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gatekrash

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Everything posted by gatekrash

  1. They're identical to the ones we use in the coastguard for creating holdfasts for lowering people over the cliff. First stake banged in at a 15 degree angle in line with where you want the strain, next stage banged in same angle about 2 foot behind it. Both stakes driven in to at least 3/4 of their length. Then run a strap from the top of the front stake (which is why they have the collar at the top) down to the foot of the rear stake and tighten. To prove how good that setup is we have tried to jerk them out using a landy and they go nowhere, even in crap ground. I've got a few on the boat and another pile in the garage, the coastguard tend to write them off once they've been driven through rock or stony ground - with enough work on the sledgehammer they will go through just about anything, but it bends the tips, which is when they get rid of them.
  2. We've literally just done this 2 weeks ago. Spoke to someone that does this stuff for a living and he said get some decent primer from a tile shop, something like BAL all purpose, first coat on at 4 to 1 water to primer, wait half an hour, repeat at 2 to 1 dilution and then tile. We've done that and the tiles are stuck like the proverbial to a blanket. Originally we were going to prime in dilute PVA but he said on calcium silicate it runs the risk of peeling, and every tiling forum I checked also strongly advised not to use it, although I know many others haven't had a problem with PVA.
  3. We've just bottled the first batch of home brew cider made from the windfalls off the allotment, about 20 pints so far. Going down again tomorrow to strip the rest of the trees before the wind his next week. Last year's brew we reckon was about 9% based on the hydrometer readings. We have to warn visitors not to drink more than a pint if they want to try it! Generally we end up with a really dry scrumpy, but being from the West country we're well used to drinking proper cider 😋
  4. Why, have you been trapped somewhere not close to a decent pub ? 😀
  5. Same at Droitwich. We're only missing on the months we've been out and about. Knew we were spotted last week near Selly Oak as the spotter waved at us and walked along next to us trying to catch the number as the plates are in the rear portholes. But he saw us again a few days later at Queen's Head below Tardebigge where we'd stopped for lunch. Nothing at all for the entire trip earlier in the year up the Shroppie, down to Llangollen and then Chester,, then back down the Shroppie, the S&W and Severn to Worcester, until we got up near Droitwich again when we were spotted above Hanbury. I reckon the West Mids checker is very active !
  6. Not sure when you're planning on moving but the winter maintenance this year has closed the W&B at Tardebigge, the Droitwich at bridge 12 and the W&B at Offerton, effectively cutting Droitwich marina off from the network for 3 months from the beginning of January. Just one to plan in ! We're at the marina and really like it there. The facilities are good, the staff really friendly and we don't mind Tardebigge in the slightest. We can do the run from the marina to the top of the flight in an 8 hour day, or Stourport via the barge canal in about the same. Worcester is about 6-7 hours. Hanbury flight can get quite queued during busy periods which can take a while to get through, but we usually just make sure we start early or else move the boat either up to Astwood or down to Dunhampstead the evening before if we're needing to go somewhere on a schedule.
  7. Very, very good beer and the pies 😋
  8. I should have lowered the pound but forgot although I freely admit I left the fender hanger there on purpose so it could take the damage rather than the front corner 😀 We didn't have an issue with the paddles although a couple of the gates needed two of us to get them moving. Camp hill on the other hand had me both feet off the ground jumping on a couple of them and they still weren't shifting.
  9. Or 'accidentally' burned down and demolished 2 days later ..
  10. This morning 2023 Farmers bridge lock 6 Ashted lock 1 and ashted tunnel. Only minor damage to a fender hanger this time through ! Lots of water on the ashted flight... Street art murals near Curzon Street
  11. Have they opened the extra bit yet? I'm sure when we went on it in May it was only a few weeks away from being opened.
  12. ISTR We had that problem last time we were that way,. We carry one of these on the boat connected to a bit of hose with a standard hozelok pushfit on the other end, it'll fit over the widest tap outlet.
  13. That reminded me, our tank is due for emptying this year. We have 'Jeanette the Jet'. Last time we had it done a couple of years ago it was £140, looking at the invoice. Even if it's gone up it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than mains, given we don't pay the sewerage part of the water rates to South West Water.
  14. We've got exactly the same model at home that @blackrose has got. It does some things really well, some stuff not so well. Mainly depends on how full the basket is, as others have said. We cook loads in ours, without issues as long as you don't overfill it and are sensible. It's also really good for keeping stuff warm without having to turn the fan oven on,...for example, this morning, the fried potatoes and mushrooms went into it to stay warm after being cooked whilst we cooked the black pud, bacon and eggs. We've used it for sausages, chops (although our butcher pork chops are way too big to fit 😁), chicken thighs work well, heating pies etc. Oven still goes on for anything bigger, like a full roast though. Haven't got one on the boat as we don't have space for it.
  15. Congrats on booking with Cafwin, I know Catherine as we're in the same marina and she will go out of her way to make sure everything is spot on for your holiday. And both her boats are immaculate. I know you say you haven't any interest in Birmingham but I really wouldn't discount a night stop there, it's a real experience and is one of the biggest historical bits of the network. Others have said they'd suggest the Black Country ring, I'd agree with that route as a good option, depending on the river state you could either drop down the Droitwich canal or the W&B to Worcester which is a really nice city to visit, then up the Severn to the Staffs and Worc (which is a really lovely canal, I think), or if the river's high then you have the option of going up Tardebigge. The Severn locks are automated and run by lockies so not too difficult for new hirers. Plenty of historic places to visit on that route too, Hanbury Hall, Shugborough, Wightwick, Avoncroft museum. If you want a real slice of history then a day trip to the Black Country museum would be an option (make sure you get fish and chips there). In answer to your other question, we just share the locks. Sometimes I will do them, sometimes Mrs G does. If we're doing a flight like Tardebigge then one of us will lock the boat through whilst the other sets ahead and then comes back and closes up, then after a few locks we'll swap over again. If we're doing wide locks, such as down the Droitwich barge canal, then I'll do the locking as the gates are really heavy.
  16. Well you probably picked one of the nicest, highest specced hire boats on the network ! Ollie is nearly new, and Catherine, who runs that boat, doesn't compromise on anything when it comes to making sure her guests are looked after. Thought I was going to see my boat for a minute but we were away up the Llangollen, so all I saw was an empty berth 😀
  17. When we came through a few weeks ago the lockie at Holt said that they were only operating those times on rare occasions during the summer and generally they were covering the full shifts with staff as normal. Annoyingly we'd rushed through Stourport without stopping for lunch to make Holt before it closed and he said we needn't have bothered!!
  18. Been there, done exactly that with ours. It bloody hurts. Also managed to trap the fleshy edge of my finger in the joint when I was taking the tiller off and it unfolded onto it, which caused a huge blood blister and also bloody hurt. However the Mrs loves the tiller so it's staying ! I just remember to check it's not folded up if I'm down the weed hatch.
  19. We spent a couple of weeks up the Llan in May. So many places to stop. Wrenbury is nice, the little post office shop has a really good selection of supplies. Whitchurch is worth visiting, but it's a bit of a walk from the boat. Ellesmere, ignore the Tesco unless you really need lots of stuff and visit the deli instead, their pies are awesome. You can also stop by the lake which is an hour or so outside Ellesmere, which is really pretty. We also stopped at Chirk, although it was a Friday afternoon and the castle was shutting when we moored up. Definitely stop at Llangollen itself, the town is very nice too. If you're coming out of Beeston then the cheese at the Calvely Mill shop just after the services on the Shroppie one you've come up Bunbury is also worth a 10 minute stop for, if you like cheese that is !
  20. Glad you said that. We've got a little 20 litre alpicool which we use as an occasional freezer and which we run off the mains if on shoreline or off the bow thruster battery if out and about, as we don't use the thruster so it doesn't matter if the battery goes flat. It has to live in the cratch cos the 'clunk' when it starts is really irritating! Good little freezer / small fridge though, great for the ice creams or ice for the rum and ginger beer 👍
  21. When I started work as a mainframe programmer back in the 80s we used to get our assembler code dumps back on the 132 column paper. You'd get one line of code wrong, load a register incorrectly or something, and the first you knew you'd got an error was an hour later when a 9 inch thick box of paper turned up at your desk. Would take an hour to work through the stack of paper to find which line was wrong, you'd correct it, recompile and resubmit the job and then another hour later another 9 inch thick stack of paper would arrive, repeat every day for a week or so. The printers in the machine room were incredibly fast, given there were about 40 of us in the IT department and we were all generating vast amounts of printouts every day. Your estimate of a few minutes is right, it used to go through the thing almost at a blur. Once finished with I used to donate the stacks of paper to a local school to use the back for drawing on, but we must have used miles of paper in a week. We never had much time for the 'newbies' who started learning COBOL, they were never real programmers, cos they never experienced the 'pleasure' of working through the entire contents of a mainframe's memory written out line for line in EBCDIC (the forerunner of ASCII) and hexadecimal. At home I had one of those thermal printers attached to a ZX Spectrum. They were great as long as you only wanted a shiny black and silver printout which was about 4 inches wide.
  22. We went through last month or so, some of the large stone blocks at the towpath edge under the bridge have dislodged and subsided. They aren't affecting the bridge at all, and I think, given the size of the blocks, that the stone is all still there. Looked to me like they just needed to build up the towpath edge and reseat the blocks, but whether they can do that without lowering the level I don't know.
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