gatekrash

Living in Devon, we're leaving it until mid week to go up to the boat cos the M5 will be insane tomorrow and Monday. Local news already giving out that all the local campsites are over booked for the last of the Easter hols week. We need to get up to the boat to take the Christmas decorations down though 😁 We're probably only going to go a short distance down the W&B towards Worcester and get to one of our favourite mooring spots early in the day and then spend a couple of days there. There are 3 hire places near us, so we are expecting carnage on the cut but the hirers tend to

You've got to be quick with hitting the three dots in the top right, then reload the page, quickly hit the three dots and then the cross. It sometimes takes a few attempts and helps a f you have a bad 4g connection so it's loading slowly, and yes it's a lot easier on a laptop !

Hit the 'stop' button as it's loading and you can stop the paywall from coming up, it's the last thing that loads on the telegraph site !

This is exactly what I would expect on any boat I've ever have surveyed (with the exception of the 25 year survey on my lumpy water boat, where I wanted him to know the osmosis had been there for the last 12 years 😁 ). Even then I stayed out of the way afterwards. When we had our boat surveyed last year I fully expected not to meet the surveyor until he was nearly done, he needed to concentrate on the job at hand not have me in the way. We arrived, let him know we were having a cup of tea sat in the car and said come and find us when he was ready. Then we had a chat for about half

Black Prince at Stoke Prior can be a bit rammed as well, and they are also often moored on both angles of the winding hole just past their hire base. It just focusses the attention a bit when winding, but I work on the assumption that their boats probably get a lot more knocks and bangs out on a hire than I would cause by rubbing one if I get it wrong!

Just to add something similar from a different source : I've just had an email from my lumpy water Yacht Club saying that it's one of the most frequently asked questions that the RYA isn't giving an answer to. However they have sent us The Yacht Harbour Association guidance for boat maintenance. They haven't posted it on the TYHA website yet, it's just come direct via an email to yacht clubs so far. It is caveated with a "you must stay local" note though : "Therefore the TYHA’s interpretation (where clear guidance is not available from Government) is as follows: Boat

And here's a very small one of the inside of the Tavistock Canal tunnel....

I know quite a few who've gone through the tunnel in a kayak, going downhill is fine, it's getting back again that's the problem ! I've got a friend who walked through it a few years ago, after SWW drained it for maintenance, unfortunately all his photos are too dark to see any detail of the inside.

Another vote for the 2 people / 2 days here as well. I'm really careful not to use much pre-loaded fluid with the Bloo when setting it up, and neither me nor the Mrs use anything more than a very quick flush. But we drink gallons of tea 😁 Oh, and it'll always register "full" on the indicator when the Mrs uses it at 2 in the morning. It just does.

Lol, yes, its in the watertight compartment that the tube runs through.

On my salty water boat I've used one of the sensing ones that starts every 5 minutes or so and monitors the load to check if it's pumping anything or not, it's been on there for about 5 years. This year, with lockdown and not being allowed in the marina, is the only year I've ever had it on 'automatic'. It's worked flawlessly, but the battery is permanently connected to a CTEK charger, so no risk of flattening anything. If it hadn't been connected to a charger then I'd have been reluctant to leave it running for weeks on end. 3 pumps on the nb, 1 with float switch under

None of these reactions surprise me too much! I've been a Coastguard for over 20 years and helped pull numerous people out of water, off cliffs etc, and experienced every single reaction from gratitude all the way through to verbal abuse, fortunately only once has it escalated to physical abuse (and he was drunk and fell on his backside after he got rather a hefty shove backwards). Mostly people just don't want to engage much as they're embarrassed that they've ended up in a situation that has resulted in the emergency services being called. We generally just let verbal abuse wash over us

Not many canals down here in my part of the world, but we do have the Tavistock canal, built in the early 1800's to connect Tavistock to the River Tamar, to transport various metal bearing ore in both directions. Although it's not exactly the most impressive looking canal ever built (it's only 3 foot deep, generally), it is still in water, as it serves a hydro electric plant these days - it was intentionally built with a very slight "downhill run" - and it does have a 2500 yard tunnel (no access by foot unfortunately), an inclined plane and an aqueduct along the route. As it was a

Some of the buses around here have been converted to run on gas. They've got a solid tank on the roof rather than an inflatable one, so no bayonet issues!

Lumpy water yacht, many years ago, we'd booked her to come out of the water at a yard up the river at about 7pm on a November evening as that was the right tide for the docking berth. We came in alongside the berth and I stepped over the guardrail to step ashore, instinctively reaching for the upper shrouds as a handhold as I did so. Shame I'd forgotten that we'd taken the mast down an hour before to get under the low bridge between the mooring and the yard, and there weren't any shrouds to grab (my excuse being it was dark...). I did manage to grab the toe