enigmatic

It also follows the good practice of Nigerian Princesses by having no personalization (it addresses you as "Hello,") I filled in the survey anyway. If I'm not going to get any support allowance, I might as well aim to get paid to complain about it for 80 mins Funnily enough, the survey includes this question

As the token person who's actually deployed one in a narrowboat emergency (started going backwards at 2000 revs heading upstream on the Thames, which turned out to be a drive plate failure), I'd say yes they're definitely useful. You do actually have more time than you mightk think, but better to use that to try to restore drive or see if you can glide into a bank than trying to move an anchor and attach it to something I did have a bit of a scare right above Beeston Lock weir on the Trent recently too (must have just been something caught on the prop) but managed to use the little bit of steering I had to get close enough to the lock landing to chuck a line ashore to a helpful boater. would definitely pick that over testing the anchor's holding power in front of a weir if you have the choice (Credit to the boatyard for deploying the safety boat pretty darn quickly as well, even though it turned out to be unnecessary)

61 sounds like a younger than average narrowboater

Big fan of the seals. Great addition

Lots of moorings in Wigan which isnt exactly a destination town, IIRC that's the pound with banks that are much higher and less convenient than it looks, just round the corner moorings that people actually use. Nice rural moorings either side too. I assume lots of people are avoiding Pennine canals this summer because of the many many closures...

The Thames (with the exception of Reading) has hideous prices you won't pay many other places on the network

Blocking a signal or smashing a device is a lot easier than plausibly spoofing a signal...

If you can prove a boat wasn't there (or that it was an approx 20ft cruiser, not an approx 50ft narrowboat) on one or two cases you've proved they've faked the data. You can probably get that far with free Copernicus data, and CRT probably know who in their enforcement process is obviously lying for a whole bunch of other reasons, like regular complaints about that boat mooring on a service point and faking a progressive journey through places you've never been past enforcement officers and bookable structures you're unaware of being really hard... Faking data well is a lot harder than ringing up with an excuse, and a lot harder to defend in court than "honestly, when I told them that I went all the way to Hungerford that month I was just confusing it with another month"

I agree with this bit Chuck a wad of cash in my direction and I'll throw in a lawyer who can prove if a boat was or wasn't where the photo claims it was using satellite imagery (reason number 99 why spoofing wouldn't work if CRT were remotely suspicious) and lessons learned from hideously expensive and ludicrously simple apps used in fishing regulation...

Sure, my point was that coming up with a digital chain of custody solution for CRT isn't really a hobby project like a photolog is, and Andy Russell signwriting isn't optimised for OCR! And whilst the components may just be libraries stitched together, anybody that pitches CRT a custom app to save them the job of hiring several enforcement officers for less than £xxx,xxx per annum is underselling themselves, and has vastly underestimated the number of meetings they'll have to sit through to deliver it

I did actually meet a couple of Irish chaps whose job was to surreptitiously attach transponders to trucks they suspected were carrying cargo places it shouldn't be taken. A lot of the time they just chucked a cheap mobile phone in the back I got StableDiffusion to draw me some narrowboats recently It's stopped weirdly fusing them with narrowbodied aircraft, but the results still aren't going to pass for actual narrowboats, never mind NB Kingfisher near Bridge 34 on the Popular and Busy Canal, what3words location boat.wasn't.there I think once OCR and digital chain-of-custody is introduced into the app it becomes a £xxx,xxx per annum contracted thing licensed to CRT rather than an interesting side project! Not sure how good OCR is at handling number plates at oblique angles through windows or fancy signwriting either

If you're determined to fake the geotags for your images you can do it with images imported individually as well as in bulk. If I import 500 pictures of my boat with accurate EXIF data in different locations (which also overlap with where CRT thinks I was), the chances of that being down to me being a Photoshop wizard are pretty slim I can't imagine images of someone else's boats in completely different parts of the system from the ones their enforcement team recorded you in being a more successful strategy than excuses, never mind enough to warrant a black market. If you've obviously faked cruising, that'd make court enforcement more of a rubber stamp process too...

Is it any good on surface scratches that T-cut doesn't do enough for?

This is a really good idea One thing I considered building for myself was a little map that showed places I'd been on the waterways. The ability to generate that from image location tags would be really cool (as would the ability to export the data in a format that could be embedded on a web page) Can also imagine the IWA liking the idea of people recording their Silver Propeller destinations on an app that encouraged them to visit more, and they do of course have a few members to suggest apps to! - @Tasemu does your app have the [planned] ability to bulk upload photos selected from the phone's album I'd be interested in seeing/testing the results of that for the last 3 years (though my cruising days will be coming to an end shortly, so not sure how much help I'll be long term)

They'd be even more upset by his lack of lifejacket! I wonder if modern volockiess respond to "Abracadabra, Superglue, open the gates and let us through!" I prefer the Peppa Pig solution of pushing one lock gate and the one on the far side other automatically opening or closing with it. Need the CRT to install some of them

Never mind Rosie and Jim and Peppa Pig, Alan Partridge was written by someone who truly understood boating, which is why he talks about toilets...

yeah. That's a limit to how long you can stay in a general area (CRT have had that interpretation upheld in court) whilst still considered to be cruising, so it doesn't even imply that CRT need to permit 14 day [free] moorings on any individual site, never mind every section of towpath. in practice, CRT allows 14 days free mooring for all boaters in most places and it really wouldn't be in their interests to change that, but as far as I can see that's completely permissive including for continuous cruisers; closest thing we've got to a legal basis for assuming the right to free 14 day towpath moorings is the "contract"...

It's the Northampton Arm, it's narrow, ultra shallow, only used by boaters with Gold Licences and the weeds do go all across. I saw three boats on the flight when I was doing it, and thought that was as busy as I've seen it! (plus the guy moored between 14 and 15 people are complaining about who did, tbf, check that it was weeds and not depth that was meaning I was struggling to pass him) The weeds are mostly soft stuff that can actually be removed with bare hands as well as anything remotely sharp (but also accumulates so slowly and layers itself so putting it into reverse doesn't do much). Your prop still rotates, but sometimes it's better not to have to rev like you're on a river to achieve tickover speed. Nothing like as bad as the Middle Level last year though..

Weird that all these people are paying for the right not to move, on a variable scale based on the attractiveness of the location of the mooring and any facilities it may be associated with and whether they're allowed to live there, when according to your own arguments they have the legal right nominate any place a boat may be lawfully kept they like and then spend the rest of the year living on their favourite 2 day visitor mooring or water point. Even weirder that they're paying this money for a space CRT apparently is powerless to stop me mooring at and preventing them from using! The 1995 Act makes it quite clear that mooring in a particular location is definitely amongst the things BW/CRT may exercise control over and levy charges for and determine which boats may use. Nothing in the 1995 Act suggests that can't include visitor moorings in popular places on their waters (or unpopular places if it sees fit!) Why are you assuming the 1995 Act (and all post-1962 Acts) were passed purely for the "power" of British Waterways, which was a public benefit entity? The Act granted BW land access rights to banks it didn't own and oversight of mooring structures attached to land it didn't own which was a pretty big clarification in its favour, it tweaked the 1971 regulations granting pleasure boats the right to navigate somewhat in boaters' favour not least by permitting "continuous cruising", it classified the River Weaver. But it did absolutely nothing to give boaters a statutory right to moor free of charge in any particular place, least of all a place with a sign indicating a time limit and a charge for exceeding that

There are obviously well established legal principles that moorings are facilities that can be restricted and charged for; indeed that's implicit in the 1995 Act as well as the thousands of boaters paying mooring fees to moor on a particular spot, some of them towpath-side online moorings managed by CRT. If the Act was intended to have the effect of making the towpath to be a free-for-all for license payers, references to places boats may be lawfully kept or cruising patterns would be superfluous. The fact that statutory conditions to grant licences exist (both framed in ways which gives the Board substantial freedom to not be satisfied that the boat is making a continuous journey or availing itself of a place where the boat may be lawfully kept if they persistently moor where signs indicate they should not be moored...) doesn't mean that the CRT has no power to levy other charges or restrictions on the use of its facilities. Nor can it be argued (successfully) that the "the 95 act in regards of licensing makes the 62 act superceded" (which sounds suspiciously like arguing that it abolished the quoted bit granting them the right to set conditions or charges to me...) as the Act is quite specific about which parts of which Acts it did supersede, and updating the 1971 licensing conditions did not in any way affect their ability to restrict or charge for other services, including mooring.

It can indeed be argued, but you have no reason to believe that your argument will succeed. There is no legal reason to believe that CRT's right to set charges and conditions for the use of their facilities is bound to how much they pay to maintain them. I'm glad you have now accepted that your claim that the 1995 Act abolished the right to set any conditions on waterways use or charge for services was incorrect though.

Yep. Or to put it another way, when the 1995 Act introduced a licence requirement and charge which you were obliged to pay regardless of how much or how little you used their facilities, I don't think the intention was to abolish all other rules and charges so licence-holders could self-operate the Anderton Boat lift free of charge, stay for free on CRT-owned permanent mooring sites or indeed stay for free on a mooring the CRT has designated as costing £25 a night for stays beyond the first 48 hours. I'm more inclined to believe the other argument attributed to Nigel which Alan posted on the previous page: that the 14 day stays (or longer than break-your-journey-overnight stays) tolerated on towpaths elsewhere aren't any sort of legal right, just an established custom which CRT have decided to permit licence holders to follow...

If you read the sign near the lock, it's from about 20 years ago, when building new waterways was still in fashion! There's still a trust, now perhaps more focused on running community boats, and it's still in long term framework regional plans for the area, but unless the developers of all the new towns planned for the area get forced to pay for it... I think the only development that's happened since the idea was conceived in 1995 is the mooring at Kempston

No boats at all in Bedford is unusual, but it's usually mostly empty; I haven't seen it as full as in that photo. I guess it's possible the EA actually enforces the 48hr moorings to keep the continuous moorers at bay You have a lot of rowers acting like they own that stretch too. That might put some of the local boaters off, as does the bridge a lot of the larger cruisers can't fit under, and the fact it's not a weekend so they're not on their boat Also it's Bedford, looks beautiful from the river but in terms of reputation as a destination it's on a par with somewhere like Nuneaton