gatekrash

No problem, I think you were almost past before I spotted the boat name and it took a while for my brain to connect the boat name with the forum name. Hope you had a good day, it was quite busy going back towards Droitwich today, I think we were going against the flow, but the weather was stunning and made it a great day to be out.

Actually Mike, I've just twigged who you are, we went past you yesterday as we were going down and again today with your novice boater as we were on the way back up through Offerton.

Back to spelling, it's clearly not important to CRT, spotted today near Worcester. I want to know what wares the cyclists will be peddling when they are pedalling past my boat !

That's Andy, who runs forge studio's boat. Mike, you must be somewhere close to us, down at Tibberton at the moment. Back to Droitwich tomorrow.

We went past an "Inheritance" this morning. Quite quiet on the Worcester end of the W&B, although we're moored up with a hire boat each side of us, we've probably only seen 2 or 3 hirers all day and maybe a handful of other boats. Everyone we spoke to on the way down said this end of the canal is empty, but when we turned at Lowesmoor the ABC marina looked pretty empty so they must all be out there somewhere!

I particularly liked his early series 2 landy parked outside. About the same age as mine complete with identical capstan winch, but I liked the light blue colour of his - mine is green. A cruise to Napton is on the list as a result !

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 get to the honey spot locations later in the day whereas hopefully we will be there before lunch and moored up before they get there. I'll be happy to just spend a couple of days sat on the boat watching the world go by with a beer garden close by ?

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 an hour to go over anything he thought relevant and to ask any questions. He basically ran through all the notes he'd taken at the time. If I wanted him to show me something I didn't understand then he already knew where it was / how it worked etc.

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 Maintenance: If a boat owner needs to work on their boat to ensure that it is safe to use (seaworthy) then this is permitted from 8th March Other general maintenance on boats is not permitted until 12th April at the earliest. "

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 the engine and 2 sensing, 1 in the front well deck and 1 in the BT tube, never heard any of them ever run. I tend to go around with a battery powered hand pump every so often, so the water level has never been deep enough to trigger them.

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 and are polite but firm back, realising that people aren't acting rationally when they are in a stressful situation that is way outside of their 'normal'. The ones I don't have a lot of time for are the people who film inappropriate incidents on their phones, which happens all the time these days. I remember a job where we spent about 30 minutes with the ambulance crews working on a drowned fisherman on a popular tourist beach, waiting for the air ambulance to turn up and people wouldn't stop filming it despite being told not to. We ended up having to use half the team to try to screen the incident with picnic blankets etc that people had left when we'd cleared the beach in a hurry. Always wonder how they would have felt if it had been their relative.

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 nice day today, we thought it was a good time for an end of lockdown walk. "Arty" type sign attached to bridge : Approaching Shillamill viaduct, the now disused double track main line which used to run from Plymouth to Tavistock and which crosses the canal. Lift bridge and sluice, which leads to someone's garden ! Culvert carrying the canal over farm track. Even in rural Devon, in the middle of nowhere we still have the obligatory "tagging" graffiti !

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 rail on the way down and the skipper saw the look of shock on my face as it went past deck level and had turned away from the dock in time to prevent me being squashed.

You may well have built my Mel Davis boat then, and I can say for sure she's still afloat !

My lumpy water sailing boat is a 1979 build, surveyed at 25 years and they said they wouldn't ask for another, now 41 years old and they haven't. Put the NB with them as well as they gave me the same no claims, they didn't want sight of the survey (boat is 22 years old). I'm expecting to be asked for one at 25 years and then not get asked again. Been a good company to deal with over the last 30 years.

100%. Our boat had an almost faultless survey, right up until the time I confirmed that I was going to go ahead with the purchase as there wasn't anything to negotiate over, and I advised the yard to do the pressure washing prior to blacking. At this point they removed the tube guards to wash it out, the surveyor had a good prod around the now cleaned out BT tube and poked a chisel right through it... On our boat the tube is in an entirely separate watertight compartment now fitted with it's own bilge pump as a backup, just in case.

We bought our boat in July, with BT fitted. It wasn't a deal breaker when we were looking at a boat, but the one we liked had one, and I thought it would be useful. In reality we've almost never used it, and prefer to do the manouvering without it purely because it's more satisfying, especially things like reversing onto the marina berth for example. We have now deemed it a purely "get out of trouble" tool in case we really mess things up, so I'm sure it will get some use before too long ! Definitely wouldn't bother about fixing it if it ever broke though.