Tam & Di
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Posts posted by Tam & Di
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I believe (but have no details) that someone had their boat taken to Calais, was lowered into the canal and the wash from the first passing barge took the rudder off.
Absolutely true - we met him a couple of times in something like a 30' cruiser-stern boat with wife and two large dogs (maybe better than dog and two large wives, but still a squeeze on the sort of canals found here.....!). He also later tied alongside a Danish cruiser with flared bows in a lock. He handed them his line and one of their crew tied it tight and went back into the boat. The lock keeper pressed the button and the top paddles opened rapidly which slewed him at an angle under the cruiser's bows, which meant water was then pouring into his fore end via the self-draining hole - the lock was self-draining into his boat! When I commented to him that he should never hand his line to some else as he should always be responsible for his own boat, he said "But they were good looking blondes and looked like Vikings; I assumed they knew everything about boats!". I never heard anything further of him, and presumably he fetched up in Valhalla on the Canal du Midi, along with so many others who only ever make the one-way trip.
(actually I've just recalled that Valhalla is for dead heroes - don't know if that is apposite or not)
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- most firms now employ a totally pointless person to assess H&S risks.
The problem is that the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1996 (with the nice friendly acronym RIDDOR) puts a whole wadge of liabilities on an employer or any operation that gives public access to places. It's a British disease to go OTT on stuff like this - there is probably a basis of sense about it but it gets taken to absurd lengths, and we do seem to be a nation of "jobsworths". In France people have to have personal insurance, so here we can still climb around crumbling town ramparts without safety fences getting in the way everywhere.
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Here we go. A couple more for you.
And very fine too. It was noticable that the NBT cannot apparently even afford brasso or a mop, which was also rather sad in the clips. I'd have been embarrassed to be seen on them, especially as there were many available pairs of hands.
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Yes it is Badsey and Barnes.
Sadly when they were subsequently owned by David Vickers in the early 80s some lout tried to set fire to Badsey on the Slough cut by levering the pigeon box off and dropping lighted paper down onto the engine. Roger Alsop bought? Barnes and did a coal run from Sutton Stop to Brentford paired with Comet, which he had worked briefly with Willow Wren.
He wrote this up in his book Working Boats published by David & Charles 1988, which I looked into to refresh my memory. That brought several people back to mind who I've not thought of for many years.
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I did wonder if it was Badsey & Barnes, as I remember them in similar colours, and it looks to me that Barnes may well have a slight extension to it's cabin, (a kitchen area IIRC).
Thanks for correcting my spelling of Badsey!
Re butty cabins, we initially leased Bude from BW, but the first butty we owned was Bingley which had an extended cabin built by Roger Hatchard - a kitchen, as you say. Our sons were about 11 and 7 at the time, and having this extra 3' or so made an enormous improvement on living conditions without impinging too much on carrying capacity other than with very light cargoes. When we subsequently bought Bude from BW I had to rebuild the cabin on that and did the same thing. We regularly took on 52 tons of limejuice, and did get much the same a couple of times with coal at Gopsall on the Moira.
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I thought I had made it clear that there was a wind from the Urals throughout the filming of these segments that blew hard on these unladen clothed-up boats as they approached the locks either north or south bound. Hence a need to deal with these conditions and adapt to them by altering the proceedure - this is called hardwon experience in action.
Obviously it is true that these are not "working" boats as there would be no reason to cloth them up when they were empty. But the main reason they get into trouble on a couple of occasions on the video is the lack of fluency; manœuvres are being carried out too slowly, probably because they are mob-handed and inexperienced. I wrote on another thread re how a lot of manœuvres work better at speed, and several of these shown here are cases in point.
I guess my main sadness is that they are now "out there" with David Blagrove being a name people regard as an "expert", but do not give any sort of realistic picture of professional boating as it should be done. As suggested by another contributer it would have been much better to have got the boating right before it was filmed, or at least to make it clear these were very naïve trainees on board.
BTW - Baddesey & Barnes showing how to do it? I don't recall Baddesey having a low cratch though. And has the butty steerer (who obviously does not have to steer as they are breasted) dropped the paddles as the gates are opened and gone on down to get the next lock?
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After wtching the clip i now know why the handrails become loose
There's certainly no reason why that should loosen the handrails it's a steady pull, not a sudden snatch at full revs. The rails where they adjoin at the centre are actually shaped specifically for use in that way as well.
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I assume David was just roped in to instruct (only noticed the bad pun retrospectively, I swear!), and did not have anything to do with how the boats were set up. There are one or two oddities about it:
* The mast lines appear to be tied to the top of the masts. They should just have a small eyesplice at the end which sits on the looby. When tension on the mast line is forward the looby comes to an upright position, and whoever puts the line on would ordinarily give it a slight pull to make that happen. If the line does then jam the looby swivels backwards allowing the line to pull off rather than pull the whole mast over.
* The short line which goes from the butty's shackle to the dolly on the motor when breasted (visible in the still photo) would be left attached as the lock empties. When the lock is empty and the motor put into reverse to tow the gate open it will also pull the butty back which opens the butty gate as well. This line is then dropped off as the motor goes ahead to move out. Although it is not shown in the video clip it was obviously the person on the lockside who opened the butty's gate instead.
* Both mast lines were too long, so there was far too much line hanging down when the half hitch was made. This would be bound to catch on something sooner or later. The lines also looked to be finished in back-splices (rather than being whipped) which means the ends were slightly bulbous - again a hazard should anything go wrong. In the demonstration that did happen, as the line almost jammed behind a rotten section of gate timber, and the person on the lockside had to free it. The whole point is there would not be anyone at the lockside in "the good old days" as if there was a spare person they would have gone on to get the next lock.
* There seemed to be something on the topmast just behind one of the masts. Maybe I was seeing things, but certainly there should not be anything just lying around.
* Although David did comment on having put the motor on the wrong side in the uphill lock I'm not sure why he did that. Possibly not used to that motor, though it must be very difficult to have to work with a second person on the stern anyway.
Wouldn't this thread be better in "Boat Handling"?
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and get on everyone,s tits on internet forums because i am bored shitless.
Your interests say "good beer " and "MCFU" (Football of some kind?). Are you happy with beer that is just thrown together by someone with little discernment or do you prefer beer made by someone with good taste. Is it good enough for your team to knock a ball about willy-nilly or do you like a team who are keen and motivated to play well? I'm not sure I agree with the way Chris W expressed himself, but by any objective professional standards Ron's site is very crude and muddled. This was nobody's business while he was happy with it and it sold everything he had on offer. But he came onto the forum to say it was no longer doing this, and various people were offering what they thought was helpful advice. Why do so many topics quickly degenerate into mud slinging?
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I'm on a Mac and it does not work in either Firefox, Safari or Opera.
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It is amaturish as that reflects my status , I am very much muddling through, at the same time for the last couple of years the site has attracted about 75,000 unique visitors and sold about 80% of weeks advertised and not removed for other purposes ( owner use or whatever ) before the holiday starts.
I use Mac G4 PowerBook with OSX.4 (i.e. I've not moved up to the new Intel processor) and it works fine with Firefox.
The site does look very amateurish to me as well, but if it presents the image Ron wants to promote and has sold 80% of what he has to offer I guess that is the major factor. I did have trouble though working out quite what Ron does - sell holidays on craft/floating chalets of his own, or act as agent for others? If it does what Ron wants that is all it needs to do, but if he is concerned about not doing so well this year it may need more attention to detail.
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i was under the impression that he had total rights on the non towpath side, or is my brain dimming with time?
To flesh it out........
Rivers are natural entities, and a bankside owner's boundary commonly extends to the centre of the river. Use of the bank may nevertheless be subject to control by the Navigation Authority for reasons such as flood control or navigation.
Canals are man-made and each one had to have an Act of Parliament (an "enabling" Act) which gave the canal proprietors powers to make compulsory purchase of the land they needed to dig it. BW is this instance simply the successor of the original Canal Company. These enabling Acts almost all say within them that the freehold land owner whose land forms the eventual bank has various rights, including the right to 'make places for boats to moor or lie'. When the BW Act 1995 was going through Parliament it originally contained clauses to repeal all the original enabling Acts, but a small handful of individuals (including ourselves) made representation and had this taken out. So you can get hold of the enabling Act for the canal where you want to buy a piece of land and see what it has to say about riparian rights.
HOWEVER ..... It does depend also on if BW owns a ransom strip - a small width of land - on the offside, as you would then be tied on their land anyway.
AND ....... to make it more problematic there was at more or less the same time a court case where a group of moorers questioned BW's legal right to make a charge for a boat tied at the end of their garden. Unfortunately instead of arguing on "riparian rights" the basis of their claim was that they paid a licence which allowed them to cruise, and this covered them for the time they were tied up as well. The Magistrate found against them on the dubious legal basis that BW needed the money. It was only a very low level court decision, and Solicitor Nick Grazebrook who knew more about such matters than any other legal person at the time was firmly of the opinion that it could be appealed. Unfortunately neither the boat owners nor IWA had enough money to fund this, and the decision therefore stands as a precedent, albeit a fairly low-level one. Negotiations then led to the introduction of a reduced rate, and people have generally gone along with this rather than the expense and hassle of an appeal.
Planning consent, as has been said, applies to change of use of the land, and in principle turning a bit of field into a garden on a mooring for a 100% proper cruising boat owned by someone with a house would still require this. Council Tax is levied on a 'dwelling' and would become payable; however you would only need a BW cruising licence, not a houseboat one.
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P.s i have 2 new names i cannot make my mind up which 1 'Ro'nin' (japanese for lordless wandering samurai') or ' Archer or Agincourt'
Unless you are doing your own signwriting or have lots of money to pay for someone to do it (and a boat long enough to get it all in) short names with straight lines are good. How about "IT"? Makes stupid comment easy as well - "How long have you had IT?" for example
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So can anybody prove "Narrow Boat" existed before 1861 or "Monkey Boat" before 1881?
Alan
I've put an excerpt from John Hassel's Tour of the Grand Junction Canal in 1819 on the General Boating 'Not a barge' thread - he refers to use of the term monkey boat at that time.
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.. turning on a river- that the hardest part of winding is getting the boat around past the 90 degree to the flow point, as in, if you don't build up sufficient momentum when turning, or position the boat so that the stream helps rather than hinders, then you'll end up going sideways at a rate of knots!
As long as the river is appreciably wider than your boat so you're not likely to bend it like the sad photo I think you'll find that you'll still get round as quickly, but find yourself much further downstream than where you started.
That is the time to ram the bank so the bow holds and the stern drops.. or rises, as the case may be!
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Well I think I've found fairly conclusive proof of "Narrow Boat" being a valid term nearly 150 years ago.
John Hassel in his "Tour of the Grand Junction Canal in 1819" uses the terms "boats" and "barges" more or less at random, but does say "The commercial boats used in navigating the canal are long and narrow and admit of two entering a lock at the same time; an economic principal by which they save the double dues; for what reason I am withal unacquainted, but the country people in these parts (Linslade/Leighton Buzzard) call them monkey boats; the passage boats are much broader and have every accommodation for passengers, travelling usually at the rate of 30 miles a day. There is another description of boats called fly boats which are allowed to travel night and day on the Grand Junction Canal; these boats bring with them Manchester goods, and all articles which require particular care, and like the monkey boats, generally go in pairs to save lockage".
He mentions also that the passage time of a lock is about seven minutes here near Linlade, but only three minutes once you get to (the smaller locks) Stoke Bruerne and Braunston.
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You should also consider that to have all the convenience and benefits of an engine room it does not have to be in the middle of the boat nor does the engine need to have any particular age, here is another alternative.
It could be in the middle of the saloon under a perspex cover as a centre piece like the steam engines in various paddlesteamers that still ply for trade.
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Whereas there are some who get quite upset, if you call a Yorkshire Keel a boat and not a ship.
While a submarine MUST be referred to as a boat and not a ship (not that you find them on canals very often)
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I have found piloting a narrowboat has drawn on my motorcycling abilities for thinking far ahead and taking early reaction to developing circumstances,
- landing at "impossibly fast" speeds and realising that it "wasn't so bad after all". Having the confidence and courage to try it is probably the basic requirement ( obviously within rational limits ).
To comment on the OP's query... I think any experience of controlling machines is likely to be of use, even if not directly, but as a pre-requisite it can not be very appropriate. As has been said there are plenty of superb pilots who can't drive etc... and vice-versa
When we get absolute beginners on our barge handling courses I find it useful to tell them that although they are stood at the wheel and to that extent it is like a car, in reality boating/barging is more like riding a bike. You begin by over-steering and wobbling from side to side, and gradually get the feel of how to make small constant movements on the wheel/tiller rather than abrupt panicky big ones. We do frequently get people with narrowboat experience who say to me that they always coast into locks so if they hit anything they don't do any damage. They are surprised when I tell them they have uttered an impossible sentence - if you drift into locks it is not a matter of "if" you hit something but "when". You are only in control of your boat when it is in gear and moving at sufficient speed that any slight puff of wind or piddle of current will not have any effect. Yes, when you are learning you go slowly and steadily, but that should only be the first stage in acquiring fluency and not an end in itself. Learning any skill follows the path that initially you can only see one movement at a time, and then gradually you see two, three steps ahead, until finally you can say drive from London to Birmingham and not remember anything in particular about the journey; your brain only wakes up when something out of the ordinary happens which might need some action on your part. That's the time you can really enjoy your boating and look around you to take everything in.
Yes too on getting to know your boat. Each one is different to each other one - even one big Northwich motor from another. Find somewhere you can go flat out, mentally mark something on the bank and when you reach it do an emergency stop. See how far it took you - how straight or otherwise was the boat when it stopped. If you do find somewhere wide enough see how tight a turning circle you need, clockwise and anti-clockwise.
Nick's comment on experience with machinery in general is true too. It's probably a "man's thing" that they are more likely to have played with toys that involved similar ideas, as it tends to be mostly women that give me grief by slamming the single-lever control from hard ahead to hard astern without pause, or go into reverse to stop in a lock and leave it there without even noticing they are on their way back out again. After two or three locks where I gently say "I think it would be better if you went into neutral" I finally leave them to reverse out and work it out for themselves why the crew is looking at them with such a puzzled expression.
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Problems with the wind whilst manouvering in the marina ...
Something you had to eat last night?
Wind emphatically pronounced as in "blowing a gale" rather than as in "winding with a key". The "winding with a key" pronunciation only appeared somewhere in the late 70s when lots of people were discovering canals and reading about them in magazines rather than learning how to go on at first hand from people who preceded them. There is also the term "cross-winded" for making a c*ck-up of getting into a lock, on the generous assumption that it could not be due to incompetence.
Boating is mostly about making use of the elements as far as possible, and obviously wind and current are the major considerations, with weight and trim of boat and the effect of the propellor also playing a part. Jumping off and pulling the stern round with a line is all very well as long as you can guarantee being able to get back on at the appropriate time. More seriously though the ability to warp a boat - use of lines for turning or manoeuvring in general - seems another lost art. With motor boats we more often talked of swinging or chucking round. It was a sign of flash when coming into Brentford for a load to chuck round in one. Ideally you would be breasted with the butty on the inside of the turn so the pair would go round more tightly; the trouble with that though is that if you screwed up and had to hold back hard the butty kept on going briefly which stopped the turning moment dead. If you went round in the direction that had the butty on the outside at least if you had to chuck back the weight of the butty continued the turn for you. All this in front of a full audience of born-and-bred boatmen!
Bow thruster? Is that bow as in what you do to the queen or what you shoot arrows with?
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but I do have a problem with ''narrowboat'' and I wonder why whoever it was decided to join the words together.
I think to signify a particular type of craft. Not really any different to Steilsteven - i.e. straight stemmed - defining and describing one particular style of Dutch freight boat when you come to think of it. Tom Rolt and contemporaneous writers Eric de Maré and Charles Hadfield all write it as two words, though de Maré uses capital letters (i.e. Narrow Boat) to imply the idea that he is writing of something distinct. Certainly when we worked narrow-boats (how about that as a cop out?) we were very snotty about people who referred to them as a barge, but it is true they come into any reasonable dictionary definition as such. It depends on what level you are talking. Among "those that know" people want to show off their knowledge and use terms like "josher", "Shroppie fly" and so on, whereas amongst our selves it was simply boat and butty. In simple terms it is enough to say canal boat, but sometimes it is useful to have the distinction between wide ones and narrow ones for instance. So narrowboat is useful to mean a 7' wide craft of the type originally used for freight on canals, as opposed to any old narrow boat such as perhaps a canoe.
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we definitely need a sick smiley!!
Or what about a smelly smiley?
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I am looking for some information on BETELGEUSE I have already found out quite a lot
I remember Comet and Betelgeuse as owned by Tony Jones in the early 70s and may even have some slides if I ever get time to try to sort them. I know he had connection with Stroudwater Carriers but can't remember exactly what it was.
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I'm intrigued that Ana thinks there are communities of people living on boats (which I would take to be at least three or four in a group) all of whom are self-sustainable eco-warriors, or all of whom are engaged (professionally?) in the performing arts. And that they would welcome being studied by an anthropologist.
It smacks of the common social science trait of knowing the answer and setting the scene to prove it is right - trouble is that my reply only shows me stereotyping social scientists in the same manner I've accused her of doing to boat dwellers - can't win, can you.
Did show there is not that much common ground among the Canal World community though, didn't it.
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Don't be shy. Tell us what you would use.
Nick
Quite so - I'd like to know as well. I suppose I would not use that hitch on a bollard to moor overnight as it is too easy for some lout to let it go. In fact though my line would be tied on the boat - I would have an eye on the bollard, possibly held tight with a cable tie if it were a dodgy area and assuming no-one else is on that bollard who would be trapped by my line. But what knot do you see as preferable? Being basically lazy by nature I'm always looking for the minimum of effort for the maximum of return, and the boatman's hitch certainly gives that.
ASHBY PERV
in General Boating
Posted
I'm hoping that it is licentious rather than licensed - not too much else to look forward to at the moment.