doratheexplorer

Can everyone stop recommending the midlands please!!! Next you'll be pointing out that journey times to London will be 50 minutes when HS2 comes, and then the midlands will be thoroughly ruined.

Isn’t white diesel just the same as red diesel but with no dye added?

"Move closer" by Syphilis Nelson?

Eww! You've just put me off my lunch! "We could be herpes, just for one day!" "I'm holding out for a herpes 'til the end of the night" along with the Double Pecker?

So going back to my original query. If you can store 30 litres of petrol on board you definitely don't have to go and collect more petrol everyday, which was what was begin said with a view to putting the OP off a petrol boat.

The OP is based in the West Midlands where these won't go. Would be a real shame to miss out on the nicest canals in the country for the sake of 2 feet. I'd go along with that. There are such things as 4 stroke outboards aren't there? Are there diesel outboards too?

3'9" draft sounds like a very different thing. aha! Does anyone have any real world experience of consumption on a canal from a typical small grp like a Norman 25?

What's 4 PoB? Remember the original poster is entirely new to this. It's helpful to avoid jargon and acronyms. You used the acronym WOT earlier, I have no clue what that means either. If you have a tender then that's not canal use, so not really the same thing. I'm picturing a little boat zipping across a harbour at full throttle.

Page 18 of the download is where the relevant stuff starts https://www.britishmarine.co.uk/Membership/Code-of-Practice

This page: https://www.boatshed.com/aboutus shows logo of trade bodies, including a British one. Would it be worth contacting them to find out whether Boatshed have breached their terms of membership? https://www.britishmarine.co.uk/Membership/Join-Us/Contact-Us

I've been a Prime member for years and I've always been delighted by it. I'm very disorganised and have lost count of the times I've made use of their free same day evening delivery option. I can order things at lunchtime and have it delivered in the evening when home from work. I can have it delivered to a locker or any of their click and collect places. Glitches do happen I'm sure but think how many orders are being dispatched each day. I personally wouldn't have a package delivered to a marina which closes at 7.30 when the delivery could be up to 10.00pm. I would go for the locker option or similar. I've often realised it was someones birthday and had a gift wrapped present sent to them on the day - thus earning lots of brownie points. Compare this to other online sellers who still use parcelforce. Turn up during the day with the only intention of leaving a card and making you queue up at a sorting office far away and specified hours only. No thanks! Oh, and Prime isn't £9.99 a month. It's £7.99 or £79 if you pay all at once. I probably save about £200 a year on delivery charges and then get tv, movies, books, music all for free.

Consider this: diesel inboard does bring a lot of benefits but this is reflected in the price. So for your budget, you may be able to get a nice, well looked after petrol outboard grp or a knackered diesel inboard grp which needs a lot of work. For the type of use you're proposing, I know which one I'd prefer. I genuinely don't know what fuel consumption a typical petrol outboard has, but I'd be surprised if it was more than a litre an hour when pushing the boat along at canal speeds. This means that if you turn up on your boat on a saturday morning and set off cruising for 5 hours a day, you'd run out on thursday night/friday morning. Typically little grp boats have a small 3-way fridge which will run off gas so all you need is a 100w panel which will charge a phone, laptop etc and run lights. I used to have a camper van and I bought a 100w solar kit off ebay for just over £100 and it included a regular and all leads. I just connected it straight to my battery and it gave me all the power I needed, much to the envy of other campers who kept having to run their engine to charge their batteries. Do you mind saying what your budget is?

I've always counted a Terrys Chocolate Orange as 2 of my 5 a day. 1. One for the cocoa beans. 2. One for the orange. I also think if you take a box of Cadbury Heroes and pour them out into a bowl, they can reasonably be classed as a salad.

Tom, you should tell us about your planned use: Liveaboard or recreation? Extended cruising or short trips? Home mooring? Electric shoreline? The responses above are making a lot of assumptions about how you want to use the boat, but we don't know yet. Lots of GRP boats are used recreationally from a home mooring and never do more than day trips (or the occassional overnight). If so, get a solar panel to keep your domestic battery topped up and you'll be fine. If your home mooring has mains electric then it's even easier. The charged up domestic battery will be fine for short trips. Bring a jerry can of petrol to the boat and top up the tank before setting off. The problem comes if you want to cruise for a few weeks at a time (or more). Solar will look after you from about March to October but not in winter. The easiest way to do it in winter is with a portable generator, but read up on the Carbon Monoxide risk with those and take precautions. Both the genny and the outboard will need petrol, and as has been said, that's not the easiest to find. Plenty of people manage though and there are apps now which will tell you where the petrol stations are. How much petrol does a 10hp outboard burn in an hour then?

Is the view of the forum that the Squirrel is best? Are there other alternatives?