Michael Donning

There's a site which archives many sites. In that archive there's still a copy of the firstmateguides site: https://web.archive.org/web/20181102231509/http://firstmateguides.co.uk/

We did the trip this summer (but not from Chirk Marina). Llangollen is "right around the corner" from your start point. It'll be around 3h from the marina to Llangollen basin. For me the most "challenging" part was going "upstream" in the chirk tunnel. But you'll only do that on the end of your trip when returning to the marina. The only challenging part on that tunnel also is that you're going unexpectedly slow and that you might notice that your boat is pointing a bit sideways while going straight. You will pass the moorings on Froncysyllte (before the aqueduct) maybe half an hour after you have started. So I doubt that you already want to already moor just then. In Trevor, there are a few (I think 2) moorings to the right just after the footbridge across the Telford Inn (those are not available on friday-saturday I think...). There also a few more (I think 3) moordings when you continue into the Basin passing under Bridge 29W. But be prepared that you'll have to wind back there. Actually we met some boaters who told us that they forgot to turn left to Llangollen after the aqueduct and ended up in the Trevor Basin where they moored right away. For visiting the aqueduct and Trevor/Trefor we moored at bridge 34W on our way back from Llangollen. That is a wonderful place IMHO. It is not the closest mooring the the Aqueduct though. From there you have multiple options to walk to the Aqueduct/Trevor: via the towpath, via a previous railway line (map recommended) or down the hill via a road (passing the "Pont Cysyllte" road bridge). Like many here already said. I don't see any problems when you go to Llangollen first. Just go slow when you're unsure. The slower you go, the faster you can stop.

Much of that information (shops, pubs, etc.) is already available in the Openstreetmap project. I think I remember that the author of the Open Canal Map had some discussion with the OSM guys about the project name (I don't know how it turned out). Anyway it could as well be added separately to the OCM. By the way, I forgot to add the proper disclaimer about my map source. Here it is: Map Data: © OpenStreetMap-Contributors, SRTM | Map display: © OpenTopoMap (CC-BY-SA)

We actually fetched some Welsh Oaties from Gerrards bakery (I think) in Llangollen. Butchers weren't a topic as our family of five had only one meat eater which wan't interested in doing his own shopping. But if certain butchers and/or bakeries are recommended here for those locations then I can update the maps at a later time.

Hi all! We did a 2 weeks hireboat trip in mid July to Llangollen + Chester. One thing that I didn't expect to happen so often was shopping for food. But we had 3 constantly growing teens in the crew which ate us out of boat and home. Another reason may've been also that we arrived (from Germany) by plane. So we did only some essential food shopping before getting afloat on our Snowmane of Chas Hardern Boats. Considering that. I thought that it might be helpful to post some notes and maps on the topic food shopping for other canal visitors. Generally, I propose that you bring a backpack or just any other convient bags (i.e. IKEA bags) for shopping. This depends also on how many hands you have to carry the food (count only one hand for each teen as the other is constantly occupied by the phone). The footpaths which I marked on the maps are often NOT quite suitable for anything with wheels. Nantwich (Shopshire Union Canal): Ok, Nantwich is off topic. But I'll add it anyway as it is quite close to the Hurleston Locks/Llangollen Canal and we actually DID do shopping there. We had to search quite a bit for a mooring spot here. The town seems to be popular. At least in summer and on a saturday. Our walk went through a quiet residential area where we spotted at least 4 cats ? and then through the park along the River Weaver. Wrenbury: There's a SPAR at Wrenbury. Despite its small size you find nearly everything in there. We took the public footpath across a field from liftbridge 19 which (officially) crosses a graveyard. For me, this little village resembles somehow a location of the Midsomer Murders tv series. Whitchurch: You might have to fiddle a bit with the winding holes when coming from north. The footpath follows the former continuation of the Whitchurch Arm. Therefore you avoid any steep climbs. ? Quite a walk but not boring. Ellesmere: You'll find the Tesco right at the end of the Ellesmere Arm. But it can be difficult to find a mooring spot here in the summer. You may consider mooring on the Llangollen outside the Arm. The walk isn't far anyway. I'll skip Chirk. We saw on the map that you could moor up right after the Chirk Tunnel (North side) and walk to a SPAR. But surprisingly we spared this one. Llangollen: In Llangollen, you moor along the canal or in the marina. In any case, if you stay longer than 4 hours then you have to pay a fee of 6£ per day. For this, you'll get water and shore line (if you brought a 16A, "blue", camping type cable, I think) at each mooring spot. I marked the Llangollen Wharf where you can obtain the ticket or ice cream or narrowboat themed towels.... The horse drawn boats also start there. Obviously, there are some shopping opportunities in Llangollen. We found the walk along the river Dee to get to the ALDI actually quite pleasant.

CanalPlan already allows to set inidividual speeds for different waterway types and locks/swing bridges in the preferences. But using "realistic" average times would nevertheless be interesting. Especially if the "season" and the individual "profile" would be taken into account. This might give a better impression about travel times on very popular canals. (Like the Llangollen in Summer Holidays) including wait times at locks. If inidividual travel times/gps will be collected it might be very important to let the user tell the app if it is mooring (filling up water, eating, etc.) or just standing by for a lock becoming available. In my very limited personal experience as a hireboater on the GU I also found that the default travel times of canalplan ac were a bit optimistic. 3 1/4 mp/h average on a "broad" canal weren't achievable. Our trusty narrowboat became uncomfortable when getting above 3.5/3.6 mph (also the wash then often began to show). And on a big percentage of the canal we had to travel anyway on tickover (which was around 1,5 to 2,0 mph) because of mooring boats or we had to slow down because of bridges/tunnels/narrow bends etc. (I read those speeds using the "OruxMaps" app)

I've seen in their forum that CanalPlan can also deliver JSON-Files. But basically, that makes no difference. I still don't see the point of the moving camera. Either you are using the map while on the canal then the camera might just follow the GPS. Or you are mooring/at home then you can manually scroll the map on which the route is displayed. Route planning is tedious to implement. So it is a good idea to query CanalPlan for that as long as you keep the last route stored. Just have an interface to add the waypoints for the route query (from/to maybe stopovers like: From "here" (=GPS) to "winding hole" to "home marina"). The queried data will be sufficient to display nice lists with distances and travel times (with a filter for mooring/winding holes/locks/junctions etc.).

The journey time in my little tool is based on the CanalPlan journey time intervals included in their CSV export. Just added up. (People can customize these on the CanalPlan site AFAIR).

Sorry, i noticed that my screenshots were far to big. Editing wasn't possible, so here's another post with smaller images:

I hacked together a little route planner for our journey last year. It was basically a web site which ran locally on android (within the firefox browser). It used downloaded CSV data from CanalPlanAC (converted to JSON). The "logic" was done in Javascript using the "Leaflet" library and some previoisly downloaded map tiles. If it is of any use I can pack the thing together and provide it to the developer. (in its current form it was basically limited to the GU and some "sidearms")

Thank you, Paul. I'll try the directional stability force (might take a time). But I fear that it will just interfere in a bad way with my lift/draft force model. I am aware that the latter is just a very rough approximation to the real thing. The implementation of propwalk is planned. Bank effect, not planned, yet. By the way: I've read that the Coandă-effect is one of the factors which is responsible for bowthrusters becoming pretty much useless on speeds above 5kts (= ca. 5.8mph). But narrowboats don't travel at this speed (at least on canals).

Yes, I use a (quite limited) physics model in the game. There's a basic phyics engine which handles weight/gravity, inertia and forces. On top of that I add a simple 4-area buoyancy calculation and a multi-point approximated lift/draft calculation. Multi-point because opposed to an aircraft wing profile a narrowboat often moves in different directions on different positions of the boat. My much simplified model therefore wouldn't cover the effect of speed on the bowthruster. For now, I just degrade the applied force depending on the forward speed... and I added an overheating turn-off after 10secs of use. The attached image shows the draft/lift vectors of my model while turning.

Sure, I could simply display a black screen for some seconds. Would not be much different than simulating the effect of a bottle of wine on the helmsman (consumption, not the other).

Thank you. That helps much. I won't ask people for reasons why the use the bowthruster at a specific speed. I just want to be sure to simulate the correct effect (= nil ) when somebody tries it out.