Tam & Di

Is it not possible to get the local IWA group involved? - create a fuss about the effect on a listed structure? On here it will get a lot of tut-tutting, but won't get anything done to rectify the situation. Embarrass BW and get them to force the builders to put it right. Do a Lindy Foster!

"The Boat"? (or I suppose even "theboat")

We were with Mike for many years with virtually all of our inland commercial craft of various types until he was bought out by Marden Marine, who declined to continue our cover. Our present operation is not really standard UK insurers' business, being a large heavy (expensive) barge in France acting as a barge handling school. However we found that Mercia Marine (01684 564457) were willing to take us on, and with our no claims bonus we pay about £6.25/£1000 value. We have no loading for having trainees on board and at the wheel, though it is stipulated that I (or a suitably qualified instructor) must be in the wheelhouse when trainees are steering. The cover even includes having someone becoming ill from eating Di's food!

The questions are pertinent as you say, but IF genuine are coming from someone who has no boat or interest in acquiring one, and I'm fed up with making my years of experience freely available to someone who asks out of idle curiosity when I'm sure a brief troll (whoops! did I mean to use that word?) through the archives would immediately enlighten him/her. I've just noticed the next post too - it starts "hell Tam". Wonder what Freud would have had to say about that? I'm still confused by what possible developments in Liverpool have to do with "Is living on Canals as Complicated as it sounds?", but I've ceased to care.

Wow, all this naivity from someone who can analyse the socio-political situation and advise Darren on what is going to happen to Liverpool in the near future.

Yep - and got a greenie for it. Wonder who that was from? I've just looked at the other (concurrent) thread and looky there - Darren can send his own mails after all. He's just left this one as an ego trip for his fairy godmother. Incidently I also looked at his profile and he purports to be 38 (39 in 3 weeks) so not as young as you suggest in mail #21, nor as tongue tied as suggested in #24. I was happy enough to contribute to a thread seemingly asking for advice, but this is something else altogether.

There is a hell of a lot of supposition here - Nina also posits that he could be suicidal! It's good that you know so many people who are able to help Darren. On here we don't actually know what he wants - does he actually want a barge? Does he really mean a narrowboat? Does he actually even care about what sort of boat it is as long as it cheap enough for him to buy? Does he agree that the Transport Minister will allow Liverpool to become a turnaround port? If he decides to buy a 100 ton Dutch barge I can advise him on movement by road as we have done it many times with craft we have owned, but it seems a bit pointless from what little we actually know of him or his plans/hopes/wishes/idle curiosity. By the way, the name is Tam-with-an-A!

I think the OP's questions have all been answered. He has also been given a lot of supplementary information that people thought he might find useful. His questions were: Could anyone please answer this Q. I recently printed off the Inland Waterways Licence Fees document (..Listing all prices for 6months, yearly, etc)). I was so astonished to see the price differences between having your Barge on Canals&Rivers, and then just Rivers! That is not actually a question. However to answer the one that is implicit, many rivers are governed by different legislation to canals, and it seems reasonable that a licence that restricts a user to a certain river should be cheaper than one permitting use of the whole system. This points me to the next Q. I wonder if anyone could answer!? I have done bit research into the Old days, on the Canals, the Old Boats,........ My Q. Is - - Can anybody tell me why? Why, has it gone so Expensive since the OLD Days of Barges, Old Working Boats, etc.. Not relevant to someone who is looking at the possibility of living on a boat today, but I did answer this in some detail in an earlier posting. The Goverment talk alot mo about SHORTAGE of Housing for people - Well, why not make it Easier for People 2 buy &live on the Canal system!!! A very difficult question to answer succinctly, and I doubt that the OP would really be interested in the answer, involving politics, economics, philosophy etc as it does. The answer would anyway not help him decide if he could/should live on a boat, and is almost rhetorical. You introduced the idea that people should e-mail him privately, but he does not ask for that. Indeed, why should they? It is one thing to respond on an open forum, yet another to give private advice. You appear to have hijacked the thread for whatever reason it is you have. If the OP wants more information it is up to him to come back in (or perhaps to explain why he has given you 'power of attorney' to speak for him). By the way, the other bit of advice I gave earlier still stands - rather than looking at books and the internet he should go out to a canal/river/harbour/lake (i.e. an inland waterway!) and speak to people on boats; look at what a boat actually is and how people live on them.

Not such a "newbie" now, as you've been a member here for 15 months, and I gather you have already posed much the same question. It has been pointed out that "the old days" is really red herring, and myalld noted that the payment system is now different. To give a better understanding so you don't feel so hard done by, in the old days to which you refer we used to carry freight on the canals, and paid tolls to do so - a cost per ton for each mile travelled. The amount of traffic was such that most canal companies (canals were privately owned till the mid C20) had sufficient income to keep their waterways in navigable condition. Legislation on matters loosely referred to as Health & Safety has meant the costs of e.g. dredging have escalated out of control, and although there are now substantial numbers of pleasurecraft on the system, trying to get enough money from the owners to carry out all the essential maintenance is no longer a practical option. Canals are actually a relatively cheap leisure resource - leisure in the sense of an occupation other than your work and which you do for choice. They were never designed as somewhere for people to live, and although progressively more people have found enjoyment living on board they should not expect their lifestyle choice to be heavily subsidised by others, either in the sense of not paying the market rate or in the sense that their use is detrimental to the generally accepted basic use of canals as a cruising waterway. Your research does not appear to be well directed. In many ways the cost is the least significant issue - are you capable of keeping your electrics, water and sewage systems running, and all the hundred and one other things that go with life on a boat? Go out onto the canals and speak to people, see for yourself at first hand. You've already been given all the basic information. Find out if it is really something you would like to do and either do it or move on.

So what is an American who lets out homes in the States doing on a (UK) canal site? Or are you one of the seemingly dozens of other GollyWobblers? Almost as good as signing on as John Doe I guess and then saying you can easily be found. Interestingly many of the respondents on this thread who say "you can see who I am if you check my details" are being economic with the truth, as there is very little more detail there on the majority of entries. I don't think I know more than 5 or 6 people on this forum, though if I knew which name they were trading under I may well know rather more. Writing anonymously does encourage people to say things they would not otherwise say. Regular subscribers do obviously gradually get to know each other in one sense, even if they might see each other at a lock and have no idea who they were sharing with, and whether they had slagged that person off or had useful information from them. I personally find it uncomfortable, but perhaps it's an age thing. I'm happy with Dominic's "fora", but it depends on which school you went to (and probably how long ago that was)

You certainly do NOT want something articulated if you are pushing. The section usually in the front must be winched tight to the pusher unit, forming a rigid single unit. There are any number of ways to form the coupling, but there must be no flex at all. As bargemast says, pusher tugs are the norm on the continent - certainly it would be much more plausible than for you to tow a butty behind you as long as you are happy with a unit of about 70' x 7' in total. You could then split them and breast up for short-fat canals such as the L&L and have them in-line on the majority of narrow waterways. Depends where you see yourself boating, but you could just have the occasional waterway where you would have to do double locking. If you went this route then the pusher section should ideally have a pointy bow or it would be a pig to steer when you were breasted with the pushed section. In fact it is not only conventional tugs that push barges here - the smallest freight boats are the French péniche which are simplistically 39m x 5m. It is not uncommon for a family to work two of these. On small canls with locks which just take a craft of this size husband drives one and wife drives the other, following along behind each other. When they are on canals with locks big enough to take the two in-line they do exetly what I suggest above, and turn their two 39m x 5m craft into one 80m x 5m one. So each is a conventional shaped craft with normal bow and stern.

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.