity available you can make use of 240 volt appliances easily. If you are going to be continuously cruising then everything relies on your batteries and your ability to manage/recharge them and you need to work out what appliances you can power. Heating the boat in the winter will be important . Having a stove at one end of the boat doesn’t really warm up the other end. Try and befriend someone who does know about boats so you can take them with you to check out boats. You don’t have a big budget so you be looking at some boats with potential problems. Think also about ongoing expenses such as a licence, insurance, mooring fees, diesel costs, heating costs etc, The expense doesn’t stop once you buy the boat.

I always think of a water pump as being a consumable and I always kept a new spare pump on board for those occasions when the pump failed miles away from somewhere to buy a replacement. I would buy a new pump if you can and fit it, the old one might be repairable and could become your spare.

I just looked at the ad on the duck. The asking price is £20,000, and of course it’s in London. The interior has been tarted up but of course thats the easy bit. No exit from the bows immediately rings alarm bells. Like MTB it doesn’t look like a Springer to me. Looks like some overplaying has been done. That stove installation looks dodgy to me and with no access to the bows where is the high level ventilation? Air cooled Lister, pass me the earplugs please. I know not everyone can spell gud but if you are advertising something for £20,000 Shirley you can get someone to check it as well as using a spell checker. I would run, not walk away from this and not waste money on a survey. As someone else said, hull and engine are the important things not a coat of paint.

The interior looks very nice. I’m not a fan of fat narrowboats so the exterior is meh to me. If you intend to move around rather than stay connected to shore power i’m Not sure how you are going to generate enough lucky to power all those galley appliances. I know there is an invertor but there are only four domestic batteries to power all those hungry appliances.

No, good fun around there. You should also be able to get into the Basin at West Stockwith which is a nice mooring.

I don’t fall either side of the line that seems to being drawn here. There are different types of boating/living lifestyles and I don’t feel strongly that one is right or wrong. But maybe it’s time for another type of licence for those who are not Continuous Cruisers under whatever terms you want to apply. If people want to move very little compared to the current “rules” or “guidelines” perhaps a premium could be applied to their licence to recognise this and provide investment to maintain or improve facilities. Stick a GPS tracker on every boat and use that to determine which category the boat falls into. Nah, I don’t think there’s an answer that will satisfy everyone.

As has been said previously there are all sorts of claims for batteries. better to split your batteries into one dedicated “starter” battery and two “domestic” batteries. Some kind of battery monitoring/managing system is also desirable. Various claims are made for different systems, take professional advice.

It may not be a major issue. On my first boat, a semi trad stern where rainwater that had got past the cover drained down the steps to the cabin and entered the bilge, I turned up after having left the boat for a couple of months. I found water half way up the engine, the battery for the auto bilge pump had run flat. I got a bucket and chucked out the water from the engine ole. A check of the dipstick showed water in the engine sump so I drained it and changed the oil filter. I filled with flushing oil and ran the engine for a while. Then I drained the flushing oil and filled up with regular oil. The engine ran fine for a further five years until I sold the boat.

The second boat has had some money spent on it in the last year and the paint job looks reasonable. My first question for the owners would be “Why are you selling it after owning it for only a year and spending all that money on it?”. Could there be a problem that they are not advertising? Personally I would want a hull survey even if they have a good answer to the question I posed.

Whilst th Leeds end of the canal has its own charms for me the section from Skipton heading West has the best scenery and places of interest. Yes, the locks can be hard work but with two weeks you have plenty of time to take it steady. Probably enough time to go to Bingley and Saltaire as well. The railway line runs alongside the canal from Skipton to Leeds so you could always use the train to visit some places if you don’t fancy taking the boat. Some of the swing bridges are mechanised so it’s just a case of putting in your key and pressing a button but others can be tough to move. Have the strongest member of the crew do the non mechanised bridges. Make sure both of you can steer the boat. One thing to bear in mind is that it a dry summer the canal can suffer from water shortages leading to closure of the locks. There is a handy hire base at Silsden which is good for this area.

£4 a pint? Is it ambrosia? It’s enough to make you think of drinking water, although tats probably £2 a pint.

It depends entirely what the criteria used in this is. If it’s about how our kids do in tests then everyone with an interest in education knows that our schools are teaching kids to pass the tests because that is how success is measured these days for schools. The education system is not necessarily better or worse than in the past, it’s just different. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but that is how it is.

All we ever did was open all the taps and leave an oil filled radiator on frost setting whilst connected to shore power. May have been lucky but it worked for 17 years. If you are visiting every weekend I dont see any problems unless the weather is very severe.

Oh! I just remembered something it might be worth mentioning to newcomers to the Calder and Hebble. Many of the bottom gates have a wide walkway on the inside of the gates. It’s very easy to have someone distract you and end up catching your tiller arm under the gate with serious results. It almost happened to me once.

The first lock where there are handspike paddles is Broadcut Bottom Lock. You can get through without a handspike but if any of the other paddles are inoperable it will slow you down. You should be able to buy a handspike at Stanley Ferry, or you can make your own with a 3”x2” length of harwood with a slight taper at the business end. The first lock where you absolutely have to have a handspike is Kirklees Lock but there are plenty of others where it’s good to have one. IIRC there are quite a few locks where the ground paddles are windlass operated and the gate paddles handspike operated.