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. 😉

Of course it bloody has! What kind of dumbass can't see that, it's bloody obvious!!! 😳😳 I told you I was tired! 😉

Yeah I get that, and I've been with you and magnetman on this ever since I woke up yesterday! However, my tired brain is struggling with the last movement of the boat, which has then set me back to the very start! Here's the bits we agree on (I think!): 1) The volume of water used to cycle a lock is fixed and independent of whatever is, or isn't, inside the lock. 2) The level within the lock is a red herring - not least because it's also independent of the boat. 3) The nett effect of boats going through locks is that they basically cancel each other out over time...kind of! But...the overall effect of one boat going through one lock once is the bit I'm struggling with. In order for a boat to move along any stretch of water, it has to displace a 'buoyancy-equivalent' amount of that water. When the boat goes into a lock to go downwards, it displaces that amount from the lock into the top pound. Then the lock cycles, which is a fixed amount. Then the boat leaves the lock, displacing the same amount of water from the lower pound back into the lock to fill the boat-shaped hole it has left behind. Then the gates close. Are those five statements true as you see them? If they are, then doesn't this mean that the overall effect of a boat going down a lock is that the top pound and lock together have gained a boat-sized amount of water from the bottom pound?

So, this is quite an interesting way of viewing it. We could say that the boat "removes" 15 tonnes of water from the lock into the upper pound when it enters the lock, and then it "replenishes" 15 tonnes of water back into lock from the lower pound. Therefore, the nett effect is that the upper pound has gained 15 tonnes of water, the lower pound has lost 15 tonnes of water, but the lock has neither gained nor lost anything. I can see some logic in that argument, which would suggest that the total effect on the entire system IS affected by the mass of the boat! I'm going for a little lie down and then I'll come back later!

The maths is here above. It really is this simple. The change in water volume/mass when using a lock is unaffected by anything in the lock.

See my second reply. It's a problem, because it's not the amount/mass/volume that matters, it's the change. And that change is unaffected by the boat because of the water you left out of the pics. Have a look at the calculations I've done. Your drawings have actually really helped to prove this, you just missed out one vital bit.

To add to my initial reply: Add 1m for the depth of water in the lower canal, i.e. what's in the lock below your shaded bit. Total lock volume in the first pic is now: 4 x 20 x 4 = 320. After the lock has emptied, it is 4 x 20 x 1 = 80. Therefore, change in water = 240 In the second pic, total volume of water = 320 - 15 = 305 After emptying, total is 80 - 15 = 65 Therefore, change in water = 305 - 65 = 240!

The problem with those pics is that you've shaded in an area of water that equates to a 3m depth, but then drawn the canal bed well below this. The way the top drawing is displayed, if the bottom drawing was accurate, the boat would have grounded. To do this properly, you would need calculate the entire volume of the lock underneath boat in the second pic, both before and afterwards, then subtract the latter from the former. Do the same for the total volume in the first pic. The difference will be the same in both scenarios.

Is it possible that you're both having different conversations? The total amount of water within a lock IS dependent on the size of the boat in it. However, the total amount of water required to USE a lock, is not. The amount required to use it would only be affected by the displacement affect if the process of using a lock involved completely emptying it.

Try thinking about it this way... A boat is going up a lock. When the boat enters the pound, the boat and the water together are effectively acting like a lift. In order to raise 'the lift', the gate from the top lock is opened. The volume of water that comes into the pound to raise 'the lift' is dependent upon the height needed to bring 'the lift' up to the level of the top lock. The amount of water IN 'the lift' is dependent upon displacement, i.e. the size of the boat. However, the amount required to raise 'the lift' is fixed, because 'the lift' is still being raised by the same height, regardless of what, if anything, is in 'the lift'. Therefore, the displacement effect, although real, does not affect the volume of water required to use a lock.

Actually, I've changed my mind on this overnight. For those of us who think that boat displacement matters, I think we would be correct IF the process of using a lock involved completely emptying the pound. It doesn't. The volume of water required to use a lock is fixed amount that sits below the floating boat. I know it doesn't quite work like this but imagine the pound as being two halves of water - the bottom half and the top half. The bottom half empties when the gates are opened, but the top half stays in the lock. There's less water in the top half when a boat is in the lock, and even less when that boat is bigger. However, it's only the bottom half of water that is required to leave in order to make the lock level with the canal below. This is a fixed amount that is not linked to whatever is in the top half. I think! 🥴