BilgePump

Just seen them. Apparently I'm in the 'Mentor' category. Wouldn't like to think anyone would take my opinions, observations and puns that seriously!

Just steer clear of roller coasters. The high acceleration/deceleration can set off the crash detection feature and people didn't realise it had activated.

Was wondering what the chance were of this thread going this way Yup. Didn't fail

There's only one residential mooring out of 11 available north of Luton, in Sheffield. It's also twice as expensive as a leisure mooring over in Cheshire. In comparison there are over 130 leisure moorings available. Take advantage of family address and save a lot of pounds?

A little selection of ones that come to mind - An obligatory Nicholson's guide. Whipped off the roof with a mooring line about 1990. Retrieved from the cut, dried and all crinkled but still around today. - An impact driver, forgot it had been left on the roof, got underway and it rolled off with a splash, never to be seen again. About five years ago. - Myself in the canal and lakes a few times over the years, a dog on a couple. Fortunately none involving injury but lost a phone on one of those occasions. - The spring retained ball bearing out of the end of my outboard fuel line connector. Didn't have a spare so lots of cursing and faffing to go get another. Was on the mooring but taught me the necessity on the river of carrying spares of more than just shear-pin, plugs etc, and not to take things apart over water! - The one I find quite ironic is the half-dozen vintage bottles that slid off the rack on my kayak as a kid in the mid 80s. I'd gone exploring a dredge heap they'd thrown up on the offside of the canal. Dug out a few interesting old bottles and broken plates. Put them on my homemade wooden, rack covering me and the kayak in dredge sludge. Rack wasn't held securely enough so it just deposited them back into the canal from where they'd only recently been liberated. Being still full of crud they sank pretty promptly.

As a suggestion I wouldn't think it the worst idea for someone returning from abroad to initially use their parents' address whether planning to rent a room somewhere or move onto the water. So long as it doesn't affect any potential reductions the parents may have on the council tax, there is the advantage of knowing that it will be useable for some time. It's easy to rent somewhere, then decide it's awful and have to move and go through the hassle of changing address with all the organisations we have to deal with in life. Deliveries can now be made to drop-off/collection points in shops/garages etc, there are coal and gas boats go up and down many canals, yards and marinas can do pumpout for a fee, elsan and water points are part of your licence fee, find a mooring with them reasonably close, be close(ish) to shops and transport links, have a decent solar array and a mooring where it can be used, have a decent source of heat for the winter. The fact that the OP mentions that the boat has been blacked suggests that it's a narrowboat and not GRP so it should be possible to upgrade such a boat to at least an acceptable year-round abode. Forget a true-residential mooring to start with from both an affordability and availability perspective. Do consider CaRT towpath long term leisure moorings. If you are a reasonably self-sufficient and resourceful person they can be found in some lovely locations and quite social with passing boats. You may also find yourself more inclined to go out a bit on the boat. Nothing to stop you going up the canal and mooring there for a few nights for a change of view, go in the opposite direction and do the same or spend most of your time on the home mooring. This isn't some very rare breed of person, it's how quite a few people live on their boats without being on a residential mooring. Some in the more informal and no-frills marinas, farm moorings etc, some on the towpath side on CaRT long term leisure and some continuously cruising (of which some will be truly doing it and some just doing the bare minimum shuffle or even less). It's the last group of the last category that CaRT are really bothered about, the people who want the benefit of a local area mooring without the expense of paying for one in any form. I'm guessing that the posher the marina, the less chance of bending the rules - some of those restrictions mentioned seem like a licence to extract more money from frequent but genuine leisure boaters. With some of the more informal places I suspect the 'don't tell, don't ask' approach seems to work fine for plenty of folks.

Have a boat on a CaRT leisure mooring up north here and there is at least one middle aged guy lives on his narrowboat full time. He'll be paying about £170 per month for a 60ft ish mooring for the pleasure of not having to comply with the continuous cruising rules. Boat is nice and it does go out up the cut or just the 200 yards to fill up with water at times, but we only have water and bins available on this towpath mooring. Electric, washing machines, wifi, showers - we have none. It's a very pleasant spot and shops, train stations etc are reasonably close by bike or boat. Obviously nothing like the on-hand facilities (or postal address provision) of a full service residential mooring but nothing like the price. Friendly chap and it's good to know that there's usually a pair of eyes and ears there a lot of the time. An electric bike obviously takes some charging but engine and solar can both make enough given sufficient output and time. It would also work well on moorings like ours where the nearest free parking is hundreds of yards away on a road. There is a council run paid car-park closer but it's not long-term so no real use to someone living aboard or wanting to take a leisure boat out for a few days. Most marinas will have some form of off road parking for their moorers but most will be for leisure and expecting occasional visits, weekends, a week or two, but not there every night. A couple of marinas I've been in have turned a blind eye to under the radar liveaboards, where they didn't have excessive demands, one even formalised it into an 'intensive use' scheme which wasn't a king's ransom. True residential moorings are like rocking horse manure and a load more expensive than leisure and there is no getting around the fact that doctor, dvla, bank, voter reg etc will all need a family/friend to help with a land address on a leisure mooring, but there are a lot of people have done it for years, and the ones I've met haven't done it at the inconvenience of those not living aboard their boats.

Like an upmarket Blackpool? Do have a soft spot for Hollingworth Lake. Many times sailed my Mirror on there when I was much younger. eta: just gone back and realised that DM said the same thing much earlier. Sorry for the echo

Good to hear from one of the team behind it. The YouTube video was linked and discussed in the thread below

8'x4' raft with about 300w of solar panels on it towed behind the boat as its tender and with a nice power line cable tied to the towing line?

One thing to remember is that a lot of the older really small engines were direct drive with no neutral or reverse. You have to spin the engine to go in reverse. Fine on a little dinghy around harbour moorings but a real pain in a bigger boat on a congested canal. I've got a couple of Ailsa Craig (4hp) and Seagulls (about 1.5hp) like that. Something like one of the last 2 stroke Mariner/Mercury 3.3hp has neutral but no reverse. Get to 5hp and above and most seemed to have fwd, neutral and reverse. I've got an old 5hp Yamaha air cooled two stroke on a sailboat similar in size to the Mirror offshore and it works okay on the river against a moderate tidal flow. The suggestion to top up using solar isn't really going to cut it as the roof space is so limited. It would be a squeeze to get 50w of solar on there let alone a few hundred watts.

When topping up the pre-pay meter via a PayPoint (yep MtB's Pray-Point is a fairly accurate description) I describe it as going for a bucketful of leccy.

I'm a little flabbergasted at the quoted £10k per recovery. When our sailing club crane in/out we get a big crane with the capacity at long reach to lift boats far heavier than a car. It and a couple of guys are with us from about 7am to 3pm and we pay north of a grand. Members do the ropework and ground prep etc but does the extra manpower, risk assessments, pickup truck, storage etc really all add up to the nearly nine thousand extra. I can imagine recovery being more complex in remote locations but the one shown in Alan's original post looks relatively good access.

🤣 that made me chuckle. Going to have to nick that as a) less crude than the lady of the night's underwear and b) more recent than the Assyrian empire.

Another vote for ^^^^^ wot Rob said Just last week old Android phone stopped charging. Battery life is poor now but just stopped charging completely. It was the charger USB lead that had failed

From the three parallel running threads it seems that the poster in France has purchased the boat Me n Thee that Wayne (known as W+T to us now but also olly+molly the OP of this thread) purchased back in 2009. Wayne confirmed that the boat had gone to France after he sold it. As the boat was never registered in France and we are now in post-Brexit days and there is no build paperwork, no original bill of sale/VAT receipt etc I fear that this could be a tricky/expensive exercise. Do Creighton's have build plates on them, hull numbers or year of build marked on them somewhere? Don't know but a lot of GRP boats from that era did and it would be the first thing to look for to get started on formally confirming its age and details of dimensions etc. for French authorities.

Never met your father but from your previous posts he sounds to have been a true gentleman and passionate about the canals. Sending my condolences to you, Ade and the wider family.

A couple that I learnt many moons ago for climbing but come in handy around boats are the Double Fisherman's (a type of bend) and the Alpine Butterfly. The latter is dead quick to tie and is useful where you may want a three way pull on the rope without the knot trying to pull its insides out.

Aren't there usually at least a few dozen jobs on the 'still needs doing' list on a boat. Cleaning, painting, fixing, modifying or making. Must be enough of those to keep boredom at bay for a while.

I found it worked well using Tony's stern pulling line plus bow guide line technique, on stretches of our local canal, but imagine on more congested waters it would be a pain because of all the moored boats and whatnot on the tops of them. Size of the boat being hauled when coming up to moored boats isn't the issue, it's getting past them. It's good that you've already got the aux bracket fitted. If you ever do have a problem with the main outboard, when away from the marina, you can beg/borrow/buy a little one to go on there to get back home without first having to remove the Honda which comes in around the 50kg mark.

Did that with a 60' steel boat a few years ago. Hard work but possible for even a short arse like me. A small GRP boat is like pulling a shopping trolley. Easy peasy.