MtB

No. Maybe they should. They put the mooring up for auction at a stupidly high starting price (for NBs), and fatties start bidding on them and totally outbid all thinnies.

Oh a lovely Broom I think... yes? Not the boat in your profile avatar, you cheat! Lol!! I can believe a narrowboater would moor up against this without noticing. Standards and attitudes are SO different on the Thames. Never fails to surprise me.

I suspect anyone can call themselves a marine surveyor. My own point of view is surveyors are creaming it by pandering to the middle class buyers' obsession with getting someone to tell them everything is fine, or maybe coming up with a long list of trivia to help knock a few £k off the price (whilst not actually carrying the can for their precious advice). Just buy a boat and enjoy it, is my (casual) approach. Whatever the survey report might say to put the fear of god into you, if you ignore it I bet the boat will still be floating in 20 years. Just my personal experience and opinion. Other opinions are available.

I think you're probably bang on the money with this. Most of the moorings here fetching £6k a year are now occupied by fatties when ten years ago it was mostly thinnies.

The absence of enforcement illustrates however, the degree of seriousness with which the government views breaches of this widely discredited law.

Ok so not necessarily slimmed down so much as to fit through before the widening of the first lock!

There is a significant body of opinion that he won't because he is a 14-year-old with a high IQ and a severe personality defect, living his life vicariously in his bedroom watching YouTube videos. There will be no wife and no boat. Others don't subscribe to this view and think the massive gaps in his story followed by the sudden jumps forward (e.g. suddenly owned a narrowboat for quite a while after all) suggest he might be one of the better AI programs learning and posting.

I vaguely remember that, but I think it went several years ago. I will ride mebike up and check next time I visit the boat though.

As Mandy Rice-Davis once said..... "Well they would say...... " Oh forget it!

"OP" = Original poster. Or Post. And the JCL mentioned is Mr HoHoHo, if you're not sure! He turned up here 'full of it' and telling everyone how much he knows about canal boating an how he was going to build one. Sked a lot of questions on here and never said 'thank you', instead criticised most of the advice offered. The he wasted a lot of shell builders' time visiting them then bought a second-hand boat.

Or put another way: Just because it can happen, doesn't mean it will happen.

Yep that sounds perfectly feasible. Its what I did to get my first NB. Bought a bare shell and as soon as we got the engine fitted and running and it ballasted, work slowed considerbly as we were always torn between working on the boat and going out for a cruise!

I suspect CCer get chased off the Basingstoke too, but again ita not clear how. Most of the locks are chained up when not being transited under the eye of a ranger, IIRC! That's a good idea. CRT should do that!

I was always puzzled by how slack BW enforcement was in every respect when I came off the Thames, where we had TC launches cruising round checking licences routinely.

How does that work then? Having a mooring contract is conditional on getting a licence perhaps? What happens one wonders, if the mooring runs out and the boat CCs for the remainder of the licence period. Or if the boat just continues to CC with no licence either. I wonder if enforcement takes them 12 years, or what happens more quickly.

Correct. Perversely, you ARE 'the market'. Given you accepted the 14% rise, they now know the market witll pay that so you've probably set the level for all future listings there. Had yo turned it down, you'd probably have seen it re-listed at the same price you were previously paying.

At £15k you're unlikely to find a boat with modern plating thicknesses. But I'd suggest you have a hard think about whether you was to get a boat to actually go boating, or get a sailaway to spend five years working on and fitting out. This might help you narrow down what sort of boats to be considering buying.

I never had any in the first place...

And that was only the legal fees. Over the 12 years it took them to achive the eviction, he perhaps swerved paying a high five figure sum in accumulated licencing and mooring fees over that period.

Not really. They charged for the tonnage transited along their waterways AIUI, not time spent on them.

How unspeakably CRUEL!!!! Making boaters have trackers fitted to their boats...

Oh perlease!!!!!

These two points are the core of the problems. Make enforcement quick and easy and the piss takers will instantly fall into line. Most if not all of the problems only arise because of the inordinate amount of time it takes to hold non-compliant and/or unlicenced boats to account.

I have also seen a welded-in waste stub ready to fall out of the hull due to a ring of severe corrosion in the hull itself, around the outside edge of the welding. Odd.

When though?