Jump to content

DRP

Member
  • Posts

    141
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by DRP

  1. DRP

    ouch

    It's nice to have a stout and robust old boat, especially if you also have a lovely wife on board. Do try not to get too paranoid on the age front: slipping and falling can happen to anyone . Did you go to casualty, and have some child in a nurse costume asking you if you can remember what day it is, and who is the Prime Minister? That's when you know the age is starting to show. Worry only if it keeps happening; and just enjoy the gin.
  2. Many thanks for the advice. I think I'll leave the inside alone, and head off to the automotive paint suppliers today. David.
  3. I have a handbowl given to me by a famous canal painter over 20 years ago. It has had no use other than decorative in that time, but the paint has steadily fallen off in sheets, revealing the bright galvanised surface beneath. (I suspect that at that stage of his career, he didn't know about etch primer; hence the anonymity, to avoid causing embarrassment). I now plan to repaint it, as due to a change in boat circumstances, it will now have to be used for its real purpose. I have two questions: 1. What is the best etch primer to use on a still "fresh" galvanised surface? 2. If these bowls are going to be used, do you paint the inside, or just rely on the galvanised surface to protect it ? I'm not posting a picture, as I'm sure some of you will know who it was by the paint that remains! (Spoilsport!)
  4. Joke. Right? If not, why not take advantage of the opportunity to let the little woman build up her confidence steering the boat in and out of the titchy locks, while you do all the running about?
  5. Gin Palace : it's usually said in a somewhat negative tone, but I've always thought it sounds rather nicer than," Expensive floating shed for drinking with your mates, or conducting illicit liaisons.(or both, but not necessarily at the same time)." Towing a butty: The late and fondly remembered Nigel Carter was bow hauling the Mary into a lock when a passing lady asked whether the boat had broken down. Nigel, adopting his most solemn expression and sonorous tone of voice replied, " No, I'm afraid the horse has died". The lady hurried to rejoin her companions exclaiming, "Did you hear that? His horse is dead". They all said, "Ooooh! what a shame!"
  6. Plainsman, did you get sorted out? Is the pump an Amal 120, like on a Russell Newbery? If it is, you could fit a "Gardner" bottom half to the pump, and then use the more robust inlet fittings from Burlen fuel systems (Amalcarb). I've just done this on a Russell Newbery. I notice Gardnerspares offer a refurbished pump for £195, but the ad says they will do service exchange; perhaps they'd let you change over your old operating arm.
  7. It's not the boats, though, is it? It's the people in them. The boats are fine; they may be old or new, they may be private ,or hire boats. Some have very capable people in them; some have complete duffers. Some have nice people; some have absolute tw*ts. Bit like Canal World Forum, really.
  8. DRP

    A near miss

    Congrats to Rob-M on surviving what could have been a really nasty accident. Whilst most of the time boating isn't that high risk, it does have the potential to give rise to accidents that are real horrors, even in the case of people who know what they are doing. It's a pity that some recent TV series have given the impression to the uninitiated that it's all a bit of a boozy lark! On the subject of footwear, for most of the working days of the canals, it must have been the normal thing for working people to wear hob-nailed boots which would give good grip in the wet, and on wood, but must have been lethal on steel decks (and pretty hard on the paintwork!). That's a huge relief; I quite like Marmite. And being chronologically closer than many to the other thing , your reply has given me new hope.
  9. Well done indeed. In Peel's case, my guess is that they would be arsed, and even if they couldn't, being on the books of a debt recovery agency can be quite a personal disaster these days. Quite agree about the handing over of money on the towpath, though.
  10. DRP

    A near miss

    Well, dead's quite bad.
  11. All very interesting; kudos and thanks to those with the application and knowledge to study and advise on the original documents. However, the practical point surely is that only the very wealthy/very foolhardy get involved in court cases against organisations with large legal departments of their own, for the sake of £40?
  12. . . . And in reply to the original question. . . Of course they do. They enjoy the privilege of spending lots of time and/or money looking after them, and doing specialist repairs. They enjoy the privilege of ploughing through the bottom of ill-maintained canals, and the privilege of getting on and off the boat on a plank because the canal isn't deep enough to get in to the side. . . . and the joy of being raced to bridge 'oles by silly people who don't know that they can't just stop. . . . and occasionally (but rarely, we hope), the privilege of being resented by sad people who wish they had a historic boat, but haven't. Above all, and making it all worthwhile, they enjoy the privilege of being custodians of pieces of living history, and bringing joy to people who know what they're looking at; and a little education and interest to those who don't.
  13. OK. You keep your boat on a mooring where you pay mooring fees. You boat off for your holidays and decide to visit a town (doesn't matter which one). You have a look round, go to a pub,have a meal, stay for a day or two then boat away. You're a visitor. You boat to a town . You tie your boat up on visitor moorings.You then lock it up and leave it there for weeks on end.You might even live on it there while you commute to work; or rent it out to someone else to live on. You're not a visitor. You're a p**s artist, even if you have got a CRT licence and a "permanent" mooring several hundred miles away that you "share" with several other people. Thirty years ago, when the numbers of boats were a fraction of what they are now, the canals could be a lovely refuge from the world of rules and regulations. Sadly, they can't now, because more boats means more people; and more people means more who will take advantage at the expense of everyone else. Just as a real-life example. We recently visited Brentford, taking a boat up the Thames, and having missed the tide had to wait until next day. In a couple of hundred yards of visitor moorings, the only spaces were a portage pontoon for canoes and the water/pump out point. Of the several dozen boats moored, only two or three had people on them. No-one else was waiting for the tide (as we noted next day), and many of the boats had been there long enough to get a good covering of algae and general crud. You could argue that the owners had just gone sightseeing, or perhaps had decided to stay at the Holiday Inn to have a nice bath and a comfortable bed. But you wouldn't really believe that, would you?
  14. Depending on your point of view, you could argue that we're all visitors, and in three score years and ten most of us will be gone. But in the context of "visitor moorings", aren't we thinking of a shorter timescale?
  15. No. I am suggesting that designated visitor moorings should be kept available for those who are visitors. Makes sense to several others. It's difficult, this reading thing, but it gets easier the more you do it. Hooray! Sense and reason.
  16. I have done and can't really see the relevance. Post #167 mentions that CRT have no obligation to provide visitor moorings. I'm suggesting that they should and that they should police them so that those of us who want to use our boats to visit new places can do. I think I was expressing the same general idea that Gordias did (more politely than I did).
  17. It's all very entertaining to bad-mouth CRT with a lot of legalistic twaddle about what they do and don't have the right to do, but who do you all want CRT to satisfy? The pleasure boaters who want to use their boat for holidays and days out? The genuine continuous cruisers who travel the whole network as a lifestyle choice, and really don't have a fixed base? Those who choose to live permanently on a boat in a fixed location, on a residential mooring? or those who are clearly extracting the Michael and the urine in equal measure; living in what are basically floating squats, or renting boats out for residential occupation but pretending that they are "pleasure boats" - and moving them the minimal stipulated distance every two weeks just so that they can claim they are continuous cruisers. If you don't like CRT imposing rules, who should? If nobody, are you happy with every town and city on a canal having miles of permanently moored residential boats; some tidy, some neglected and some piled high with rotting logs, bits of dismantled domestic appliances and all the other debris that accumulates when people don't realise you can't live on a boat and have lots of "stuff"? Personally, I'd quite like to be able to visit some of our major cities and find moorings where I could stay for a few days, then go away again. If that means CRT have designated visitor moorings which they police vigorously for overstaying,well so be it.
  18. So ,this topic started as a discussion on the merits (or otherwise) of volunteer lock keepers, became an opportunity for a few to engage in exchanges of personal abuse (subtly and not so subtly), and has now evolved into an exchange of reminiscences about real ales. Is that it, then?
  19. Clearly there was confusion, but it wasn't on my part; and as you say, the official notice was issued some time ago. Perhaps it was unreasonable of me to think that phoning the day before would yield the most up to date information. In hindsight, I should have put this post in another category. My intention was not to have a rant against the restrictions, but to offer suggestions as to how boaters might cope with the inevitable waits that result. Judging by the amount of grumbling going on at the top lock, an awful lot of people were unaware of the restrictions until they arrived; and if you don't know the top lock area at Wigan, it is a bit of a desert if you've run out of milk and bread - and the pub only takes cash.
  20. What's Really Happening at Wigan? If this has been covered elsewhere, moderators might like to delete this post, but having just gone up the Wigan flight yesterday (and today!) I'd like to make sure people understand what's happening. We've just taken the Sultan up Wigan, to get some overdue bottom work done at Botany Bay. On Tuesday afternoon I rang CRT to check and was told the locks were open twice a day from 8 to 9 am, and 2 to 3 pm. We arrived at the bottom of the flight at 1 pm on Wednesday, found a few padlocks on the lock gear, but an empty lock and one ground paddle working, so we went in and waited for the lock to slowly fill. It duly did, so we set off up the flight. We were getting on well when we encountered volunteer lock keeper Peter on his day off, who told us we shouldn't have started to come up, as the conditions are not what CRT had told us. Here is the real situation: -- You can only enter the flight between 8am and 9am - whether you are going up or down. After this time the flight is locked. -- You can only leave the flight between 2pm and 3pm - unless you've reached top or bottom after getting in by accident like we did; in which case you might get out in the 8 to 9 slot, but you will have spent the night on the flight. No-one should be put off by these restrictions, but going east you should be prepared to spend the night in Wigan. Tie up in the pound with the dry dock in it, and be ready to get up early to arrive at the bottom of the flight at 8am.One lock to go up before you start. You can easily walk into town, but there is a convenience store, and a nice pub called The Honeysuckle about 200 yds down the road if you go out the gate by the dry dock. If you're going west, and you know you'll have to spend the night at the top of the flight, stop in Adlington to do your shopping and go to a cash machine. There are no shops within walking distance of the top of the locks;there is a nice pub, "The Kirkless Hall", which does food, but as a matter of brewery policy doesn't take credit cards.
  21. . . . and pulling people's mooring pins out.
  22. Couldn't agree more. The whole story may help explain a heavy dose of irony in my post: The George was originally going to be towed across the Mersey to Liverpool by a commercial boat operator, then along the Leeds & Liverpool canal by a well-known boat preservation society. Owing to illness, the boatman of the preservation society found he was no longer able to do it, so asked us if we would take over with our Yarwoods short boat. We were keen to help, so a meeting was organised with the "Project Manager", who, only months before the journey was due to begin, seemed not to have considered basic issues such as was the boat to be ballasted at all, was it to be equipped with a pump as it would almost certainly ship water on its passage across the river and what sort of security arrangements had been made. We left it that we would still be willing devote the Summer to it for no payment other than the diesel used, once it had arrived in Liverpool. Some weeks later, we received an e-mail from some other woman at the Boat Museum, telling us our services would not be required, but that we could feel free to join in any of the George's activities. Not an offer we felt inclined to take up. We have it on good authority that it is now going to be towed around by a Bantam tug. We shall not be bothering to get involved with that organisation again.
  23. The George remains in what is described as the "care" of the Ellesmere Port museum. It had a fantastically expensive restoration somewhere in the south of England, and returned last year. There has been much sniffing and snorting about the restoration, and whilst it has to be said that the boat doesn't look quite as it did before, it is still a lovely-looking thing. It was due to be towed through Lancashire so school kids could see it (to fulfil the conditions of its restoration grant), but the plan was changed; it was taken to Liverpool on a lorry, and craned into Salthouse Dock, with kids being bussed in to see it. Isn't technology wonderful?
  24. Lovely though it is as a houseboat, there's probably more usability if it stays in the South. In the North West, Wigan to Liverpool wouldn't stay magical forever, and the Bridgewater isn't magical to begin with. In the North East, there is a friendly community of boaters on the Aire and Calder, but then what? Adventures on the Ouse or the Trent? If I worked in London, I'd snap your hand off for a comfortable 3-bedroomed flat at that price! And for it to be a glorious old boat as well!
  25. Handy horse creep at Liverpool locks, if you haven't got a weed hatch. Photo credit as shown.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.