john6767

I have to say in my limited experience I am very impressed with 3G. From our boat in the marina (Calcutt) I get similar speeds to what I get from home on an "up to 20Meg" connection. From home to the exchange it is about 3 miles (as the crow flies, longer for the cable run), from boat to the mast about 3.5 miles. I was expecting to struggle to get anything from the marina given the distance to the mast, but far from it. True the 3G is less reliable the wired ADSL, dropping out perhaps once or twice a day compared to ADSL one or twice a month if that. The main difference really is the download limit I guess, but that is just commercial not technical, and can easily change.

We passed it at the top of Calcutt locks the afternoon of Thursday 28th, it looked really strange. So does anyone know what it actually does?

Thanks for the suggestions, some food for thought and a bit of hard work to look forward to.

I was going to replace our cratch cover, but have decided to get another year out of the current one. It is a canvas type material, and has quite a lot of green mould on it, from when the boat was sitting on brokerage earlier this year. What is the best product to use for cleaning it?

We have a 12v shoreline (not certain what model though, perhaps 5 years old), and have never noticed any noise from it. So based on a sample of 1, I would have said that they are not all noisy.

It was on Sunday.

I went past last Sunday 10th Oct, still exactly the same as in the above pictures.

Does anyone keep a low level electric heater on over winter to prevent freezing. If so any suggestions as to what type of heater to buy?

Looking at the photo of MJG's rear fender, the chain fixing points look quite close together, which is how ours are. For that reason I decide that a tipcat arrangement would not work, and went with a single large fender as a direct replacement for what was on (and much worse than one one here I might add). Was that a correct assertion, or is it still possible to make tipcats work when the fixing point are closer together that the length of a tipcat, (22" or 24" if I remember correctly).

Not related to survey, but make certain the Saga meets your needs. When I rang up earlier in the year for a quote from them and asked questions about the extent of covert with respect to a) towing/being towed, and travelling at night, it was not clear that they covered either of those things. Whilst I don't particularly plan on doing them, it seemed a bit limiting when there were others who came out cheaper and had no problems with those. Perhaps as with all insurance the only true test is when you have to claim.

Quite..... no one said this stuff was easy, or obvious, but working in software development you get used to this sort of fun and games Anyway it is most certainly the Skpe add-on for IE that is doing that, moments after my last post I saw one appear. It depend on the time/date of the posting, making it what the plugin thinks is a UK phone number (assuming you have UK as your default of the plugin). So an example is a post time of "Sept 02 2010 08:28pm" which gets picked up by the Skype plugin as a phone number of "02 2010 08". I suspect the day needs to be 01 02 07 etc for this to happen. If you want to keep the plugin turning off the number hilighting does stop it doing that. Anyway back to Google Chrome for me......

If you are using IE and you have Skype and the Skype add-on for Internet Explorer installed then it could be that. You can turn off the number highlighting in the Skype add-on if you don't want it to do that. I don't normally use IE and do have Sykpe, but I have to admit that I could not reproduce this with the forum, but have seen do this on other pages.

As this thread proves, each to their own. Springers, good for keeping an eye on those pesky ducks.

We passed you on Saturday afternoon on the lower part of Atherstone locks. I believe I gave you (guessing it was you in retrospect) the standard grunt as you passed my on the towpath and I was getting back on the boat to go into the lock your boat had just come out of. It was not until I passed your boat I realised the name, and at that point the heavens opened big time. When I was in the lock I looked round and your boat we nicely across the cut , so I guess the sudden downpour caught your wife out too! When we were looking for marinas we looked within an hour radius of home (Solihull ) and Mercia at 50 mins looked quite promising for a while. In the end we decided we did not want to start out on the "northern" canals and settled for more home turf on the GU at Calcutt instead. In terms of the facilities I don't think you can really fault Mercia, and it was not expensive in comparison with others either.

We came down Spon Lane locks on Sunday afternoon, and the pound between the bottom and middle locks was the clearest I think I have ever seen on a canal. Did not notice fish, but you could clearly see the weed and the rubbish on the bottom! However bellow the bottom lock it was the opposite,a dirty oily mess and the black slick we churned up as as we made the tight turn left on to the New Main Line was horrible.

There are lots of sources of information on this, but a good overview can be had here

I didn't believe you could do it on line if it is a change of ownership, at least that is what BW told me. I was told you have to use the paper form in that first instance.

No idea if it really matters if the name matches what is painted on the boat, we were lucky the name was not written on ours. All you do on the licence form is above where you put the boat name you write "rename from [old_name] to new name" and in the name box put the new name you want to call it. That is what BW customer service told me to do and it certainly worked, the new licence came with the new name on it.

I would say as soon as its yours. We took ownership of our boat on Friday 25 June, and the license expired at the end of June. I took the form into the Fradley office on Monday 28 June, and the license finally arrived last Thursday 29th July. So basically a month from applying to getting the license. I did change the boat name at the same time, so I don't know if that prolonged the time taken. The only real benefit from taking into a BW office it that you go get a receipt to display on the boat while you are waiting for the license to come; looks a bit better than the classic "license applied for" on a scrap of paper!