enigmatic

I believe there are a couple of exceptions on the Great Ouse lodes due to local (parish level) bylaws but the rest of it technically permits sea toilets including sections like the Old West River which have the width and depth of a narrow canal and little flow (I assume none of the moorers there have sea toilets, otherwise the moorings would get really unpleasant) Odd that of all the rivers its these ones permitted really: they're far smaller and more frequently swum in than most and I doubt seagoing boats without black water tanks visit them often

I would assume they would handle towpath side moorings the same way they handle existing towpath side moorings (Waterside Moorings signs threatening £150 a day fines) Still, if as you suggest administering and maintaining moorings isn't a profit centre for CRT at current rates, they obviously need to charge more for them.

The other thing to take into account is what the bank is like. Even if you get all the relevant permissions to plonk a boat there, it's possible the water is too shallow to properly moor there, and having the right to moor doesn't mean you have the right to dredge or sort out the squidgy bank or build a little wooden jetty. IIRC there was a topic recently where someone did actually own some land and have mooring rights and they were still having trouble trying to make their mooring usable. Peak Forest is a lot better than, say, the Rochdale for actually being able to get near the bank, but I do remember some stretches where there were underwater obstructions on the towpath side that made it impractical to moor there, and I'm sure the off side will be worse.

That doesn't sound like a fun place to moor - As workboat moorings go I've seen worse, they seem to like mooring on lock landings and adjacent to bridge holes more than the average anti social boater. My favourite was the one right in the middle of the Rochdale (not their fault tbf, was necessary due to draft and the shape of the canal) which ended up with one of their staff members going on a half hour wild goose chase looking for the "adrift workboat" some well-intentioned member of the public had rung up about.

Money from them Plus if they're tasked with maintaining the canals to benefit their users, so if people asking about finding moorings on here are generally being advised "you'll never find a residential mooring in that area of the country. Maybe try bending rules instead" they're clearly failing in that respect I realise that local authorities have the final say too, and the CRT can't just pay them off with planning gain like housing developers, but they'd also generally be proposing something which doesn't involve permanent structures, is related to previous use of the land/water, is in out-of-the-way places and doesn't set any precedents for other developments.

Bloke at Portland Basin told me his access to the canals was a permanent agreement with the builders of the canal granting access for loading of coal and goods or "any other purpose", which was sufficiently broad for CRT to be unable to charge him for stuff like emptying and filling his dry dock

Some of the specific questions you might have here can only be answered by your surveyor, who should be willing to do this within reason as part of the service you paid for. Would have thought he can give you an opinion on new sacrificial strips (is it an imminent thing, a "next blacking" thing or a "maybe in another 5 or 10 years" thing?). They can probably also give you a subjective opinion on how good the overplating that's been done is, and whether the many bits of work done is a sign of thorough regular maintenance or patching stuff on the cheap. But it's insurable, has a thicker than average base plate, and if they're saying there's no cause for alarm, there probably isn't. And it seems like you were well aware that you weren't buying a premium boat and it's priced accordingly.

haha, I'll hold my hands up to that one, turns out my midnight beer maths is better than my midday about to have kids descend on my boat maths. 🤣 Did think the number looked wrong, but stupidly didnt spot that it added back to £2m instead of £20m Still, if CRT want to auction off towpath moorings the right to bridge hop at £666 the number of the beast there will be takers. Seems better than selling us the right to not have a mooring for more than twice as much as CRT is getting for actual moorers, anyway. I think you were also an order of magnitude out with your separate suggestion CCers use facilities 20-30x more than the average though. Even my bad posts don't fill Elsans with that much disproportionate amount of shit, and some CCers have amazing eco friendly composting toilets! Flip side of this is I suspect most CCers actually CC. And of the ones that don't I suspect the ones with the actual purchasing power aren't avoiding paying for an £800 end of garden mooring, they're unable to find a suitable mooring in their preferred area at all because waiting lists and wild London prices So the new charge wouldn't change their incentive to CM, but does possibly leave the cost-focused ones competing for cheap farm moorings up north with people that actually want to keep their leisure boat on a cheap farm mooring up north (tbf, CRT seem to be trying to close the 'ghost mooring' loophole, but if they haven't succeeded in clamping down on existing stricter rules ....). Meanwhile people who actually CC would pay more to the CRT than most people with home moorings, and the CRT still wouldn't have enough money because people voted to ensure the entire burden of cost increases fell on the seventh of waterways users that wasn't them... Crawling along in a box section metal tube sounds like the sort of thing only Prince Harry would like (he can pretend that the fishermen are Taliban). Probably best we don't invite him though, because if Meghan likes it as well we'll have the canals all filled in to universal public acclaim by 2024

You and your online neighbours don't get asked to pay the same amount as an entire marina with 6x the berths though! (I hope, anyway) This is good. We hear lots of talk about there not being enough moorings and advice to people to get a mooring before a boat especially if they expect to base themself near a certain city, so if CRT can sell more residential moorings in popular areas it's way of raising money that should actually make people happy!

It's not CRT's rationale for a 2.5x licence fee, but Alan's original post on the subject was "If we are looking for equality maybe the 5000 CCers would like to match the £8.1m paid (in addition to their licence fees) by boats with a home mooring". Since then he's added the NAA fees to our bill too. I just pointed out that what Alan's calcs actually suggested was that this would actually end up paying vastly more than the average home moorer contributed to the CRT coffers! For less entitlement. Actually amazed that, if correct, CRT is only getting an average of £66 per year extra for boaters with paid moorings Anyway, it doesn't really make much sense to charge services based on usage when most of the upkeep cost is fixed and heavy users don't have more purchasing power. If all us CCers went and got moorings to mostly stay on like Good Boaters Who Definitely Shouldn't Pay More, lock repair and waste disposal contracts and bridge maintenance would be almost exactly the same, and people would still need locks and Elsan points for their summer holiday. There's a much better argument for 1.5x ing 2x ing everyone's licence from the point of view of revenue raising than 2.5x ing the licence of the subset of boaters with the fewest entitlements. - Related tangent: if that £20m the CRT gets for NAA agreements comes with strings attached to restrict CRT's ability to sell competing moorings in the area (potentially residential ones for £2k+, which I'm sure would be an excellent revenue source in some parts of the country with more demand for moorings than moorings) which I think it does, they've seriously underpriced it at £10m revenue for tens of thousands of boats...

That wasn't my question though. My question was why the hell 5000 boats should be expected to pay the same total amount as much as 30000 boats? That's like concluding villagers should be moved up to the top council tax band because the neighbouring town 6x the size has more taxpayers HMs, by your calculations, contribute £66 per boat more than CCers to CRT coffers for their moorings, which I must admit is a lot less than I thought it would be (and strongly suggests that they're not making nearly as much as they should from NAA agreements). Quite happy to pay the CRT an extra £66, especially if I get a mooring with it! Fair's fair, innit.

Why don't the 30,000 people pay more then, bearing in mind they get more and collectively (and probably on average) they definitely have more money? Think we should get even bigger discounts if we save the locks from hire boat damage and the need to organise volockies by breasting up in front of places like Grindley Brook, and instead of overburdening CRT facilities, exclusively dispose of our rubbish in facilities open to non-license payers like towpath bins and the BCN, and help regenerate banks with our composting toilets

Why would the 5000 CCers need to pay as much as the 30000 non CCers? Meet in the middle: how about we pay the average £270 (obviously an underestimate, but it's yours!) per boat difference and get the benefit of a mooring of our choice and the right to bridge hop if we fancy a month or two's holiday in the most congested parts of the network?!

tbh I seem to remember it being a relatively good towpath last time I moored there! I realise there's other stuff like local funding to consider, but odd priorities