doratheexplorer

If CRT aren't satisfied then they'll take action, following warnings. In that situation my sympathy is much reduced. As I keep saying, my beef is when CRT ARE satisfied, but other boaters aren't. Using meaningless phrases like 'bending the rules'. As I said before, this plays directly into CRT's hands - keep boaters squabbling amongst themselves and they'll never get anywhere, since they'll have no unified voice.

There you go, I've corrected you where you were wrong. Fact is, there's a problem in London with boat numbers. Responsibility for this should be laid right at the door of our current and previous governments since the 1980s who have utterly failed to get a grip of a broken housing market. This will only get worse unless something very drastic is done now. There's no such thing as 'bending the rules'. People are either following the rules or they aren't.

Hear Hear!!

https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/media/original/633-guidance-for-boaters-without-a-home-mooring.pdf?v=09041e

You're confusing the guidelines with the waterways act

Seems like it's you who isn't reading clearly. I'm not talking about people who are being chased by CRT. I'm talking about people who CRT have no problem with, but boaters still think it ok to critisize. We have people on this thread saying nonsense about not being able to cc with a permanent job. Others clearly thinking you should be cruising all over the country. I stand by what I've said.

I'm still waiting to here what harm is being done by people who follow the guidance and no more. It feels like a divide and rule situation. If a boater is clearly failing to meet the requirements, then fair enough, have a go at them; but to snipe away online about boaters who DO follow the rules but not to the specific approval of self-appointed moral artibers, well that's pretty poor in my opinion. As boaters, 99% of the time we all want the same things. We'd be far more likely to get those things if we combine out voices, than spend our time critisizing each other.

The point is, if our legal system considered that people keeping to the 'spirit' of the law were sufficient, then the speed limit would be sufficient, and there would be no need for other laws on dangerous driving, driving without due care etc... The fact is, the law recognises the potential harm caused by dangerous driving so, it deals with it. Cruising about within a fairly small area harms nobody, so there's no other legislation to deal with it. So the spirit of the law, or of the licence is a myth. It's just people wanting everybody to agree with them. . In 1995?

It isn't because there are other laws regarding dangerous driving etc. Which things? Again, there are other laws regarding sanitation, odour nuisance etc. so no good as an analogy.

If it were true that the intention that we either have a mooring or travelled all over the system, then the waterways act would have said that. It doesn't. All this stuff about the spirit of the act is a red herring. There's no spirit of the act. You are either on the right side of it or you aren't. Simple.

That may be true but the guidelines, the waterways act and the licence T&Cs don't say anything about travelling round the system. I'm told the the CRT guidelines used to say something about it but they had to change it, because it was balls!

I get that, but some people seem to think they should be moving far more than the guidelines say. Those lot at the IWA included.

Seems that for many, the spirit of a licence or the spirit of being a boater is everyone doing exactly the same thing as them. If someone wants to cc around Solihull and they meet the minimum requirements set by CRT, then what harm are they doing? And why would anyone else care? TBH I'm sick of hearing this nonsense from other boaters saying stuff like you have to be convering the whole canal network, and "I use £45 of diesel a week/day/hour". It's always men, and it looks a lot like willy waving. Why would people be competitive about how far they move, or how much diesel they burn?

My comment was partly in response to this: "Initial plan was to go up via the Macclesfield but the Marple Lock stoppage has meant I'll need to go the longer way around." I was just pointing out the neither the Trent nor the Ship Canal were necessary alternatives.

Do they have some system to stop people using the car park then?

Do you mean the whole place or just the clubhouse/bar?

There are easier ways to by-pass Marple Locks than going via the ship canal. From down south, you could go: GU, North Oxford, T&M, Bridgwater, then into Manchester and choose between the HNC and the Rochdale. In fact, I'd think this might be marginally quicker than going via the Macclesfield.

Crikey! A pretty standard spec boat, overplated, in Yorkshire, odd layout...£33,000!!!!! 10 years ago they'd have been lucky to get £15-20k for that.

Including Birmingham and the Black Country, the population is about a quarter of London. There are also more canals than in London. But even more important is that cheap housing is far easier to find in the Birmingham area than it is in London. The stark truth is that continuous cruising is arguably the cheapest housing option in London, but that's far from being true in Birmingham. The cost of renting or buying property in London is so high that many people simply have no option other than to look at things like boats. In Birmingham the cheapest way for a young person to live is to rent a room in a shared house, or be a lodger. That's not true in London. So there's pretty much no prospect of Birmingham becoming like London. If you have no interest in boating, you're unlikely to become a cc'er in Birmingham but you might well do in London.

This isn't even remotely true. There must be hundreds of miles of canal within a commutable distance of Solihull. There are numerous continuous cruisers around the Birminghama area, with permanent jobs, not causing any concern to CRT.

Horses for courses. Manually inflating jackets are largely pointless on canals. Self-inflating or good old fashioned foam ones are much more useful. The risk of falling into a lock and hitting your head is real.

Sounds fair. Not much dinghy sailing on the canals though.

"A life jacket should keep someone afloat even if they are unconscious and should have a collar designed to keep the person’s face clear of the water." From:https://www.getoutwiththekids.co.uk/water/buoyancy-aids-or-life-jackets/ In the case of canal boating, the only benefit of a manual "lifejacket" over a buoyancy aid is for non-swimming adults. However, since the canal is mainly shallow enough to stand in, that's a dubious benefit. For children, auto-inflate lifejackets or old fashioned foam type ones are needed. For adults, the biggest risk by far is banging your head on the way down and lying unconcious face-down. So I'm struggling to think of a scenario where a manual inflation system is ever appropriate on the canals.

Then I don't consider them to be proper lifejackets, and I wouldn't recommend boaters use them.

Not sure what you mean there. If it doesn't save you when you fall in unconcious, then it's a buoyancy aid, not a life jacket. That includes anything manually inflated.