Keeping Up

It's all so confusing around there! When we set out from Sharpness once we met a cruiser who had come down the Avon from Stratford to Tewkesbury, then down the Severn, and was heading for Portishead so he could rejoin the Avon there and thus travel back up to Stratford.

SECONDED !!!

I agree with you 100%. For exactly the same reason, after we have completed one final trip next month, there will also be a 67ft NB available (with all bells and whistles)

You didn't need a dipstick with a Lister. If it had enough oil, it smoked; if it stopped smoking, that meant it had run out of oil.

Maybe the drive plate or possibly the gearbox.

We normally leave a couple of fan-heaters set to frost protection level for the whole winter, they normally use between £35 and £50 of electricity for the whole period, depending on the weather. Unfortunately this year at some point the thermostat on one of them went wrong and so we are due a bill for about £150.

There is one just a few miles further south, near Simpson

It's the end of an era ...

I once sat opposite a group of Americans in the bar of the Boat Inn there, and heard one of them ask what "legging" was all about. I solemnly explained that to get the boats through the tunnel they trained the horses to lie on their backs on top of the boat so they could propel it by walking along the roof of the tunnel. They believed every word of it.

We moved here to MK (next to bridge 83) over 30 years ago, and we still love it!

Yes a full length boat sinks by 1" per ton, so this one should go down by 2" per ton, but if they are all near the stern you should manage to sink that end by more than 3" per ton; and you get about 12 people per ton, so you could push the stern down by 6" with maybe 24 people. We once "recruited" 20 people from a road in Birmingham, and they all thought it was great fun to stand on our boat and get us through a bridge!

I like it, let's keep that rumour going!

The most convenient supermarket is at Wolverton; there are plenty of other shops nearby too. You can easily moor, almost anywhere, depends what you are looking for. It's nice by Campbell Park with a pleasant uphill stroll into the City Centre (though MK isn't really a city), but everywhere has good piling to moor to & a good towpath. No, there is plenty of space nearly everywhere.

Absolutely! I have the same argument with them every time - plus arguing that as a narrowboat I only need one gate opened at any time. I remember speaking to the (then retired) locky who had first put up signs saying the paddles should be wound down. He had meant that after dropping the paddles (under their own weight, of course) you should check, using the windlass if necessary, that they had seated themselves properly and he was almost screaming with frustration at his signs being mis-interpreted in the way they are now.

Our first encounter with Hatton was in 1969, on a Wyvern Shipping hire-boat. After climbing 19 of them we found there was a stoppage because of a broken paddle so we had to turn around and go all the way back down again!

It's not always that easy. Back when I was a mod I had a running battle with a group of people who continually changed their login names (at any one time they had about 4 names each) and had dynamic IP addresses that changed every time they logged on. Identifying and banning them was a major challenge.

I have another way of testing, without a bubble tester. Once a month I turn off the gas, at the bottle, overnight - without the boiler being lit, of course - and in the morning I look at the auto-changeover valve. If it has not turned red, I know that I don't have a leak.

Once when were moored up for the afternoon, a boat moored behind us and then proceeded to carry a small petrol generator half way alongside us. He placed it right next to our open lounge windows - which was the limit of the length of his extension lead - and started it going. When I remonstrated with him about it, he replied that it was too noisy for him to use it near to his own boat. Strangely enough, every time he returned to his own boat it would mysteriously stop working; after half a dozen times he gave up and carried it away again.

Our 80ft on-line mooring on CRT water is classed by CRT as a small marina, and we have to pay them a fee (roughly equal to the local EOG fee) whether it is full or empty.

That's exactly what the man from Kidde told me, when I queried it.

I remember when they did that on the Norfolk Broads, there was a rush by the various hire companies to scrap old (and sometimes historic) boats in order to licence new ones in their fleets.

When our boat was built, the plate was only just below the water line at the extreme stern. I always reckoned it would be better if it were slightly lower, and this was proved to be the case when the extra weight of overplating lowered it by between 1 & 2 inches. The boat goes slightly faster at the same engine revs, steers more easily and positively, and most of all stops in a much much shorter distance because going into hard reverse doesn't lift it clear of the water to suck air in.

I find that a bicycle cape is perfect on a trad. With the doors shut and the slide pulled half way, not only does all the water run away smoothly but also the inside of the cape fills up with lovely warm air.

Yes, there is a separate image for each month and BST/GMT are highlighted in different colours. I actually centred it on Birmingham but that is near enough for all the English and Welsh canals.

Not unlike my Satellite Sundial, for finding the Sky TV satellite.