Tam & Di

Without looking up the exact wording, I recall that the other half of this says you must not throw or allow to fall any object into the canal. It would seem that it is therefore illegal to fall into the canal, but having done so it compounds the offence to have someone help you out again.

Ah, the good old days, when you would go out and scoop up the horse manure from the road for use as fertiliser. Dog cr*p is just not the same, is it.

It is the norm among commercial boatmen on the continent to leave outdoor shoes (or more commonly rubber clogs) at the entrance to the wheelhouse/accommodation and put on slippers - generally the backless "mules", once inside. It's adopted by most pleasure boaters here as well now, and to a lesser extent "new-build" barge owners in the UK too. Dog extrusions, chewing gum (if you're near a town) or grit when it's wet are the worst offenders.

I’m a bit confused. Does your demure wife use your long shaft or not? That thing you quaintly refer to as a “pike”, that some of us use to clear our blades as well. Might another alternative be for you to shaft the fore end out and have your demure wife drive the boat? Is your wife electric or hydraulic, and how is she wired? Yes, Blackrose, I did just say that I can understand why a person who was always single handed could find a bow thruster a useful tool for manoeuvring on the odd occasion. Just that I’ve never found one necessary in many years of boating with a great variety of predominantly heavy craft, and they do seem to encourage a general laziness in people with boats which have one. Even more odd I now see repro barges fitted with a stern thruster as well. Useful on a cross-channel ferry perhaps, but these are about 20m barges on inland waters.

My analogy when people are trying to use their bow thruster instead of their wheel/tiller is that it is simply an alternative to having someone on the fore end with a long shaft - something you do only rarely. If you are working one-handed it is obviously more useful, but my comment still applies to those who see a bow thruster as an alternative to learning the skills of steering a boat.

Since when did CWF threads stay on topic? With any Morse style control you can always disengage the thrust and rev the engine to give additional power to the bow thruster. With a system designed to give full power to the hydraulics throughout the revs of the main engine you can overcome this anyway, other than if you have a slow revving old engine such as our Gardner. OK, back to a discussion of electrics.

You're probably right. We operated a large range of craft in the UK from freight narrowboats, passengerboats, tugs and barges to small coasters. None of these had a bow thruster and I never thought they would be useful. With our 24m motorbarge for use in continental waters I did fit one. I find I mostly use it as an instructor's override when a trainee tries to ram a lockside, but do find it useful when reversing a couple of kilometers to a winding hole. Unfortunately we see a hell of a lot of inexperienced barge owners here who seem to rely on their bow/stern thrusters rather than learning to use a wheel (tiller, to those in the UK!). Their electric ones give them a false sense of security. Obviously it would be better to learn to steer properly, but they've paid their money to the builder so they do not have to do that. I'm still unconvinced of the necessity on UK canals, but that is another argument. It probably relates to the poor handling characteristics of modern craft as much as to lack of skill of a steerer.

Tear it all out and fit a hydraulic one. Hydraulics can be used virtually non-stop if necessary, as with a JCB. I have to concede that bow thrusters are useful when you are reversing some long distance, but you need something powerful that you can rely on, not a kitchen vent-axia fan.

But if you click on ANSER in that link they seem to be referred to as towing rings! Someone else with a peculiar idea of their function?

Sorry Tim, I'd forgotten you put that on and was only thinking of the picture of the Ian Kemp one. None of it is going to infuence Robin2 as his game is to get people annoyed, not to find anything out.

But that was not an old boat either. I worked narrowboats from the late 60s and knew plenty of "born and bred" boat people from some 12 years prior to that. Not ancient history maybe, but certainly from times before Steve Hudson and other repro builders were around. I said my piece but you are just a wind up merchant and I can't be bothered to add more. Those of us who know, know. You come in with the absurd idea that Hudson's rings were based on earlier ones that were for lifting a boat (not a thing that a working narrowboat commonly had done - why would it?), you'd not heard of a back end rail, nor side cloths, nor really anything much about working narrow boats at all, nor any of the techniques involved in running one. If you have a realistic point please make it, otherwise go back to wherever you came from.

As you discount every response you don't like, why not write/e-mail Hudson and ask him. None of us will convince you.

Some bits of apparatus are not made with one specific use in mind. Narrowboats will generally have a t-stud at the fore end. How many variants of use can you think of for them? Let's just start with tying to the bank, hanging a bow fender on, to put a line on which holds the fore end of two boats together, to take a line from here to a craft in front when being towed, hanging a bottle of white wine on so it is in the water and cools down ........ This is another bit of kit you certainly don't use as a lifting point on the end of a crane though. I must say that it struck me as odd that the OP wants the rings although he did not know their name or function(s) - whether he will be any wiser now is a matter of conjecture at this point.

Aaaaaaaaaagh! I hope I look a bit better now. That must be after the end of 1973 as they were wooden barrels till then. I can't remember when I put new doors on Towcester and I seem to have mislaid my logbooks at the moment. In fact everything looks pretty grotty in that photo - there's not even any brass on the chimney. I don't even know why I'm singled out - we'd normally go up abreast in short pounds. Thanks for putting it on though - I've not seen it before.

As usual there is a lot of dogmatic nonsense written by people who don't have an original working narrow boat and have not looked properly at one. Unfortunately I think Steve Hudson may be amongst these as he does not appear to understand what a rail is for and has put something on his craft that does not really serve the same purpose. I suppose it's a bit like someone sticking metal blobs on a hull 'cause they thought that boats have metal blobs, without realising that the real ones were rivet heads which hold the boat together. A back end rail is multi functional and many of the potential uses have now been mentioned. Leo is correct too that they are sometimes used when loading. You tie a heavy weight, known as a log, to a line dropped over into the other craft and this can hold the two boats together without having to constantly adjust the length of lines. We used 56lb weights, but a heavy bit of timber would serve the same purpose. We also learned to use them when we were breasted up on the tideway. If you breast up conventionally the boats can come apart at the bottom and lean in against each other, sometimes with disastrous results. We took a long line from the rail under the two boats and back to the rail to prevent this. I don't imagine the original design brief (by which I probably mean pencil sketch on the back of an envelope) limited them to any one purpose - they are just generally useful "thingeys".

But as this boat has no side decks it presumably would require a bit of walking on water to do that, and I don't think that trick's been done for a couple of thousand years now.

Possibly - it depends on how close to the bank you can get. In fact of course if it is deep enough to come alongside you actually have to keep the boat away a bit so you can get a shaft to the blades. Especially the case if you've got a load on or if the bank is a bit high, otherwise your shaft is at too steep an angle. The nearest I've ever come to having to be in the water was to put a plank from the bank onto the top of the rudder and reach under from there. Anyway, despite blizzard's assertions I've never felt need for a weed hatch on any of the craft we have worked through the ages.

Sorry, no. We just live in totally different worlds. A boatman's long shaft is a standard boatpole about 16' long - no sharp inner edge. The bit you miss is that we (and I think I speak for generations of working boatmen on the canals) had no great difficulty removing the majority of rubbish from the blades. "Weed" hatches were a much later invention, specific to pleasure boats owned by people who probably don't even have a long shaft. I think they were probably first introduced on hireboats, and the hire company would certainly not want to refer to them as a "barbed wire" hatch. Another possibility, especially if it is rope around the blades, is to hook the shaft into it, put the engine in the appropriate gear and decompress it, and have someone turn it over with the starting handle. Do you know what a starting handle is? Sorry, being a bit snotty. As I said, your canal is nothing like mine. A weed hatch would NOT have made our lives easier.

I think my point was that I never found it a problem getting rubbish off the blades with a long shaft other than a couple of times where we picked up a great entanglement of barbed wire and on another occasion a sprung bed base. I would not have wished to tackle those without being able to see exactly what I was doing - certainly not either in the water or through a narrow box. You'd probably need arms at least three feet long anyway Why are they known as weed hatches, by the way? Surely they should be shopping trolley hatches or old rope hatches.

What happened to the art of getting rubbish off the blades using a long shaft? Working narrowboats do not have weed hatches, but I've never been in the water to clear the blades. My view of water is that it is all very well for floating boats in and washing in it, but going into it or drinking it is a step too far. I admit we did have to put the motor on the cill a couple of times to cut barbed wire off, but I would not have wanted to do that either in the water or via one of these weed hatch thingeys.

I queried this earlier, and I suspect that WotEver's suggestion is correct. To teach grandmothers to suck eggs, or alternatively to avoid potential embarrassment in future Roxy - the bit of hull which is almost certainly flat and forms the bottom of the boat is generally called "the bottom". If you lift up a bit of the floor you stand on you will probably see it, and the space between the floors and the boat's bottom is known as the bilge. You don't generally expect to have water there, but it can happen in the bits of boat outside of the accomodation (or if you have a leak!), and boats mostly have a bilge pump there to get rid of it. Bilging your bottom out sounds like a very painful medical procedure.

??????? I'm intrigued. What on earth is this operation? Did he keep a straight face when he told you he'd done that?

Also both GUCCC and FMC experimented with motor wide boats to operate between London and Birmingham. We owned the wooden 12'6" x 74' (yes) ex GUCCC Progress and cruised it extensively on all the interconnected wide waterways available in the '60s including the Grand Union to Sampson Road. It failed as an experiment as it could not pass another boat in the bridge holes or tunnels so the journey times were too long. Sort of wandering into the thread on priority at bridges, when we started freight boating with narrow boats in '71 we met and passed other loaded boats in Grand Union bridge holes on several occasions. I suspect channel depths and maybe even gunnite on the underside of bridge makes that less possible now, but it was the norm, so I could well understand why wide boats did not work on that route.

You're presumably talking about Thames and other river locks, where this could occur. I guess I'd expect the other boats to have their own fenders rather than putting my own out for them which anyway may not even be any good for their size or type of boat. I just don't like the idea of having a lot of unecessary things dangling over the side that might get snarled up with stuff (like other boats' fenders on locks)

I can understand having a fender at each quarter on a straight sided boat such as the wide beam one shown, i.e one pair forward on either side and another pair aft, ditto. That means that coming into a lock or quay the fore end can run against the wall without scratching paintwork, or the stern can when the boat slews as you hold back. What purpose do the others serve? (especially as the craft does not appear to be 14' wide, and there is therefore plenty of room between the hull and most UK "wide" locks).