Carrera

Yes - but why would you? Most birds will eat bread just as most kids will eat crisps. The point is that there is very little food value for birds in bread and whilst it won't do them any harm of itself, a bird with a stomach full of waterlogged bread has no appetitie left for nutritious food and nowhere left to put it. If you want to feed the ducks (or swans, or geese or whatever) give them seeds, peas, sweetcorn etc. Would you feed your children or grandchildren a diet of crisps and expect them to thrive? A large bag of peas from a supermarket is pretty cheap. Throw the ducks a handful and they'll love it. And the warm glow you get from feeding them will be compounded by knowing that you're actually helping them rather than just gratifying yourself.

It makes me laugh when people attack the metric system by saying they prefer 'English' measurements. Do you buy fuel for your boat in groats? No - thought not. At school I learned both systems but when I joined the Army at the age of 15 in 1962 (Junior Leaders Regiment Royal Engineers) at Shorncliffe I soon found that about the only thing that was not metricated was our pay. I have used metric measurements ever since, and when someone mentions a measurement in imperial I have to do a mental calculation to appreciate its value. I fervently wish that we would adopt the metric system in its entirety - the mish-mash of both is a nonsense, as NASA found out to their cost; they have to contract out almost everything they do to private companies and on one of their Mars probes the navigation programming was contracted to one company but the entry and descent programming to another. Nobody noticed that one had worked in miles and the other in kilometers; several million dollars worth of space probe, having travelled for nine months through space to arrive at Mars was switched by mission control from its space navigation program to the atmospheric entry and descent program, and was just thinking to itself 'Right - time to deploy my parachute' when it slammed into the Martian surface at something like 17,000 kilometres per hour! (Thats 10,563.31 miles per hour for those of you with a nostalgic disposition!) I'm pretty certain that a lot of the opposition to the metric system is basically an expression of low-level xenophobia which is ironic because it was pretty much invented by an Englishman; John Wilkins, the first Secretary of the Royal Society, set out the principles in 1668. In true English fashion the powers that be looked at it, said, 'hmm - very interesting' and did nothing about it. It then languished for some 150 years before being utilised by the French during the revolution. But then we're good at that; we developed a very good all-round weapon for the Army made entirely of fibre and then gave the patents to the Americans for a song. Only a couple of years later we had to pay through the nose to buy the weapons from the Yanks for our special forces, who thought the Armalite a very fine piece of kit. And don't forget the swing-wing jet, an invention of Barnes Wallace who was laughed out of the door by the Air Ministry when he showed them the concept. Someone remind me how much we pay the Americans for those jet fighters for the RAF - a figure of £35 million each springs to mind? Moral - don't disparage your own countries inventions; the resulting egg-on-face can be expensive...

Every once in a while the gene pool needs a little chlorine... Sorry, but I have very little sympathy for rank stupidity; the fact that the boy was only thirteen is irrelevant unless he was mentally handicapped, in which case he shouldn't have been without an adult minder. Any thirteen year-old of normal intelligence can work out the simple formula 'immersion in water + inability to swim = disaster'.

I think common sense would dictate that this is not OK at all. The boat's location may be a public place, but the boat itself is clearly not a public place. Directly analagous is the notion of someone taking a photograph of a street scene which includes your house; that is entirely different to walking up to said house and photographing the occupants through the window.

Oh I'm already afloat, though perhaps not in the sense you mean. I've been sailing racing dinghies since I was seven years old (I'll be sixty-nine next week) and I also have a 42ft Bavaria sailing cruiser in Brighton marina from which I took my screen name on this forum. But helping with the canal clearance will be something to do in the off season, and it will also help with restoring some wildlife habitat which also interests me - I'm an avid birdwatcher!

Some of you might recognise the name from the 'Stolen Boat' thread. I saw a link to it on Facebook, wondered how in hell something as big as a narrowboat in the restricted environment of the canal network could disappear, and visited the forum to follow the story. After a day or two it occurred to me that the 'guest' continually on the forum might be taken to be the thief, so I joined the forum to reassure you all... I did say in my original post that once the stolen boat situation was resolved I'd leave the forum as I had nothing to contribute. BUT - in my meanderings around the internet I wondered where the nearest canal to my home in Brighton might be - and found that the Wey and Arun canal Trust offer narrowboat cruises, with cream tea provided. So I and the management climbed into the Landy and headed for Loxwood to partake. And a very enjoyable time we had too. So - the upshot is that I have joined said Wey and Arun Canal Trust and shall be reducing my excess avoirdupois helping to clear some of this old waterway. At present the Trust has only a few pounds open to boats, but has ambitions to restore the entire waterway from the River Wey near Guildford to the River Arun which runs to the sea near Arundel; it was originally meant as an alternative route from London to the sea to avoid the French fleet back in the 17th Century. So instead of my original intention to sign off you'll see me sticking around here for a while. If I live long enough, I might even see some of you boating down a stretch of canal that I helped to clear. I'd quite like that.

Perhaps the answer to 'why did the thief choose such an identifiable boat' is no more complicated than him not being a narrowboater. To him, a narrowboat is a large but easily moveable object with considerable value. I'm not a narrowboater either, and had I seen this boat on the water it would not have occurred to me that it was distinctive in any way; I suspect the thing I would have noticed most about any boat would be the name, and in his eyes the fact that there was none on this particular craft might have made it seem handily anonymous, whereas it seems that in practice the opposite is the case. He had the misfortune to steal a boat that has unusual design features that would stand out to anybody in the narrowboat fraternity; it that is indeed the case then he has been caught out by his own ignorance.

A cheap shot Sir, very cheap. I don't know you, but I'll assume that it is unworthy of you. Just a thought. There have been a few calls for Chris and Graham to come on here and tell all, and the speculation is that they have been told to say nothing by the Police. I think that is probably the case, but there is another possibility; that their pride and joy has been comprehensively trashed and they are far too upset to talk about it. As I said, I think it more likely that the 'police' answer is the correct one but on the offchance that it isn't, perhaps they should be given the space to reply in their own time?

Hopefully we'll soon hear from the owners as to the state of the boat - I do hope it hasn't been trashed inside. And I know from personal experience how a burglary can leave one feeling that one's home isn't the same any more - hopefully they won't be left with the same feeling about their boat.

Which itself is odd, unless of course they have been looking at this forum and realised that the finger of suspicion had fallen on the boat. But it raises another question - who did the signwriting and where? Signwriting is a real skill and not easy to acquire. Someone posted a while back that the sign looked to be a professional job and the response was that it could well be vinyl graphics which can be made anywhere and take little to no skill to apply - but if that was the case, why paint it out? It would be quicker and easier to just peel it off. Or have the police painted out the name for their own purposes?

One further question; why is someone on the canalside who admires your boat and asks a few apparently innocent questions called 'a gongoozler'? It sounds very dismissive and mildly insulting. Do you not want others to take an interest in your passion?

If this is indeed the stolen boat, and Chris and Graham get it back undamaged apart from the changed paintwork, then I'm delighted for them. In reply to Trundler, who posted, I'd say that as previously mentioned I don't have a narrowboat and have never been on one; however, looking in from the outside I would imagine that it is s very stress-free and relaxing way of life (please correct me if I'm wrong!) I would also imagine that this is a huge part of why you all do it, and that relaxed, care-free atmosphere militates against having to guard one's comments when talking to strangers. Why would anybody in that frame of mind assume evil intent on the part of someone asking apparently innocent questions which give you the chance to share your enthusiasm? What this illustrates is that none of us, whatever our involvement in boating or any other activity, can afford to be as relaxed and unguarded as we should like to be. I'm a dinghy sailor and I can tell you that boats are stolen from sailing club compounds all the time. Although there are a very large number of dinghies around, they all belong to one class or another, and the classes are much smaller and the active participants generally know each other from open meetings etc; in addition, they are all identified by a sail number which is also usually permanently carved or moulded into the hull so the majority of stolen boats are identified and recovered, although not always in the condition in which they were removed. When I'm sailing I get frequent questions from passers-by about my boat; how pretty it is, why doesn't it fall over by itself, etc, etc. I answer all these in good spirit assuming that they are the innocent questions of someone whose attention has been caught temporarily; sometimes this leads to me taking them out for a sail, and once or twice that someone has become hooked and discovered a new interest in their life. Its all good. I can't believe other than Chris and Graham being of exactly the same mind. Narrowrboats don't have the same regulated identity as sailing dinghies, but perhaps they should. Also, in order to help retain the relaxed atmosphere, perhaps owners of these (presumably) expensive boats should consider more sophisticated security than a yale lock or padlock. I think if I owned such a boat I would have a transponder fitted and hidden within its structure so it could be located at all times (thought: don't narrowboat hire companies do this already? I'd be amazed if the answer is no). I might also consider the idea of a couple of fibre-optic cameras, one facing forward from the front of the accommodation to show where it is going and one at the rear of the accommodation so as to give a picture of who is at the helm. These might cost a bit of money to install, but the sum would be insignificant compared to the cost of replacing a much-loved craft. Lastly, I'd like to congratulate you. This forum has shown the best of what a community can do, even if it turns out that the boat was not recovered due to the activity here. The network you have created would have found it eventually I'm sure, and its great to see that such a diverse bunch of people put themselves out to achieve a a common goal.

I hope I have! For sure, they can run, but they can't hide forever!

Hi all, I know this isn't the place to introduce oneself under normal circumstances, but... I don't have a canal boat and don't think I've ever been on one either. I'm a dinghy sailor who saw a link to this thread on Facebook and have been following it avidly ever since; with all respect to the owners of the missing boat, it's addictive! After all, it is fascinating how 50 feet of steel boat can disappear so effectively! But I have noticed the little bit at the bottom of the page which shows' xx users are reading this topic; xx members, xx guests, xx anonymous users. I strongly suspect that when it says ' 1 anonymous user', that has been me, so I thought I should register and explain before someone else gets the wrong idea! Chris and Graham, I do hope you get your boat back very soon, and undamaged as well. I'll continue to follow the saga on a daily basis and am only sorry that there is no water local to me that might need checking. But I am also an avid birdwatcher and I do travel a bit, quite frequently to areas with rivers, canals etc, so having made a drawing of the window layout etc to take with me I'll add my eyes and binoculars to the search. When the saga draws to a close as sooner or later it must, I'll log off and leave you all to your peaceful traversing of the nation's inland waterways...