magpie patrick

Unfortunately they are going to be expensive - mine for a Viking 23 narrow beam is well north of £1500 just for the canopy, and I already have the frame - if you need a frame as well then you probably need to smash a couple of piggy banks open

I will admit my second foray into this (and I had a permanent mooring) ended when I got skin cancer - I woke up one morning in my lodgings, the wound from the op had become infected and I both looked and felt like a mouldy potato, suddenly all those needless luxuries of houses, toilets connected to mains sewerage, taps that never needed their tank filling, endless hot water etc - weren't luxuries any more. I was reminded of this last week when we took Juno out for the day - I was recovering from a COVID type bug and found everything hard work, the deft step on and off became a major climb, pulling the ropes (on a Viking 23!) felt like mooring a container ship. I watch Canal Boat Diaries with a nostalgic pain for the great journeys I have made, and I will go boating again, especially as SWMBO is keen for us to do this in retirement (for once it's not me suggesting a two-three month summer voyage) but I will always have a land base with mains services to retreat to!

Detection wasn't always easy - in about 1725 Saltford lock on the Bristol Avon was so badly damaged by saboteurs that it had to be rebuilt. The culprits were never caught although it is thought (known?) that they were sponsored by mining interests from the Radstock area aggrieved by being undercut by imported coal. [Caught by the merge] By chance, sorting through my magazine rack, I came across this article in WW from December last year. Not only does it describe events around a murder in Manchester but it looks at the canal company police which some companies employed from the 1840s onwards.

Is that the colloquial term for anything over 6 feet wide? 🤔

Surely the point of the 30 minutes max rule is to make it obvious you can't leave the boat there and go shopping or have a leisurely lunch on board. Every rule will have ways in which people can wilfully misinterprete it. "Boat must not be left unattended" - crew has a five course dinner on board. "Water point only" - operate all those thirsty appliances whilst on the water point and stay six hours... "30 minutes" - time to give someone else a go

Fascinating! Sadly our itinerary for the great Glen holiday doesn't have any spare time to get to Arisaig. Floating timber is still navigation I would argue - there were canals built in Norway for use by log rafts

It was Gordon Bailey's initiative when he was Mayor of Stockport so 1980 would be about right. Back then (and possibly still now) each mayor had a "Mayor's project" - I do wonder how the others are fairing nearly half a century after inception.

This is on Facebook and thus may not be visible to some members - someone may know who ho extract it, I'm afraid I don't! super fast boat lift Definitely boating, perhaps not general boating though

Your first paragraph defeats your second - the boat in your first paragraph has travelled to several checking areas to remain unspotted. If it has stayed in one place it will not have remained unspotted. There is only one criterion for overstaying - you were in the same place for too long. If the boat isn't there it hasn't overstayed. Cruising range is a different matter and more difficult, but it would take quite some skill to remain unspotted on the K&A for example, where the entire route is walked weekly. You'd have to know what day the route was walked, what day the next section was walked etc to the extent it might be easier to comply! Finally, no court is going to accept the idea that, because CRT didn't know where you were, you must have been breaking the rules!

It looks very good aesthetically, but on a website like this it will get questioned! Are you one of the volunteers? The team are doing a grand job

You shouldn't, and that fact you haven't logged them should be interpreted as they are not there on that particular length of waterway, ipso facto they are not overstaying on that length of waterway.

One of the key weaknesses in the system is that there is no interpretaion of "no siting" - if a CRT spotter walks past the same spot three times and you are there on the first and last of those they don't pick up on the significance that you weren't there on the middle one - that only gets noted if they see you somewhere else.

Thank you - that was my suspicion! no lid, no spout - almost useless as a water can!

The original plan for this was to lift boats across the river - there was a problem to solve as the EA wanted the proposed aqueduct to be above a certain level, and this mean locking up at each end. The idea of the swing was that it would lift boats over the river at a level clear of any floods, where as an aqueduct would potentially obstruct flood levels. The issues around the proposed aqueduct were resolved but the concept lift was then applied to a link down to the river which, when improved, would link the canal to the city centre. There is a pedestrian footbridge in Derby city centre that swings - not for boats but to get it out of the way of flood waters - high water on the Derwent is a serious issue.

This weekend just gone we had a trip on Rose of Hungerford - part of joint birthday celebrations (only ten days between our birthdays). This prompted some thought on my part on the history of trip boats in restoration, but I digress.... on the cabin were two water carriers, both traditionally decorated but one was a normal water can and the other more like a small milk churn. Does this other one belong to another tradition or is it just to look pretty? Good trip BTW, and more power to the K&ACT for doing this and getting people on the water.

given my experience the legal action is unlikely - during the never ending voyage with Lutine I twice got "spotted" with emails sent suggesting it was time I moved on - for this to be initiated in error the same wrong number would have to be input three times. For the record, my first offence was at Lower Heyford, I had moved but not far enough (through the lift bridge) and the total stay was about three weeks, the second was near Devizes and was struck from the record when I protested it has been snowing and it wasn't safe to move the boat (which CRT agreed with)

This just popped up in my feed - makes the Huddersfield Narrow look like the middle level... Safe link to early 20th Century Alpine canal scheme I've read it twice and I still can't figure how the locks were supposed to work!

I met John when he came through Bath, I lived there then, and corresponded with him at other times. I was particularly impressed with his humanitarian activities and his down the earth attitude, given he had made a reasonable sum running a logistics business he was always looking out for those less fortunate than himself - hence his ultimate involvement with refugees. RIP Cotswoldman, the world needs more people like you, and now we have one less.

I'm currently pulling together some notes on the history of canal restoration for leisure purposes (to remove things like the Thames and Severn in the 1930s and the even earlier Bradford Canal!) and a professional query threw me a curved ball. The query came from the Somersetshire Coal Canal Society and was "how long as our canal had protection under policy H3 of the local plan" - Policy H3 protects the line of the canal as an archaeological relic and has been in place "as long as I can remember" so probably at least since 2006, but I realised I had no idea how I'd check - once upon a time paper copies of old local plans could be found in the library, but paper copies are a thing of the past. The reason for the request was practical - it would be helpful in public debate to say how long the protection had been in force, but it set me thinking - when the history of canal restoration is written planning policy will be a significant part of that history, just as the original acts and other consents are now to the original canal building. When did restoration become a planning policy "thing"? I first worked on such a policy in 1996, to protect a route for the Derby Canal across Pride Park - but in my wide eyed innocence back then it never occurred to me that such a thing might be innovative, or that it might not be. Does anyone else have any knowledge of the history of planning policy on canal restoration? Ta very much for any contributions!

Keep em coming! I'm trying to keep up as I'm enjoying these, the vicarious pleasure of a cruise I will almost certainly never be able to do for real. Thank you

Can't see why anyone would want to escape Perry Barr either! That said they must be one of the easier flights to avoid, with three other canals leading from the Walsall Level and three more from under spaghetti junction

I don't dispute what your grandparents said, but I would dispute that one can avoid being a vagrant by not living on one's boat one week a year, or that one would become a vagrant if one lived on board 365 weeks a year - the wording of the vagrancy act is far more nuanced than that. Reading the act, one would only have to trade without a licence (pedlar), beg or be a prostitute for long enough for the authorities to notice to be charged, and it wasn't aimed at no fixed abode, it was aimed at rough sleeping among other things.

That bridge is narrow, but even so the driver missed it by quite a margin!

Assuming you mean working boat families they lived on board 365 days a year. That's the reason their boats were registered, to ensure the vessel met basic habitable standards.

I have just read the article - this is local to me, and the contents fall into three areas: Some of the things affect people on low incomes full stop - the cost of living etc Some of them are the effect of trying to live on a boat on a very low budget - it's hard Some of them are not accepting that other people use the canal... (including the headline) The Wilts Times often seems to have decided that liveaboard boaters are a cause celebre, I do sometimes wonder if this is simply to wind up the Bath Chronicle who tend to take the opposite view....