magpie patrick

The basic premise here isn't accurate - Juno has probably the best internal headroom of the boats I've owned, yet her cabin isn't significantly higher than a modern narrow boat. However there is much less boat "under the floor" than on a narrow boat - no stretchers, bearers or ballast - so you feet are only an inch above the water underneath in places. Add to that the gap between the ceiling and the roof is less (less insulation) and there is good headroom without excessive cabin height. The price for this is that it's colder in winter!

Viking still make them so obviously it is worth "producing boats for such a small market" I agree with all that. For information, Juno is a Viking 23 and has always had a 10hp engine, easily big enough unless you want to stem the tide in the Avon Gorge. Can I add, it would be helpful if those of us who do own grp cruisers weren't frequently contradicted by some posters who clearly do not. Some of the things said about GRP cruisers above can only come from people who've never had one. GRP cruisers are economic and practical - I'd have given up boat ownership long ago if narrow boats were the only option. Even a 23 foot steel narrow boat would cost far more to run over, say, ten years, than a fibreglass cruiser does.

This is from the Viking Owners Club website - gives it as 6 foot 6 inches. Vikings are all over the canal system so I can't think it's a major problem. Fir bridges and tunnels if you could stand on the back deck of a narrow boat to go through then the Viking should fit. The only places I can think of where mine almost certainly wouldn't fit are the M5 culvert on the Droitwich Canal and Froghall Tunnel on the Caldon. The highest point is the top of the windscreen. The canopy is higher when it's up, and needs to be taken down going under the lift bridge at the entrance to the Somerset Coal Canal. Not doing this early in my ownership was expensive, but I've had the frame rounded so it's lower at the edges and higher in the middle. I prefer cruising with the canopy down anyway. Viking website spec for 23 The first coffee of the morning, sitting on deck looking backwards, canopy up, rear screen raised, is exquisite. The photo is me on Christmas day And if you need to be sold the dream - this is me and Lady V out for the day near Avoncliffe

I have a fibreglass cruiser - a Viking 23. To be honest you'll hear a lot of rubbish about yoghurt pots, they're fine for canals. However I am beginning to think I'd like a boat I can step onto rather than need to climb onto, getting over the side deck and combing onto Juno's back deck is not something for dodgy knees and bad backs, especially as these small boats rock more readily - there's a Viking 26 centre cockpit moored near me and the combing is even higher and combined with a narrower side deck. In the medium term as my years advance I'm pondering a Wilderness Beaver or possibly even a Sea Otter for this reason

What length? Others will known whether a given combination of length and beam is a problem, in particular at Whittlesea Briggate bend, I know that narrow beam 70 foot boats can get round it and could make the journey

Somewhere in the US? Not the enlarged Erie Canal I don't think The Farmington Canal in Connecticut?

It is the Loire, at Orleans, during the Festival de Loire in 2019. On the front of the moving boat are the Breton folk duo Agites du Bouzon. There were around 500 boats at the festival, on a river that is regarded as unnavigable by most modern standards

As it was opened in 1809 that is unlikely There is some suggestion that French prisoners of war helped build Caen Hill Locks, and there are a number of French place names in the wider area, including Caen, Dunkirk and Petty France (Petite France - little France). There is also some stonework locally cut in the french style, that is with an axe rather than a saw, although I don't know that any of the locks feature this. A waterway beyond the UK shores below

I've had to look this up, but I see there is also a Buckingham Canal in India, so is it that? Beyond answering this I shall keep international stuff to the other thread!

I had a good walk from Resolven to Ysgwrfa yesterday, a couple of photos below - took loads and will keep adding uploads as and when time permits. The canal is now derelict, and probably looks like many canals did in the 40's and 50's. The first lock at Resolven is probably useable as the gates were replaced in 2007, the others are not as they have the 1990 gates on. In some cases these older gates have been heavily patched indictating attempts to keep the canal going. On this evidence gates fall apart after 34 years! There is also silting which has led to reed growth and between them the channel is impassible in places. There are only three miles of canal, and there were never many boats on it - two separate trip boats which may or may not have traded at the same time. Nevertheless in the late 90s the canal at Resolven was buzzing on a summer Sunday, with trip boats, canoes*, towpath walkers and gongoozlers indulging in coffee or ice cream. *There is still canoe hire from Resolven in season, although only the pound the canoes are on is passable There are seven locks on the length - one at the start described above, then a pair after about a mile, a single lock after about another mile and then three up to the end at Ysgqwrfa. Having seen boats go through all seven about 30 years ago it's a bit sad. Some of these would allow an interesting (to some) analysis of lock gate failure - most of the joints have rotted (which squares with CRT Bradley saying that it tends to be the joints that go - this seems to be true even on gates that aren't used) but in some instances the cross beams have snapped, they must be very rotten to do that with virtually no load other than the weight of the gate.

Is that the stub of the Lancaster Canal southern section at Wigan? The bit beyond the top of the locks?

Is there a line of bubbles where the top gate of the right hand lock should be?

Ceylon? (Now Sri Lanka)? There was a network in Colombo and a long one up parallel to the coast. The Buckingham Canal I think.

Just bumping this so it stays on View New Content I did a Google Search for "Yarwood butty Hound" and it came up with this thread, so that doesn't help!🤔

Thank you @matty40s - I shoulda thought of that! so my memory was not failing me, I could have visited in a hire car in 89/90 and seen the restored canal (The memory of the project manager for the original works might be failing him though - he said it was early 90's!) To add, I think Enfys, much restored, is now operating on the Mon and Brec from Goytre.

I'm off to have a look at the Neath Canal between Resolven and Ysgwrfa soon, the restoration of "about thirty years ago" needs redoing apparently. I'm dredging the old memory banks (something the canal probably needs as well!) but can't recall exactly when it was restored, part of the brain says early 1990s but another part seems to recall visiting in a hire car and seeing a boat moving. The hire car is significant as I bought my first car in August 1990 and generally didn't hire cars for local travel (I lived in Cardiff) after that. It may be a hired a car after 1990, it may be I made the trip in my own car, or it maybe this first siting of the restored canal was prior to August 1990. Can anyone help with when the canal was restored? Thanks all!

Brings new meaning to the term "floodlights"

That was exactly my question, and it appears the answer was to serve a wharf on the Salwarpe - nevertheless the Barge Lock was built as part of the Junction Canal not as part of the Barge Canal.

The locks were shortened, not lengthened. Cutting new recesses and moving the lower gates would have been much easier. That was my thought too - no extension needed, although I guess the new cill and recesses might need stronger foundations than the invert, so it may have been based on experience when building the locks Gate paddles A number of the locks modified in this way are quite close together so dewatering wouldn't have been a major problem, although as you suggest moving the top gates inward only involved dewatering the lock - as the crown of the arch is below water level it couldn't have been done with the lock in water, but it could have been done without draining the pound above. The more I think about it though, stop planks or a bund below the lock (or in it) would have been needed whichever solution was applied. For all the above, as @Pluto has pointed out before, it's what they thought to be true that matters, if they thought it was easier at the top... Just to add - the cynic in me wonders if they did this so it wasn't easily reversible - just in case some Thames Barge operator objected after the event.

No - the "Barge Lock" is on the Junction canal, the Barge Canal (originally just the Droitwich Canal) had it's terminus in what is now Vines Park and had no access to the Salwarpe although there was a feeder pipe. I'd often wondered what possessed them to do it that way! New recess and cills at the bottom would have been so much easier

Just tried that - easy to use and impressive results. Thanks

Unless one can drain them they are almost as much of a liability closed as open, and they can't just be filled in as they have a land drainage function. The major difference comes when a failure occurs, if a lock wall starts to lean put a pipe through the lock and fill it in rather than repair it, but even this isn't cheap. Even draining them isn't as straightfoward as it sounds - there are bits of the Dorset and Somerset Canal, which never opened, which hold water 228 years after the company gave up building it, and the Coal Canal summit was deliberately drained and the lining punctured after closure - bits still hold water after heavy rain. One of the factors that enabled the early restorations was that "something had to be done" with a decaying asset, and making the canals safe or eliminating them was as expensive as restoring them - the Newton Heath shallows on the Rochdale is a case in point, the canal was filled in to a few inches below water level to make it safe - this was hugely expensive and not that successful, as accidents still happened and rubbish thrown in the canal stayed at the surface. The cost of eliminating the Bentley Canal, near Walsall, was more than the cost of restoring it although the way it was done did at least largely remove future maintenance requirements. To properly eliminate a canal one needs to rip the lining out and pipe the water before filling it in - if this isn't done then the canal remains a liability. I had a phone call from a contractor recently, working on a site near Shrewsbury: they'd been excavating a trench and suddenly had lots of water to deal with - the trench had gone across the bed of the Shrewsbury Canal, which had been filled in with rubble and then had a layer of blacktop applied, under the blacktop it was still gathering water from the uphill side and redistributing to heaven knows where. One more example, when the Derby Canal at Draycott was filled in, the nearby railway started to flood, and Network Rail (or RailTrack - not sure which it was then) paid for it to be dug out again.

There was a tendency to overcomplicate these things at the turn of the millennium, two locks on the Huddersfield Canal had pedestals with hydraulic pumps to work the gates, I think these were eventually replaced with cranked balance beams. Edited to add, there was a tendency to assume these things would never be needed. I seem to recall it took quite a bit of persuasion to get Tuel Lane lock long enough for seventy-two foot narrow boats. So maybe this was just a permanent towpath that could be moved but no one really expected it to ever be used.