Tam & Di

I understand it is getting more problematic to find a marina mooring for anything over 15m - not that there are many marinas though. But even if they did exist we don't live a lifestyle that takes us from marina to marina, and certainly we don't have great trouble finding somewhere to stop with our 24m (80') "Friesland" as a rule. The biggest problem is that even non-Marina moorings (a bit of bank with rings or bollards, or an ex-working wharf perhaps) are few and far between anyway. OK on canals, but it is difficult to just stop anywhere at random on the big rivers. Those to the east (Meuse for instance) are heavily used by Dutch and German cruisers in the summer, and they all stop at the most convenient sites about 2.00-3.00 o-clock, making it sometimes difficult for people like us who enjoy a decent day's boating. It was a strange beast. probably only about 40' x 12'6". It had offset wheel steering from the bow, which was in some immensely high boxroom - much higher than the rest of the casing. It also had a platform across the stern which he kept his car on (by means of a ramshackle looking ramp) - unfortunately I did not get to see him put it on or off, as I think the amount of list would have made it an interesting event. He had hydraulic steering by rams to the top of the rudder. The swim looked to be negligible. I only saw him mobile as he moored behind us and next day as he moved on again, and I would not say he came in to moor under control, nor did he steer a particularly straight course as he left. I would guess that the hydraulic steering had too much time lag in it, plus the whole craft was badly out of balance. He said he had only had it a few months, and it was brought to Calais by low-loader. He said he was hoping to find a boatyard to modify the bow, as he thought that would cure the problem that he could not control the boat if he opened up the engine - I'm not sure on what basis he came to that conclusion.

Can't see the logic of that - even short locks here are 39m! We saw a Liverpool Boats thingy a few days with similar dimensions and a 60 hp engine - he could not go much more than tickover without it being absolutely uncontrollable. He was thinking of having some sort of modification to the bow, but I was not convinced. I guess Piper's boats have rather better under water shape though. If France is a thought, don't forget you have some serious waters here where you do actually get to use your engine. I'm not sure about a 3KVa genny and 3kw inverter - seems a bit lop sided to me. Certainly you don't want an enormous genny or it seldom gets enough work, but I went for 5KVa one. I fitted a 1500W Mastervolt sine-wave inverter, on the basis that that was adequate for all daily use including usual electric tools. For more pokey stuff like washing machine, iron etc we then run the generator (or use shore power when we have it available). I did put in two wiring circuits - one connected only to the inverter, with one pattern of face plate, and other switchable between generator or shore power with a different face plate. We have a 24v x 650ah domestic battery bank of 2v deep cycle cells. This set-up has worked extremely well for the 15 years we've used it - we live aboard much of the time, cruising France and Belgium mostly, and running a barge handling school.

If you're a graphic designer and photographer then you presumably already know that Apples win hands down for this. We've always used Apples, and currently each of us has a G4 laptop. We spend most of our time on board our barge cruising France/Belgium and Holland. Our cruising area is irrelevant, but it does confirm that you can do the same thing anywhere. We have a Mastervolt sine wave inverter. We write articles for various magazines, and I've written a book on the rules of the road on European canals for the RYA. We keep our accounts for the taxman, produce all the paperwork for our barge handling school, including our website on iWeb, and have a Canon printer with scanner built in. Basically we can do anything we used to do when we had land based office facilities. We do have a Lacie for back-up, and with the power of our G4 there is nothing much a desk-top machine could do that we can't do on board. We can also take it around if we have to. I have a Microsoft Office for Apple program, but in fact it is very convoluted and I've not made hardly any use of it.

Helming??? !!!!!!!

I'd certainly want to try to find out the cause of the failure. Otherwise there is the risk of the whole thing happening again in the near future.

A mooring operator would not be happy. If the occupier gives him grief he has little recourse if the mooring agreement is with someone else, i.e. the boat owner. The boat owner is also very vulnerable. If you rent out rooms and a tenant refuses to pay or trashes the room, it is again virtually impossible to do anything about it, certainly not in a hurry (unless you have heavy friends in the mafia, perhaps). With a boat the risks are infinitely greater. With a room, at least you do probably get it back at the end of a lengthy and expensive court procedure. Boats can easily be sunk, or even 'disappeared' - ask the owners of Que Sera.

We used to use the half-tide grid at Strand-on-the-Green on the Thames quite often. You get about 8 hours between tides, which is plenty for black varnish or whatever. We've used various draw docks as well (ramps to allow carts/trucks to go onto the foreshore to transfer cargo from lighters), but you can't clean and paint the bottom then. edited to add piccies - and to note that with portable plant you can do welding and similar maintenance jobs too. We did take narrowboats out onto the river, but I've not got photos handy. Our little coaster Swiftwood is on the Putney drawdock, and our 80' barge Friesland on the grid at Kew just before we took it (Friesland - the grid is still where it belongs!) to France/

If you are saying you have oil coming out of the exhaust(?) this would normally be coming past the oil scraper ring on the piston

Very sorry to hear you might have to come back to rejoin the yokels you escaped from, but from what comes over about you in your mail, I think the answer might be "YES".

QUOTE Significant boat impact damage has caused the cill to become cracked and loose, resulting in a potential hazard to navigation. Localised dewatering is required to enable BW staff to take measurements in order to fabricate a new cill. The navigation will be closed from 7am to 11am to facilitate this. Boaters are requested to be cautious when approaching the bottom gates. I still can't for the life of me understand how boat impact can happen to the BOTTOM cill.

Don't really know what a helm shelter is. We had our rainshed passed on to us by boatman Fred Dell when BW paid off the last three pairs of boats out of Brentford. It was basically four bits of ply or similar, about two foot square - three of these would stand up around the hatches,held in position linked by hooks and eyes. The front one had a "postbox" size slot to allow forward vision, but it did not help when our dogs took to peering in at us on the cabin top from time to time. The fourth one was covered in roofing felt or similar to make it rain proof, and clipped onto the top, again with hooks and eyes. This had an optional piece of canvas that hung down to close off the back as well. The whole thing could be erected in a matter of minutes, and took very little room when dismantled. The cabin stove provided plenty of warmth as well. All these clothing ideas sound great, but seem to me to make it difficult to get around the locks easily and quickly. Pete Thompson of Uxbridge did film one entire trip of us doing barrels during which we did use them at one point, but I've not come across any photos otherwise - perhaps photographers were just not around when it was p*ssing with rain and you had to keep the boats a-going. It is a "to do" project to turn his film into DVD when time becomes available. Now we are in France with a barge we can at last join Phylis with a comfortable wheelhouse etc etc. Also the locks are all automatic, so you barely have to leave your creature comforts to investigate the weather at all - boring, isn't it.

!! Not sure about this "tie up" stuff when you're wet through. Just grin and bear it, and keep a-going - certainly though hang the donkey jacket in the engine hole to dry off a bit over night. Mind you, with the stove putting heat up your left trouser leg when you're stood in the hatches it was not so bad. Also we used rain sheds - a four part device that made front, two sides, and roof over the hatches, which kept most of the rain and snow off anyway. The old-style working boat design was a lot more functional than modern cruiser or semi-trod - semi-trod, what's that then?

We bought the sunken 74' x 12'6" wooden wideboat "Progress" on the BW dredging tip at the Slough Cut end in 1961, and after converting it to live/cruise on went down the Slough Arm to the basin at the end a couple of times in the early-mid 60s. We also went a couple of times when we had to back up and swing just beyond Iver Boatyard, as weed and debris deposited by the local didicoi encampment made further journeying impossible. However the arm was never "closed", just a bit difficult to get along. John Wooley was an accountant who lived on the wooden boat "Hetty" in the Harefield Flash before buying Iver Boatyard from Stan? Woodward in the late 60s. As well as building wooden craft he started a hire fleet, using concrete narrow boats. The fore ends of these suffered badly when hirers reached the tee junction with the mainline at Cowley. The Slough cut is so straight and boring that it was easy to go to sleep at the tiller, and then hirers finally had to wake up and do something to get round the 90 degree turn - not many succeeded. There have also been repeated efforts to get the Slough cut extended to join the Thames, and in the 60s this would have been relatively simple if the will had been there. Neville Long who ran the horse drawn hotel boat "Pamela" was a prime mover in this, along with other canal stalwarts such as Lord St Davids.

As I understand it the M.O.D. paid him good money to get the name Ironclad for one of their ships. It was on the official Register of Shipping, and any vessel on this must have a unique name - hence the Navy's problem. When we bought her there had been a break in the paperwork trail of owners, and we were not able to easily have her registered in our name. She still had "Ironclad" carved into the bow, and we operated her for some years with that name at the fore end and Cadellis at the stern.

We had three L&L shortboats (plus 1 long one - Cadellis). Probably pushing it to say it was carriage, but when the New Covent Garden Soup Co moved to new premises in Acton in 1989 they bought a 40 foot cooling tunnel from Germany. They then found they could not get it into their factory by road. Helicopter had been suggested, but they then came to us and we breasted Mersey and Ribble and welded rsj's across them. The tunnel was craned on athwartships at the nearest point where there was road access (and no bridges between us and their site!). We simply motored gently along to their quay, using our Bantam pusher tug to give perfect control of the operation, winched it off on rails and into the back of the factory. Ribble was at one time BWB's tripboat Fair Lady, and Mersey still had the name Arthur at the fore end from John Lily's ownership.

The fact that you say it is oily water seems to suggest that water is getting in between the two layers of plate in the engine compartment.

On being berated by a fisherman for disturbing the fish, "Oh it's alright. I keep my propellor wrapped in a plastic bag".

To flesh out its history: Nigel Carter who owned Ash at Benbow Bridge had a penchant for big (and dare I say it, rather ugly) craft. He subsequently owned the George and Mary built by the Uxbridge Steel Barrel Company. He bought Ash from Lord St. Davids, among other things founder of the Pirate Club at Camden. I think there are others on this forum who might have knowledge of how St. Davids acquired it. We sold it in the late 60s on behalf of the woman who bought it from Nigel, and it went onto the Basingstoike Canal.

What commercial craft are we actually talking about here? I would guess it is not those floating about on the majority of the UK canal system, where man-overboard drill involves putting your wellies on. Once a boat is operating in water which is too deep for practical use of a boatpole there may well be good reasons for having some mechanical alternative. When they are put to use as an alternative to steering I find it rather sad, as it demeans the art of boating. Perhaps if there were another term for driving a boat with thrusters .......... "I'm taking the boat out for a quick thrust this weekend" ???

This is obviously true, and I'm sure an ex-working narrowboat is far more handy than virtually any modern equivalent. I can understand the viewpoint of a person trying to boat one-handed with a rather crude steel box with little underwater shape, that he might find a bow thruster a handy tool. We never felt the slightest need for a bow-thruster for any of the wide variety of boats we had on UK canals, but did fit one on the 24m barge we now have in France. In reality though, it gets very little use other than as instructor's over-ride during our barging courses to stop trainees bending the boat, and apart from this what rare use it does get is where a boatpole might otherwise have served (had the water been shallow enough for that). What we do see though is people with their new boat over here, using the bow-thruster almost as much as they use their main engine. A child can learn to ride a bike with an outrigger to stop him falling over, but unless he gets rid of that he will never really be able to cycle properly. The trouble with learning to boat when you have a bow-thruster is that it is too expensive to want to discard it and learn to boat properly. At least electric ones do commonly burn out fairly quickly though, which I suppose is one factor in their favour. A bow-thruster should be a tool that is only ever fitted after a person has learnt to boat without one. Otherwise it is a crutch or zimmer frame that prevents the person acquiring any degree of skill or competence.

We (or more correctly Tim Wood, our then partner) converted a Thames lighter for use as a floating puppet theatre by Gren Middleton on the lower G.U. and Thames some 20 years ago. The boat had already been part filled with concrete to serve as a floor for the theatre and give ballast for stability, and it was an extremely heavy craft. We fitted a BMC 1.5 across the very stern, and the hydraulic power unit was fitted into the rudder blade to give very precise steerage, both ahead and astern. It could have had take offs for any number of other applications - anchor winch hoists etc if required. It worked extremely well and has given and still gives stirling service.

Certainly better than fitting something resembling a vent-axia kitchen fan and expecting it to move the fore end of the boat successfully. You could have a separate engine up at the bow, started remotely from the steering position and controlled from there. That would do the trick. You might need a longer boat to accommodate it though .......

Depends which ferry port you have in mind, but Brittany has a lot of excellent cruising waterways. From Calais/Boulogne the nearest is probably Meaux (as of Brie de Meaux cheese fame). The Marne is not particularly fierce except when in flood, and you can saunter gently up into champagne if that is your thing. Don't bother with Épernay itself as it's cr*p, but the smaller villages are terrific, and the local wine's not bad!

Some of this information is dubious. For instance the ICC (Inland) is a visitor's licence for UK nationals, and if you get a Dutch registered vessel and it is kept in Holland you will have to hold a Dutch Vaarbewijs if you wish to cruise it. However you do only say you want it to live on, so even this may not be applicable. The best advice was to join the DBA. Though in reality this is a club for owners of cruising vessels rather than static ones, you will get plenty of relevant information there.