Stonker

It is a hotspot, run by BT. There is a way you might get free wi-fi access from BT Openzone sites. I know it works for BT home customers but I'm not 100% sure if it's 100% free for customers of other suppliers. You do need have a wireless access point at home (or maybe the office, or borrow someone else's. Anyway it's Fon. Have a look here http://www.fon.com/en/info/whatsFon Stewart

Some years ago the boatyard we moor at were selling Hallmark narrowboats. Gary will know the yard. Most went down the slipway and came back up again very quickly to have the leaks fixed. I had thought about buying one, not after seeing that. Stewart

As far as I know no one does a trip that includes a transit of the Five Rise in a passenger/trip boat. There are hire boat bases at Silsden, Snaygill and Skipton but you'll need at least a couple of days to get from any of those places to the Five Rise and back. There are days boats at Snaygill and Skipton but it's a 7/8 hour trip from Skipton and a 6/7 hour trip from Snaygill to the top of the Five Rise. It's only thirteen miles from Skipton but there are 19 swing bridges, only three of which are usually left in the open position. The other complication is that going down and then back up the Five Rise, just for the hell of it, is frowned on by the Lock Keepers. I've known them insist a couple of hire boats leave one boat at the top of the Five Rise and all share one boat for a trip down to Saltaire and back on the same day. There are a couple of broad beam trip boats at Skipton, you don't get anywhere near Bingley, or Gargrave in the opposite direction, 'cos it's a three hour cruise I think, but it's a decent trip. Stewart

I posted a list of moorings around Leeds in another thread started by Smelly. Try searching for it. Stewart

Quite right, I was mixing it up with Aire Valley Marina which is near Armley. Here's a list of L&L moorings from BW. With postcodes and grid references. 10 HIGH COTE, RIDDLESDEN -E.O.G. BD205QJ Leeds & Liverpool 406816 442840 2 Washburn Court, Riddlesden EOG BD200QZ Leeds & Liverpool 404376 446073 Aire Valley Marina - Private Moorings LS122BG Leeds & Liverpool 426966 434217 Airedale Boat Club - Private Moorings BD164DR Leeds & Liverpool 410507 440398 Apollo Canal Crs Ltd - Private Moorings BD177DW Leeds & Liverpool 414741 437738 Apperley Bridge Marina - Private Moor BD100UR Leeds & Liverpool 419104 437803 Bank Newton - 165 - Perm Moorings BD233NT Leeds & Liverpool 391178 452878 Bank Newton 164 - Perm Moorings BD233NT Leeds & Liverpool 391260 452688 Bank Newton Lk 36 - Perm Moorings BD233NT Leeds & Liverpool 391655 453608 BW - Apperley Bridge - Visitor Moorings BD100PY Leeds & Liverpool 418748 438207 BW - Three Rise Locks - Visitor Moorings BD971AD Leeds & Liverpool 410734 439391 Clarence Dock Leeds - Perm Moorings LS115UG Leeds & Liverpool 429966 433025 Clarence Dock Leeds - Visitor Moorings LS115UG Leeds & Liverpool 429966 433025 Craven C.C.-Bingley - Private Moorings BD164DT Leeds & Liverpool 410698 440129 Fallwood Marina - Private Moorings LS131EQ Leeds & Liverpool 423927 436619 Gallows Bridge - Visitor Moorings BD177DU Leeds & Liverpool 415103 437724 Gallows Bridge, Skipton - Visitor Moor BD231QY Leeds & Liverpool 398796 451502 Gargrave Higherland - Visitor Moorings BD233RH Leeds & Liverpool 392915 454334 Hainsworths Boatyard - Private Moorings BD164DR Leeds & Liverpool 410583 440327 Kirkstall Brewery - Visitor Moorings LS5 3RT Leeds & Liverpool 425840 435532 Leeds - Office Lock - Perm Moorings LS115QG Leeds & Liverpool 429611 433055 Leeds Canal Basin - Private Moorings LS115WA Leeds & Liverpool 429701 433052 Low Holden Farm, Silsden - E of G Moor BD200LT Leeds & Liverpool 405478 444390 Pennine Boat Trips - Private Moorings BD231LH Leeds & Liverpool 398794 451589 Pennine Cruisers & Marine Ltd - Pvt Moor BD231LQ Leeds & Liverpool 398794 451648 Rodley Boat Centre - Private Moorings LS131LP Leeds & Liverpool 422255 436498 Rodley Bridge 216 - Perm Moorings LS131NF Leeds & Liverpool 422182 436785 Rodley Bridge 216 - Visitor Moorings LS131NF Leeds & Liverpool 422182 436785 Silsden Boats - Private Moorings BD200EB Leeds & Liverpool 404126 446146 Skipton Pk Craven Cruising Club-Pvt Moor BD231PG Leeds & Liverpool 398517 451562 Skipton Town - Private Moorings BD231RJ Leeds & Liverpool 398688 45166 Snaygill Boats - Private Moorings BD209HF Leeds & Liverpool 399327 449245 Springs Branch - Perm Moorings BD231NY Leeds & Liverpool 398879 451754 Springs Branch - Visitor Moorings BD231NY Leeds & Liverpool 398879 451754 Stylo Works - End of G Mooring BD100NW Leeds & Liverpool 419415 437671 Swift Craft - Private Moorings BD100NL Leeds & Liverpool 419680 437751 Wilkinson Farm, East Marton- E of G Moor BD233LP Leeds & Liverpool 390929 450915 Stewart

There's not much in the centre of Leeds. There used to be long term mooring just above Office Lock but no one seems to have moored there for a few years now. There are long term moorings at Woodlesford and quite a big marina at Lemonroyd Lock, both near railway stations a few minutes journey from the centre of the city. Going the other way there's an offline marina at Fallwood http://www.fallwood-marina.co.uk/. Then nothing until a marina above Newlay Locks. Get in touch with British Waterways to find out if they have any vacancies at any of their sites. Stewart

I would get a tape measure out, we've struggled to share locks on the Calder & Hebble with him before because of his length. it might be a generous 55ft plus fenders. Stewart

I've got the Johnson version. I'm not sure I could recommend it. It handles water from the shower and/or the bathroom sink. When it works it's fine, when it stops working then I get water in the bilges. I'm not sure it could cope with water from more than one source at once as the capacity is limited and there's no watertight seal on the cover. Might be too much to expect it to cope with two sources of waste water at the same time, depends on the capacity of the pump. I used to have the version with the float switch but it broke while we were out cruising for three weeks (on the second day) and I had to get the new version which has an electronic sensor built in to the pump rather than a float switch. The first pump I had broke very quickly, second one, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Stewart What's wrong with them Gary? Stewart

I know it's April 1st but there is supposed to be a speed camera on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. Dont know if anyone has been caught by it. Stewart

I never knew there was a visitor mooring at Warble Wharf, is it new or just never been signposted? Mind you, anyone heading up that way from PB needs to ignore the sign that says Warble is 50 yards away, longest 50 yards I've ever seen. Stewart

We have always stopped at Castlefield and gone straight through, up the Rochdale Nine and up the Ashton to Portland Basin in one day. Some people stay at Piccadilly Village after the Rochdale Nine but we have never done that. It's taken between six and eight hours depending on whether we've shared the Rochdale Nine with another boat and how much traffic there was. Stewart

Hi Neil, It will be difficult to get on the visitor moorings at Whaley Bridge, they are almost always full. Bugsworth Basin is huge and unless there is a special event on there will be plenty of room. There is a San station and water point on the left just as you get to the entrance to the basins. Ahead of you are two "arms" you can moor in (one of them was closed last summer. Head round to the right and there is a stretch of moorings on your left and then there is the entrance to the inner basins. There's room to wind a full length boat but I don't know what the depth is like. It's a 15-20 minute walk to town along the towpath. There are a few decent pubs, a good off-license and a couple of restaurants and take-aways. Also a Co-op store. There is a Tesco just by the junction of the Bugsworth Arm and the mainline, 5 mins walk from the basins, if you need to stock up. I'm not sure I would call the pub at Bugsworth "great", unless it's changed recently. The beer is OK but the food was very average, huge portions, but with a menu that big there's bound to be a lot of pinging going on in the kitchen. Stewart

If you buy an iPhone you'll be on o2 unless you hack it. You can't use the iPhone as a modem unless you hack it. You wouldn't want to anyway as it's only got EDGE connectivity and you really want 3G to connect your imac to the internet, EDGE will be like going back to the days of dial-up access using a modem. The iphone will be fine for picking up e-mail and some limited web-browsing, and it even works as a phone when there's a decent signal. If you are within range of a wifi hotspot your iphone will use it and if your imac has an Airport card you will also be able to use wifi but you'll probably have to pay to connect your imac, it's free (from certain providers) with the iphone. If you really are going to get an iPhone and you're not going to hack it then you'll need to adopt another solution for your imac to do anything serious with it. I've not used any of the others so I can't recommend a provider. I don't think you'll enjoy carrying the imac round to Weatherspoons or Macdonalds every time you want to use their wifi to connect to the internet but if you have a laptop it's not too much of a problem. Stewart

Just the other side of the bridge, away from the locks there are long term moorings. The land might be useful for anyone mooring there, storage, garden, ice cream shack (oh no there is already one of those the other side of the lock keepers cottage) grazing animals, camping. Stewart

Yes, you don't have to move the boat in one trip. We bought our first boat down on the Oxford Canal and moved it to West Yorkshire by "weekending'. It takes a bit of planning and as others have mentioned there are stoppages but it's feasible and it gives you a fairly gentle introduction to boating. Canalplan will be very helpful if you choose to do this as it has details of all the boatyards on the canals. This assumes that the boat is habitable. Drive down to where the boat is on a Friday night. Up at first light and cruise until Sunday afternoon at this time of year and leave the boat somewhere secure. Most boatyards/marinas will let you leave the boat for a week or two for a mooring fee if they have room. Take a bus/train/taxi, scrounge a lift to where you left the car, it won't be a long trip as you've only cruised for say 14/16 hours at an average of 2-3mph. It will take quite a few weeks but you'll have fun doing it. Craning and transporting by road will cost over a £1000 I would reckon, probably twice the cost of your fuel and public transport costs if you weekend it. Stewart

Hi, You can do Leeds and back in six days, about eight hours a day cruising. Getting to Bingley would mean pushing it a bit. You could always take a train from Leeds to Bingley, the station is very near the foot of Bingley Three-rise and the Five-Rise is only five minutes walk away. Saltaire is worth a visit as well. The problem you would have taking the boat to Bingley is due to the opening hours of the section between Leeds and Newlay. Office Lock at Leeds and the locks up to Newlay are open 8am to 3pm (last passage) due to the problem that sometimes exists with troublemakers. Having said that we go there almost every year and apart from kids jumping into the locks as you're trying to navigate them we've never had a problem. It should be cold enough in October that they won't want to swim but if it's school holidays there will be a few around. The two, three lock staircases on that section have BW people staffing them to help you through and sometimes they will help with other locks as well. It's at least a day and a half from Leeds to Bingley although we usually take a couple of days to do it. I would suggest that turning round at Leeds would allow you a bit more time to appreciate the scenery and enjoy the holiday. If you have time you could always nip up the Broad Canal to Aspley Basin, Huddersfield, it takes about three hours to get there from the junction with the C&H. Good places to stay include Elland, Brighouse, Mirfield/Shepley Bridge, Bingley Arms at Horbury Bridge, The Navigation below Broadcut Top Lock, Stanley Ferry, Woodlesford and Leeds itself. There are plenty of other quiet places to overnight. Stanley Ferry to Leeds is not particularly scenic. You're on the river most of the time and can't see much above the flood banks until you reach Lemonroyd. The locks are broad locks and manually operated until you reach Broadreach Flood Lock just before Stanley Ferry. This, and all the rest up to Leeds are mechanised, all you need is a BW Watermate key and a thumb. Sometimes a lock-keeper will be on duty and operating the locks if there is any commercial traffic around during the week. Although they are huge locks they work very smoothly when boater operated. If a lock keeper is operating them you might have to hang on tightly to a line as they can open the sluices very quickly if the fancy takes them. The one fly in the ointment is that in October you can reasonably expect some rain and the Calder and Hebble is notoriously "flashy". If it does rain heavily you might have a delay while waiting for the river level to fall. You will see that at the bottom of every lock that lets you out onto a river section there is a board indicating the river level. It's red, amber, green. I will go out on amber if it's stopped raining and the water level is falling but I would never go out on red, in fact I think my insurance would be invalidated if I did never mind the risk to myself. But a few hour of dryish weather will see levels fall back to normal. Oh, and if you've got one of their boats with an air-cooled Lister engine take some earplugs, they don't half make a racket when you're pushing the boat at six miles an hour on the river. Stewart

I don't see a problem, it's almost what I did when I bought my present boat. I paid for the dry-dock and got a surveyor in to do a full survey, also had the owner there as it was a private sale and I reckoned it would be easier if there were any problems identified then he would know exactly what they were. The surveyor was happy with this too. There were no problems, I didn't expect any as I had already spent 3 hours with a checklist going over all the points I wanted to check on the boat before making an offer. Also had a new Boat Safety certificate exam done at the same time by my surveyor and the owner paid for that as I made it a condition of the sale that it have a new BSC even though the existing one still had a year to run. I think that is particularly important as the BSC only reflects what the examiner saw on the day it was issued as non-compliant items could have been taken out and then re-instated. The boat stayed in the dry dock for another day and the owner blacked it, also a condition of sale I stipulated. The owner would have blacked it anyway while it was out of the water as it was just about due but this way he saved the cost of the dry dock. I took lots of pictures whilst it was out of the water as you don't always get a chance to do this. If you decide to walk away you should offer to sell the survey to the owner to offset your costs. Stewart

Grahoom, There's nothing "wrong" with 6/5/3 if the hull is in good condition and from the sound of it the condition is OK. My previous boat was 6/5/3 and the thickness report was similar and ten years later it's still going strong without any problems, it's moored next to me and has been since I sold her. I don't know what this zincing is, never heard of it. Running away can also be caused by water in the fuel, happened to me once and scared the bejesus out of me, turning off the fuel supply stopped it. Although in that case the smoke was white. A check of the water separator revealed a lot of water, probably from a dodgy batch of fuel I got which was contaminated. If the boat has been sitting around unused for a while water could have got in there. But it could be more serious, either badly contaminated fuel which will mean clearing out the tank or an engine fault. Only a decent mechanic will be able to tell you if it gets serviced correctly. Pump and pipes relatively cheap and easy to fix. Switch on the gas heater the same if parts are available. Alternatives:- 1) Walk away and find another boat. 2) Make a much lower offer (like £8k less) and fix everything yourself. New engine (or recon job rather, I don't see much point in putting a new lump in an older boat) and the other bits and pieces should come in at less than £6k unless prices have rocketed since the last time I looked. 3) Make the £4k or maybe £6k less offer subject to the vendor fixing everything to your and the surveyors satisfaction. Guaranteeing they've not botched the work is the difficult bit. You might find the vendor walking away from you with alternatives 2 and 3 if he thinks there is someone out there willing to pay somewhere nearer the asking price without him having to spend any money. In the end you have the information from the survey and presumable you've met the vendor and have an opinion of him so it's up to you to decide. Stewart

Hi Strads, I think BW moved the goalposts a couple of years ago, previously it was verboten for Towpath Gnomes ( I'm going to be in trouble) to fish from lock-landings but the new rules said we all had to play nicely and share. I follow Carl's method and make sure we tell them that we have to come in near them and their equipment to let the crew off safely and have never had a problem. We see fishing matches regularly on the Calder & Hebble and I try to speak to everyone we pass, even the many who suddenly find they can't tear their eyes away from the fascinating hook on the end of their line. There are a few funny anglers/fishermen but then we meet some funny boaters as well. Well after that it's time for a joke( more flak coming). A few years ago someone said they had seen a funny sign on the cut in Leicester. It read "Unemployed? Low IQ? Why not take up angling?" Stewart

Hi, Craven Cruising Club have moorings on the offside above Bingley Five Rise, I don't know if they have any vacancies, give them a ring. You could also try Snaygil Boats, they are near Skipton but it's only a couple of hours or so by boat to Bingley. There are a couple of newish farmers field moorings around, one near Silsden but I don't have any contact info. There are the odd BW moorings around but most are on the towpath side. Stewart

I think you might be looking for an arguement, would you like the ten minute lunchtime special or the full A La Carte? We all do what we want to do in the end (especially on re-cycling, it's easier for me as I have space to store things until I have a carful that I can take to the dumpit site and I know not everyone can do that) but Bones asked a question and I and others answered. I'm not making a judgement and saying I'm holier than thou, I'm putting forward the case that putting Solid Fuel and Coal ash in the water is, according to what I've managed to learn, potentially harmful to wildilfe and plants. "The "traditional" arguement is not going to stand up if you're putting toxins into the water. No point in giving examples as that would just generate offtopic discussion.Stewart How do you know so much about my sex life? Trees don't mind a couple of hundred volts through 'em and it does wonders for my libido.Stewart Going back to the OP, Bones must know it's wrong otherwise why talk about doing it "in the dead of the night"?StewartTime to try and recycle a bottle.

I would rather the lazy people chucked it in the hedge bottom than in the cut although rain will probably leach some of it into the cut eventually. Debbie may be a little more keen than me on treading lightly on the earth (I do recycle glass and grapes, mostly in the form of drinking bottles of wine and taking the empties to the dumpit site) but it's not too difficult to do some small things to help like making a tiny effort not to "potentially" ( I don't know enough about arsenates surviving burning in a non-toxic form to argue) kill fish and other wildife in the canal. Stewart