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Derek, with apologies for dragging this thread off topic, do you happen to have photos of the other boats on the Basingstoke at the same time? I am particularly interested in whether you have any pictures of Christina? Alec

We have moored at Wolverhampton Top quite a few times in the past few years. There are moorings towpath side between the lock and the bridge (by the gardens) and then more along the towpath beyond the bridge, just past the services. There are also offside moorings opposite the latter but as David says there is no access to them so they are very secure but not good if you want to go to the pub! Something to be aware of, there is a homeless shelter just over the main road so there are often a few people around, in the gardens and along the towpath. In my experience this is nothing to be worried about. All the people we have met have been friendly, usually a bit lonely, and keen to have a chat. None of them have ever been drunk, high or threatening, just people down on their luck wanting a bit of conversation. I really wouldn't be put off mooring there - quite the opposite in fact as people being around probably means it is less likely that there would be anyone trying to break in. It's just useful to know in advance so you are ready for it. Alec

I think there is a bigger point here than the minutiae of the the CRT booking system for the Anderton lift. The survey is all about a visitor centre and what people would like to see take place there. This pre-supposes that there is demand for a visitor centre. Yes, people will come to see the lift, but will they spend? In my opinion, leaving the lift refurbishment itself aside, CRT is considering making an investment from its limited funds into other facilities at the site. It therefore should be considering the business case for doing this. If it will directly make more money than it costs, it is clearly a good investment. If it will secure indirect funding e.g. from government by hitting KPIs which cannot be otherwise met through a lower cost route, and this funding is greater than the cost, then again it is worth doing. However, if the figures do not add up then it simply should not be built, however nice it may be. With an increasingly stretched budget, this is the sort of question which should be asked up-front of all new plans. I am concerned that the survey appears to be pre-supposing the answer without any sign of a solid business plan being presented to the funding providers. Alec

I'm prepared to accommodate a bit of a relaxed schedule. If I have a booking for a time then I can usually aim to arrive a couple of hours before it, which unless it is at the end of a very long, hard slog of a day is probably enough to allow for plastic bags. On the T&M north of Stoke on Trent I am probably not expecting too many mattresses. The tightest I have ever cut it was a hire boat pick-up on Saturday afternoon at Norbury with a Harecastle booking at 4pm on the Monday. We made it by 5mins and we couldn't have done much more, having run pretty much every hour of daylight. However, we had a viable 'Plan B' of a booking the next morning. It's when the system doesn't allow for such alternative plans that the problems arise. It would, however, be pragmatic of CRT to recognise that boat movements are not predictable and hence bookings should be similarly flexible. Alec

Particularly as the system becomes less reliable. Imagine if you were planning to travel from Market Drayton to Northwich Dry Dock for some work, which in theory is a fairly easy weekend. With lock failures at Audlem, Hack Green and on the Middlewich branch, plus the sunk boat on the Middlewich branch, how many days could you actually have done that trip this year? If the boat lift is a booked component, how long between re-bookings, ie once you can't get through, how long do you now have to leave your boat on the towpath before you can come back to complete the trip? It's not practical to require precise timing from the customer when it is the CRT network which prevents this from being predictable. Alec

I don't think it is this boat which is giving you a heating problem - I think it's the pattern of use you are looking for in general. For good reason you want to minimise power consumption. This limits you to solid fuel and gravity fed bubble stoves such as the Refleks (others are available). The solid fuel stove takes some time to light, to warm up and then to deal with the ash, which you have to allow for. The bubble stove is much quicker to light and run (and turns off with no fuss) but it isn't quite running in the mode it is designed for to run on diesel in stop/start conditions so you do end up needing to do more maintenance and design the installation so far as possible to accommodate this. The only way out of this is to choose which compromise you are willing to make. Mooring in a marina or a formal canalside mooring with power will give you far more options that fit around your intended lifestyle as you no longer have the power issue. Otherwise it is accepting that time will need to be spent on heating, but that's the same whatever you do - a boat is not like a flat on the water. Alec

But that's a diesel heater with an electric system (pumps and potentially fans). It's good, but it uses power which the OP is trying to avoid for reasons of not being there at a reasonable time to recharge the batteries. This is where bubble stoves and solid fuel both have a significant advantage. Alec

We have a Refleks stove fitted as on due consideration it seemed the best option. It's a leisure boat, used all year round, often for short visits, say overnight. I might turn up at 7pm on a February evening and be heading off at 9am the following day, so the boat will be stone cold on arrival and I don't really want to be dealing with a fire that isn't fully out in the morning as it means I can't cap off the chimney. I didn't want something that uses power as we have no power connection so at present there is no charging, sometimes for several months, and running the engine within those kinds of hours isn't realistic. It works well as intended, however a few learning points along the way. Refleks stoves will burn red diesel, but really they prefer clean kerosene. This means they don't burn quite so cleanly across the temperature range and extreme care is needed on filtering. We have added an extra gravity filter just before the intake which seems to help. They do not burn quite as cleanly on diesel so more pricking out of the air holes is needed. They seem to like running in steady state rather than start/stop, so more frequent cleaning is needed. They are efficient, but the amount of diesel they use mounts up so a second tank would need to be surprisingly big. We already have a hand pumped day tank, so fitted a second feed to that. I would go that route - probably a 10l tank up against the roof at a convenient location, with a vent to the roof but no openings to the room. Having it hand pumped it takes less than a minute to fill and deals with any concerns over power consumption. I wouldn't be worried about smells/fumes - the tank does not need to open into the room. On balance, it has been the best solution to our pattern of use, but it has certainly had compromises over how I thought it would work and there have been points (usually on a winter's night when it's minus ten and the thing is refusing to light because it has clogged up again and I -really- don't want to have to dismantle the metering needle yet again) when I have been tempted to hurl it into the cut and replace it with a nice, simple, solid fuel stove! Alec

From personal experience, firstly vintage engines don't usually fail fast enough or frequently enough to be too much of an issue. Things wear out but they give you a lot of warning on that and will limp on for a surprisingly long time (the exception being the magneto on a petrol start Kelvin which has the ability to fail at an alarming rate!). Secondly, once you have one, you work out three things pretty fast. The first is who else has one of the same type and who has spares; the second is a network of people who know where to get things made/fixed and the third is all the parts which are either interchangeable with other engines or were originally made by someone else anyway. For example, the odds are that the piston rings will fit from something else, liners may well fit from something else, pistons may also fit if you are lucky, the fuel pump will almost certainly be CAV and can be serviced by an old school diesel injector refurbishment company, the starter motor will almost certainly be CAV etc. I would say it took around six months to reach the point where we could probably find something if we really needed to, a year until I had a good idea for most spares and two years until I was confident that whatever realistic failed I could probably get it up and running again. The use of a day tank is a good idea. An even better idea is to make sure that the outlet from the day tank is a couple of inches up from the bottom but that there is also a drain right at the bottom so that you can periodically drain down the day tank to remove any water. Tom_c is Tom Cauldwell, based at Langley Mill. I have let him know that you are interested in making contact, although you may note a greenie on my previous post from Stagedamager who is Tom's brother, so the odds are that Tom will be aware pretty soon one way or another. Alec

I certainly wouldn't be worrying that the engine is completely shot and in need of changing at this stage. Water is not good in precision parts, so a thorough investigation would be in order to understand the extend of what needs doing. Does the engine currently run? If so, it's likely you can get away with the damage. Solid thumpers like this often gradually lose performance rather than stop dead. If it doesn't run then clearly some cleaning/refurbishment/potential new parts are needed. If it comes to it, it appears that aftermarket injectors are available at £90 each which won't break the bank. Beyond that, there is a series of checks, all fairly basic, which should establish what if anything wants doing and on what sort of timeframe. Probably to be considered more as a negotiation point on price - the urgent or near-term ones either the owner gets them done or adjusts the price accordingly. If you need an engineer to take a look at it, I can point you at @tom_c who troubleshoots a number of vintage engines for people and has a very high success rate in getting them going again! Alec

Yes. OEM parts seem to be pretty much gone for the service and wear items but they last a long time and the aftermarket parts seem to be satisfactory. It certainly doesn't seem to be an engine where you need to have a spare engine to hand in case of failures (unlike our Kelvin!) Alec

Which parts have started to go rotten? If the iroko runners are still sound and it's just the top which is going, could they be re-used? I would echo the advice about painting with epoxy. An even more thorough job can be done by tacking canvas over the whole outside before painting, and then applying enough paint to completely fill the weave. You are effectively making a composite skin. The only alternative to iroko I can suggest if you can find it is robinia. It's a minor timber so not always very available, but it is incredibly durable. Alec

It depends when the conversion was done. Oates was commercial, but ceased to be in 1974. RCR therefore does not apply. My Dutch boat became a pleasure craft around 1980 so the same applies. If this Dutch barge was converted to residential use prior to the invention of the RCD/RCR the same applies. Alec

Did you manage to resolve things with PLA? It does occur to me that one option would be to have it craned aboard a ship, then craned off in the UK and towed to its mooring. That could overcome some of the road transport issues. In my (very limited) experience, so long as the boat is already no longer commercial at the point when you bring it in, you don't have too many problems with RCR/RCD, and since they are accepting it as residential that would appear to tick that one off. Alec

I think it depends on whether you regard them as services for boaters, or services for those arriving by boat, which is not necessarily the same thing. If we arrive back at our linear mooring after a trip out, we generally want to leave the toilet empty as it could be a while before we are back. The services we use are 20mins boating away, which is fine, but if we boat up, use them and boat back but want to leave the boat pointing the direction we originally arrived then we have a 40min run the other direction to wind, so all round it's a 2hr+ trip to empty the toilet. Taking it up by car is a 15min trip all-in. I could probably wheel it up and back on the towpath in around 40mins. The contents was produced by the same people, boating in the same way (and probably at the same place and time) and the facilities are being used as part of the same licence fee, so I'm not sure that obliging the boat itself to be there to empty the Elsan is entirely justified? Alec

I think you can go significantly lighter weight on your bed sides. 18mm ply would be structural on its own, so if you are adding a 38/63mm frame the ply becomes largely for the facing and you could go down to 10mm with no problems. I found it easier to use frame and facing construction than to try and use frameless designs as it isn't quite thick enough to carry fixings and there was no point stepping up to 25mm. What is the maximum unsupported span on the top? That should define how thick you want the 'fingers'. You don't want lightweight and flimsy but equally there is no advantage to going excessively thick. We span 2ft with 12mm ply and it doesn't flex, but that is as a continuous sheet. Adding a sheet above the 'fingers' to allow easier sliding without rubbing on the underside of the mattress sounds useful, particularly for putting it away, but you need to avoid forming a step in the bed. It isn't under any load so could be much thinner than 12mm. 3mm would probably be plenty. If your woodworking skills are up to it then ramps on the back ends of the pull out fingers could raise them level as they exit the bed onto the side rail that they rest on. This would allow it to be truly level. Boat carpentry always takes way longer than it should, but it isn't difficult, just awkward shapes and a cramped working environment. I am slowly rebuilding the end of my daughter's bed so that the stove hearth is incorporated. Outside chance I will get the end section made up this week, except I left part of it on the boat which is 3hrs drive away! Alec

Any comment on the concentration of the original spill? Alec

You would like to think someone has dropped in a lot of stop planks to compartmentalise the damage.

I was thinking they were now ready for next year's BCN Challenge...! Alec

I think you may have run across some of the discussion about liveaboards and continuous cruising and perhaps got the impression that most moorings only allow you to be there for up to 14days. This is true of mooring in locations which you don't pay for - the general rule is a maximum of 14 days unless signposted for shorter than this. This is the type of mooring you would be using on a trip out for an overnight stay - essentially you can moor anywhere you like on the towpath. However, when you pay for a mooring, it's for your use only and almost all moorings that you pay for can have the boat left on it for as much of the time as you like. Think of it like renting a parking space for your car - you can leave it there as much as you like but when you go out, you expect it to be there waiting for you when you come back. There is a lot of fun to be had from a boat used for weekends and getaways - the four of us have a 38ft boat which works fine for up to a couple of weeks as we aren't looking for luxury. Alec

You can't be sure, but it can help build a picture. GDPR is often misunderstood (including by people in the insurance industry) but it relates to personal data. 'Is this boat insured by you?' is not personal data, and neither is 'has it been insured through you since XX/XX/XXXX?' The company may choose not to answer, but I have currently had a 50/50 success outcome on asking. If you are shown a copy of a comprehensive insurance policy and the insurer confirms that they have insured the boat since a particular date then it is supportive rather than definitive, ie another reason to head towards having a survey (or not if you are so inclined) rather than walking away. Alec

One occasional exception to the 'don't trust the seller's survey' general rule is when the survey is a year or two old and was needed to obtain comprehensive insurance. If you can see the policy and check with the insurer that everything is in order then the fact that the survey was not for the purposes of selling the boat can give a level of reassurance. Another one is when the survey was undertaken by one of a small handful of very respected surveyors. For example, ours is being surveyed by Mike Carter next week, because it is coming up to due for the five year insurance survey and we would rather address any issues while it is out and get a management plan in place. Hypothetically if it was for sale in a couple of years I would imagine anyone familiar with Mike's work would be reassured by this, even if they then had their own survey done. I know I would be if the situation was reversed. Alec

I know why this won't be done (inability to control it if things go wrong and no confidence in the strength of the balance beam) but given that it is a pivoting action where there is also a turning moment by pushing downwards, I wonder whether if you could rustle up say ten people and put five down each side of the balance beam to pull backwards and lean downwards it might move it back into place? I suspect that is the type of approach which would have been applied in the past. Alec

Enjoy the unusual view of our boat as you pass Industry (just over the A5 aqueduct past Brewood). Alec

A top quality inward sprung bit of mooring by us in 2023: