Jump to content

Bargebuilder

Member
  • Posts

    886
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    5

Bargebuilder last won the day on August 1 2021

Bargebuilder had the most liked content!

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    essex
  • Occupation
    retired
  • Boat Name
    zovare
  • Boat Location
    llangollen

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Bargebuilder's Achievements

Rising Star

Rising Star (8/12)

330

Reputation

  1. I've cruised the East coast for 25 years and lived aboard a barge in tidal waters, rising and falling 10 feet or so twice each day without issue, but we were in a mudberth with access to fairly solid ground. In your area, large tides are always around lunchtime or early afternoon, so don't coincide with the daily commute for most people and don't imped ones path across a salt marsh. Outside of marinas, pretty much everyone flushes their toilet directly into the sea, as there are no pump-out facilities that I am aware of within a day's sailing of Brightlingsea: a tiny minority use composting toilets. Liveaboards in marinas use marina toilets when convenient and sail out of the marina to pump out their holding tank into the sea. When using a sea toilet, your fresh water onboard lasts MUCH longer, but if on a swinging mooring, taking a large steel vessel into a marina for water when you need it will be nerve wracking, with very little room for manoeuvring amongst some very expensive plastic boats. There are local swinging moorings for a few hundred pounds a year, but you are responsible for your own ground tackle. There are even mudberths a mile's walk from the nearest car park for less than £100 a year, but neither are convenient or suitable for liveaboard use.
  2. You are absolutely correct, but those boats on the cut that have no concern for safety are likely the very ones that don't have BSCs. I'll bet that there are tens of thousands of coastal boats that wouldn't pass the BSS inspection if it were compulsory: no CO detectors, glass water separator bowls on the diesel filter, too much petrol carried in cans, hoses not to the correct standard etc. Yet no statistics showing that accident rates are higher than on the canals.
  3. That didn't stop our BSS examiner moaning about how it would take him more years to pay off the costs than he had left before he retired: I didn't ask the details.
  4. But if the percentage of boats on inland waterways that fail is applied to sea boats, then amongst sea boats one would expect huge numbers of undetected 'unsafe' boats and a proportionally higher number of accidents and deaths; are there? If there are not, then the BSS certificate doesn't seem to be making much difference. It would seem that prospective examiners are lured into the ridiculously expensive training process with an unrealistic expectation of a decent financial return.
  5. Indeed, but does it? The only 'control' experiment we have is to compare accidents in tested craft with those which are not tested.
  6. The shell of the boat certainly, but surely not the bits of the boat that the boat safety inspector is interested in. Coastal marina's are full of boats with affluent owners, but so are inland marinas, so both are likely to have well maintained boats. Even more coastal boats use swinging moorings or mud berths and are maintained on a tiny budget if at all, similar to many continuous inland cruisers. Can fresh water boat owners really be less well informed over safety matters or less willing to take responsibility for safety or even less affluent and able to pay for professionals to do the work than owners of coastal boats.
  7. I agree with your generalisations, but for the few that do it, living on a yacht in a coastal marina, on average costs a lot less than living on a narrowboat in an inland marina, if only because of the length difference. If you don't live aboard, you can get a mud berth or a swinging mooring for less than £150 per year and there is no annual licence fee or BSC to pay for either, so it can be a cheap hobby. With tens of thousands of sea boats costing less than 5k and very low running costs possible, there are many owners with minimal budgets, so perhaps 'safety' spending might be neglected. If the BSC was effective, I'd expect considerably more explosions, fires, CO poisonings on the tens of thousands of cheap coastal boats where inspections aren't required.
  8. Agreed, but the same could be said about salty boats. Are there fewer fires and CO deaths on inland boats than on salty boats?
  9. But do boats that have BSCs have a better safety record than ones that don't?
  10. My last BSS inspector operated my gas bubble detector, then sat drinking tea whilst asking me questions about my safety systems without looking for himself; useless! I have two boats, one salty, the other fresh and I am very happy that both are safe, even though only one of them has ever been inspected. Nobody seems to be able to produce any evidence that inland boats requiring BSCs suffer fewer accidents than the much more numerous salty boats that don't. There is plenty of evidence, however, that a lot of people make a lot of money out of the BSS gravy train.
  11. It's the latter for me and so far I've been lucky.
  12. My experience is from 30 years of coastal cruising, so I can't speak for river water, although I'd say canal water was more laden with organic matter than sea water. Sea water, however, gives a stunning display of phosphorescence if you flush in the dark!
  13. A bucket full of tap water and a long flush solves the problem.
  14. Because in the back of the U bend and in the pipes the environment soon becomes anaerobic. The organic matter in sea water gives off highly pungent gasses as it degrades in the absence of oxygen.
  15. Unless you live aboard and flush the toilet every day, even sea water, if left stagnant in the toilet's U bend for a week will start to smell, so a tap water flush prior to leaving the boat is essential.
×
×
  • 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.