Bargebuilder

It would be an excellent idea to watch a surveyor and ask questions as he/she progresses, but not many surveyors would welcome it!

There may be some surveyors that tear a boat apart to do a thorough job, but that's not my experience. There are lots of things and areas that don't get examined thoroughly and even hull thickness surveys will leave many thin patches missed. I'm not sure though, that a surveyor would overlook problems for a seller of a boat but highlight them to a buyer.

It would seem that many people don't trust a surveyors report unless they paid for it themselves. Is our opinion of the integrity of surveyors that low that they can be 'bought' by their employer to lie on their report?

When I lived on a boat, it was kept on a permanent mooring, so my wife and I could become part of a local community, join clubs and make long lasting friendships. I have no experience of continuous cruising, but I've always imagined that it could be quite a lonely existence, with only transient relationships, particularly if you live/cruise alone.

Don't worry, I didn't understand either. There is lots of talk about such on here, but what percentage of NBs have either? When I sold my barge, nobody who looked over her asked about RCD compliance and it was sold without the topic even having been mentioned. Do most buyers understand the system or even care?

And dry docking. I think that you might find that fully comprehensive insurance for a £200K plus boat is a lot more than £80.

It's almost 30 years since I've bothered with fully comprehensive insurance, and that includes when I lived in a brand new replica Dutch barge!

My boat fully complied with the requirements of the BSS on the day it was examined.

I do too, but I'm not convinced that the risk from other boats is great enough to justify insisting on multiple CO detectors in boats that don't burn any sort of fuel.

Quite. The BSS speaks of the necessity of protecting the boats occupants from the long term effects on health of low levels of CO that waft in through the window. So much so, that fully electric boats with no gas, petrol, diesel or solid fuel on board must have multiple CO detectors, depending on the number of 'rooms'. Despite the risk of other people's CO building up inside another boat is vanishingly small, we have to buy multiple detectors. The long term risk to health from the particulates in ones own exhaust is arguably higher, but no mention is made of that risk. This might be the top of a slippery slope, with the BSS getting increasingly involved in 'looking after' us.

My wife and I lived aboard for 4 years and although we had further to walk with the shopping, in other respects it wasn't hard work or an expensive way of life. We filled up the water tank every month, carried aboard a gas bottle every 4 months, emptied the toilet tank every 6 weeks or so and had one delivery of oil for heating each year. We were entirely off grid and survived on 1kw of solar panels and a wind turbine, needing to supplement with a diesel generator on a handful of occasions during the winter months. We eventually moved back into a house because I missed having a garden and I suppose the novelty of boat life wore off.

Not a swerve, just an addition, that diesel exhaust not only contains CO, but it is hazardous to health in other ways also. I've seen one chap who has rigged up a flexible hose from his cabin top exhaust to run over the stern of his NB to reduce his particulate intake; a sensible precaution perhaps.

Although not anywhere near as much CO as a poorly tuned petrol engine, diesel engines certainly could produce high enough concentrations of CO in a confined space to cause serious damage to health. I certainly wouldn't want to helm behind an exhaust outlet based on what Wikipedia says about diesel exhaust: "Diesel exhaust is a Group 1 carcinogen, which causes lung cancer and has a positive association with bladder cancer.[2][3][4][5][6] It contains several substances that are also listed individually as human carcinogens by the IARC.[7]" My digital CO alarm shows previous peak levels. They indicate levels (not life threatening) when we haven't been there (and it's not batteries sulphating) Don't you have solar panels that charge your batteries in your absence? My solar panels regularly register on my CO detector because they are very sensitive to Hydrogen. Even if your batteries don't gas off hydrogen, those on your neighbours boats may well.

I can think of two cases in marinas where the CO alarm alerted the occupant of CO from an external source I know of one case where the CO detector alerted the occupant of a malfunctioning battery charger in the boat next to him in the marina.

I couldn't agree more and like you, I too would shut the door, however, the BSS is supposedly protecting us from CO from other boats and I maintain that it is incredibly unlikely that CO would migrate across several metres of open air, pour, by then further diluted, into an open door and build up inside a cabin on another boat with its door wide open, in sufficient concentration to seriously damage the occupant. A CO detector may detect it, but that doesn't mean the occupant would be harmed. Think of all those traditional NB skippers who spend many hours every day just a few feet downwind of the diesel fumes coming from the vertical flue in front of them. Not as much CO as from a petrol engine perhaps, but up to 12% of the total exhausted. It's all a matter of dilution.

You may not like the smell, but I would be amazed if there has ever been a case of CO produced from a generator migrating across several metres of the great outdoors and into another boats window and poisoning its occupants.

You are right, I hadn't, probably because the chance of this happening is somewhere between vanishingly small and zero, tending towards the zero end. In common with most people, I'm all for CO detectors where there is actually a risk. Perhaps I should have one in the cockpit!

All accidents are incidents, but not all incidents are accidents.

I suppose that the boat owner and their guests are themselves visitors to the inland waterways, so would be included. The question is, has the BSS made a demonstrable difference to the number of accidents?

Is there any evidence that inland waterways boats are safer today than they were in 1995, and if so, can any such improvements be contributed to the BSS? We do have a 'control experiment' in that lumpy water boats have never been subject to this examination. Lots of people make money out of the scheme, examiners, their trainers, everyone employed in administration and possibly the CRT. We know that they all benefit, but do we?

I agree: my last two examinations lasted about 20 minutes, including lots of chatting. On several occasions, the examiners relied on my answers to their questions, rather than looking for themselves. We have a centre cockpit boat, the heater and cooker are in the forward cabin, but we were failed because we had no CO detector in the aft cabin which is separated by two metres of open air!

There is certainly a gravy train there I think. So the examiners, the trainers and the administrators all benefit from the scheme, but are inland waterway boats any less likely to suffer a catastrophe, or their crew less likely to be harmed than lumpy water boats?

The training scheme to become an examiner, I understand, is hugely expensive, so the trainers certainly benefit.

But Basic Boat are happy to insure lumpy water boats that don't have a BSS and for no additional premium.

I don't know if CRT benefit financially from the BSS system, but it has always seemed like a bit of a gravy train to me for little benefit to the boat owner. After all, lumpy water boaters, of which there are many, seem to cope very well in potentially a much more dangerous environment without one.