phillarrow

My partner's parents sold everything 25 years ago and bought their first and only narrowboat. They lived onboard for fifteen years but were forced to come back to dry land when her dad had a serious heart attack and didn't recover well enough to enable him to continue boating. As it happens, that coincided with grandchildren coming along, which softened the blow a little. The problem with how they did it is that they couldn't actually afford to move back on land, and only managed to do so because my partner helped them out, which is something we're still financially responsible for. For this reason, I would say it does make sense to keep some kind of land dwelling as security. However... When I talk to her dad about his time on the boat, he says it was the best fifteen years of his life, he regrets nothing, and he'd rather have done it and died homeless than not done it all!!!

I've seen a few comments on here about how unrealistic some/many/most YouTubers are in the picture they paint of living on a narrowboat. This lead me to wonder if there are any who do paint a reasonably realistic picture? I'm not asking for opinions of who is the 'best', but are there any who tell it like it really is?

No it's not the maths, as I've already said, it's the survey questions that puzzled me! If what you're saying is right, and they only asked for one of three choices, i.e. simply choosing option A wasn't a choice, then I can see your point. I still don't think it says what you're saying it does because the only way on knowing this would have been to have "Stick with A" as a choice. It's just such an obviously biased way to pose the question that it is bonkers. It is normal for businesses to have a pre-determined outcome, but to consult in a way that makes this so obvious is just a bit weird! However, as Arthur says, this thread has gone on for long enough and it's none of my business, I was just curious as to your viewpoint. I'll bow out of this one now. 👍

No. I've made it clear that I'm totally new to this. So, given that you did...how were the options posed? We're you about to state your preferred option, or only given the choice of which of the three compared with the status quo you preferred?

Oh, I see what you're doing with the figures now! I thought you were writing something different from the CRT consultation. Sorry mate but that's just daft! You can't take each option in isolation and say that this proves most boaters wanted A! By your own rationale, only 14% wanted A because 84% wanted something else and 2% didn't know how to fill the form in! Hang on a minute! Are you saying that the entire survey was done by comparison against A? Literally, the only choices participants had was to say which of two options they preferred, where one is always A? Did people not get the chance to simply say which of the four choices they thought was best?

I see what you're getting at now but all comparative questionnaires are so fundamentally flawed that they tell you nothing. The only way to get an actual consensus is getting people to either choose one option (first past the post) or use a weighted preference voting system. Getting people to choose one of two options, when four different options are available, is just silly in all honesty. It's clearly designed to produce a pre-determined result. The only reasonable way to canvas opinion is to give people all the choices that have been deemed available and then see which one of those is the preferred one by more people than the others, which is what they did. And no, I wasn't quoting 16% from the report, it was based on your own quoted figures subtracted from 100. I didn't realise that 2% have no preferences at all.

Does it? Doesn't the FOI release suggest that only 16% preferred option A? If it's a comparative choice and 84% voted for one of the other options than the status quo, doesn't that indicate that only 16% have 'opted' for the status quo?

It seems to me that for many/most people, their views are at least in some way biased due to their boating habits. I realise that a complete outsider's view might seem irrelevant, but it could also be argued that their viewpoint is likely to be the fairest and least biased. So... As someone who is a complete outsider to this (still in the dream stage of getting a narrowboat!) but with the intention of one day being a genuine CCer, I think magnetman got the answer to this one quite a few pages ago: Everyone pays the same licence fee, but everyone pays for moorings. The cost/value of those moorings being set by market value and based on services. Canalside moorings would be the cheapest, all singing and dancing residential moorings would be the most expensive. Personally, it surprised me greatly to discover that canalside moorings are currently free. I'd happily pay for canalside moorings if/when the time comes that we own a narrowboat.

I think you're very much missing the point! If answering the repeated questions of newbies is something that certain people find tedious, nobody forces them to read this section. They can leave it to the more generous/patient/magnanimous old hats.

Surely not! Surely he was being equally sarcastic?!

Wow! Who'd have thought that eh?! You mean we actually have a choice about the topics we read?! I wonder why the forum Gods force some members to visit the sections they don't like then?! It's just odd!! 😉🥴

It's such a shame that this forum puts all of its posts in one place, thus forcing long-standing members to work hard to find the threads they are interested in engaging with. It would be so much better if they would split the forum into different sections based on topic titles. They could even have a specific section for those of us who are new or prospective boaters. They could even call it something like, oh I don't know, "New to Boating", for example. This would mean that older/grumpier members wouldn't be forced against their will to read the same old questions posed by inexperienced or new members. I might suggest this to the forum Gods. I think it would help make it better for new and old/grumpy alike. 😉