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Keeping Up

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Everything posted by Keeping Up

  1. We've been trapped by reversed locks on the Nene and Ouse several times but the only 2 relevant things I can think of from my own experiences on the Nene were (1) going upstream when it was in flood so far over the top gates that getting into the lock was quite a challenge, and there was no need for top paddles because the lock had filled before I had finished winding down the lower guillotine and (2) going downstream through Ditchford lock which has a radial bottom gate when an EA rep opened all the top paddles fully behind us and said "Just open the lower gate all the way up and you'll still be able to get under it ok"; he was right but we really shot out of the lock when I untied the rope (we had to use the rope to hold usback while we opened the gate). On most rivers, of course, including those from a canal to a river, the rule is to leave gates open behind you. On the GU, for years after the introduction of the rule to close all gates behind you, there was an exception that it was normal to leave the top gates open behind you between London and Berkhamstead - ie the section which was designated as a broad canal, unlike from there northwards which is still officially a narrow canal.
  2. Yes indeed, thanks. Original now edited.
  3. Both of the Huawei tablets that I mentioned above, will happily take a SIM SD card which can be used for the storage of pictures, music, etc; however there is no facility to enable the transfer of any apps to it.
  4. How old is it, or which model? I have a Huawei T3-10 which, since last year's updates, is almost completely filled up by its own operating system and the "essential" apps that cannot be uninstalled. Nothing can sensibly be done with it. I made the mistake of replacing it with a more modern Huawei, forgetting that they are no longer allowed to access the Google Play Store so their range of apps is very limited.
  5. I won't tell the whole story again, it's easy to find several tellings of it by searching if you really want to. However I can say that I have photos that I took for myself at the time of the first survey, showing hardly any pitting, and then 2 years later showing massive pitting. So the phenomenon was real, and is still unexplained.
  6. Yes it went from 6mm to 2mm in about 18 months (quote from the surveyor, "at this rate you'll soon be the proud owner of a 70ft submarine" but we never established the true cause. It may have been other boats electric worms, or an electrical supply fault (they did admit to putting 30v down the earth line for a while), or stray electrical currents possibly through the exhaust system to the engine block, or something non-electrical such as pollution in the water, or something else entirely. We will never know - we re-wired the boat, put an isolating transformer in the supply, etc etc, and had no more problems after the re-plating.
  7. Sounds promising. Fingers crossed that it works OK for you.
  8. They are a bit of a nuisance too, they have a habit of cutting off the supply at times when they shouldn't, such as if you turn on the tap on the gas bottle too quickly instead of just a little bit at a time.
  9. Another vote for the Nasa BM2. It uses voltage to estimate SoC when discharging, and counts amp-hours when charging. Provided that you remember to reset the Ah counter to zero after charging and to regularly recalibrate the nominal capacity at least monthly (for example by setting it to show 100% when you know from the charge current that the batteries are genuinely fully charged) then it will actually give remarkably accurate displays of all parameters including SoC the whole time - as well as showing you what is the actual battery capacity. Add to that the ease of reading the display from a distance, it really is very good.
  10. This post cannot be displayed because it is in a forum which requires at least 10 posts to view.
  11. Back in the late 1960s we were on a hire boat and arrived at Foxton locks to find the side-ponds empty. We opened some paddles then heard a shout and saw a man standing on a bulldozer in the middle of the now-flooded pond. He had been digging out the silt from the side-ponds, and now we had stranded him. Getting the boat through the locks as quickly as possible, we then drained the side-pond for him again and he came over to 'discuss' with us the benefits of keeping our eyes open while locking.
  12. The underwater profile is also different north of Berkhamstead. The width from bank to bank is the same but the deep channel is narrower and would have needed re-profiling before any significant usage by widebeam boats could have been implemented. Maybe they built bridges and tunnels wider because subsequent modification would have been more difficult than merely digging out the earth channel?
  13. But only from London to Berkhamstead
  14. Indeed. If you cut away all the steelwork for the full length of the boat, and take away the internal fit out, then remove the engine and gearbox, there is really not a lot left. The quoted article is scaremongering at its best, designed to promote the self-interests of various interested groups. Overplating, when carried out by an experienced and capable professional repairer, is a perfectly good technique. But there are also quite a few bodgers out there. The problem is, how do you tell which is which?
  15. I'd be very happy to help you. Highly experienced (over 50 years) and willing to drive up and do a car shuffle first. I'll send you a PM.
  16. And yet we got a good signal from our Omnimax on about 90% of the network that we travelled, both in towns and in remote countryside including virtually the whole of the GU (except the Leicester line), W&B, T&M, BCN, Oxford, Coventry, Shroppie, & Llangollen. Obviously there were occasional dead spots on all, but the only major exceptions were the southern S&W and the Caldon
  17. We've been to the Great Western several times, the last being just a few weeks ago. Good beer, friendly service, and excellent food every time.
  18. It depends much on who did the overplating, and how well. If it was done by a well known and highly experienced professional boatyard, and was properly surveyed both before and after the overplating (with the paperwork to support that) then the value of a boat should not be reduced just because the work has been done. Our own 67ft boat, which was 30 years old and had been properly overplated as well as being meticulously maintained throughout its life, sold for that price within just a few hours of being advertised and the buyer's surveyor said it was well worth it.
  19. I don't think the bars were fitted to protect the cabin tops, they were there to protect the passengers. They were hurriedly fitted (it may even have been made mandatory on hire boats for a while?) after somebody was killed when a hire boat drove into a swing bridge on the K&A while they were standing in the front cockpit area.
  20. On Canal Plan, look at your Preferences page and on the Speeds tab select "Never" for Seaways and maybe Tidal Rivers too. It will then show you the alternative routes.
  21. No, it wasn't modified, that's just what happened anyway. The bottom was completely flat. In fact the chines (where the sides met the bottom) had worn away after years as a hire boat on the Llangollen and Shroppie, so strip of angle had been welded along them.
  22. We had one of those, see here, and we loved her. Yes the biggest weak point was the joint where the top met the sides; I never did seal all the leaks despite using tube after of sealant, so as soon as it started raining we knew where immediately to place saucepans to catch the drips. Also the screws through the roof and up into the handrails were a weak point (the rail once snapped off so I fell into the canal while still holding it in my hand) but that was easy to fix. Later models had a modified roof design with built in upstands so that the rail could be a straight pole. On the plus side the GRP was a sandwich made of two thin sheets of GRP holding a layer of foam which provided extremely good thermal insulation, unlike most similar boats of the time which were just a single layer of GRP which on its own is very cold in winter. The wet bilge was never a problem, and never caused a dampness issue in the living area. We also loved the way it allowed such a low floor in the cockpit area, so that there was good headroom even when the cratch covers were in place (it became our children's favourite space). In particular the air-cooled SR3 used to suck air right through the boat's bilge and thus ensured that the bilge remained mainly dry (especially once we had fitted a shower drain pump instead of having the soapy water drain into the bilge)
  23. Before powered boats the rules were set according to the wind direction (starboard tack has right of way etc) then at first "steam gives way to sail" was adequate, but eventually new rules were needed. An idiot official in the Admiralty (whose name I forget) who had never been to sea, decreed that the rule in the Thames Estuary should be that ships heading out to sea should drive on the right and ships coming in from the sea should drive on the left (or maybe it was the other way round). It took 3 head-on collisions and about 30 lives lost before he admitted that perhaps he had made a slight mistake.
  24. After 30,000 miles on Keeping Up (plus a fair few thousand before that on previous boats) we had been everywhere that we wanted to go many times - on 2000 miles of waterway that's 15 times each place on average. We had in fact covered all but 6.5 miles of the waters that we could reach, and realised we were getting bored! Add to that our increasing sense of frustration with CRT's growing contempt in their attitudes both towards boaters and towards the need for maintenance to keep canals navigable, as well as our frustration at the increasingly crowded state of the canals which made mooring in our chosen places more and more difficult, and we were strongly driven to sell the boat. CRT were very quick and efficient in giving us our licence refund, but spoiled it by then setting their debt collection department on to us for owing them that exact amount!
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