Doug Scullery

If the blacking was applied properly a thin layer of ice won't do anything to it. Maybe once your talking about over a centimeter of ice the blacking becomes a concern, but if a thin layer at the beginning of winter scraped it off I'd be straight down to the boatyard that did it demanding a refund.

I find a generous dollop of washing up liquid breaks the grease down nicely. For anything more ingrained than that I use a mixture of washing up liquid and salt.

I'm getting pretty shattered during this flood business. Does anybody else struggle to sleep on flooded river? This is my first serious flood.

That is brilliant

This is true. That said I've never had a boss who would have said that before. I've worked for him for over a year and a half and I'm basically Mr Reliable, you'd think he'd cut me a bit of slack seeing as the local news is full of flood related disaster stories.

That made me laugh more than the new sitcom I just watched on iPlayer. True story.

Will do. I have to say on a positive not that I've got to know my new neighbors (who arrived from the canal a week ago, baptism of fire!) much better than I likely would have had the weather been calm. Certainly the heavy rain predicted here all day has been much lighter than I expected, which is something of a relief. edit: stupid spelling mistake

So Friday was a bit hairy. According to the Environment Agency site we have had the highest levels ever recorded of 1.96m during the afternoon (although annoyingly they haven't updated the paragraph about the record on the page, you can see on the 48hr graph that it topped it but once that's gone I fear nobody will believe me!). I trust the forum members upstream of me made it through OK? I'm glad I got in my kayak to go to the shop on Thursday night because come Friday I really didn't feel comfortable doing that. What had been a few feet of fairly still floodwater on the land was flowing fast and carrying debris down the bank side of my boat across the land and back into the main river 3 boats down, pretty scary looking. It's gone down dramatically during the night and seems to have stabilised this afternoon, currently on the EA site as 1.38m. However it's been raining lightly all day and I think I've watched it start creeping up again in the last hour or so. So, what to people think we'll be waking up to tomorrow?

That's exactly what I thought when I got that reaction from him.

No shortage of pics. I have also taken a screen grab of the Environment Agency site where it advises against unnecessary travel (I should say at this point, I'm not a doctor or a firefighter or anything, I make paninis for tourists, nobody is going to die because I take a day or two off work). To be honest I think it's an empty threat, buy I need to cover my ass in case he does follow though. I shall attempt to find an email address for HR.

update: I just called my boss to give him a heads up to my possibly not being able to get in tomorrow. He had said (well, the assistant manager said, very apologetically, he didn't have the bottle to speak to me himself) that if I'm off tomorrow it will be treated as an "unauthorised absence which may lead to disciplinary action". He's determined to be a dick about it, I could really use some help with this. Can he really expect me to risk my life to avoid disciplinary action? If I drown trying to get to work can my family sue him?

River is higher than I've ever seen it and still rising. I'm supposed to be at work tomorrow, don't really see that happening. Does anybody know the laws regarding not being able to get to work due to weather? Obviously I'm not sick so legally speaking, what is this?

Cheers Craig, we're all holed up for the night now, it's dropped a wee bit during the day but I'm expecting it'll peak higher tonight than it did last night. A real baptism of fire for our new neighbors!

Oh, hi, you guys must be Toms mates. We've got one of the moorings by him. Good question, I can't say I have an answer but I'm interested to know what others think about this.

River level has been steadily dropping for the last couple of hours, it's probably about 4 inches below its peak this morning. I am quite nervous about this rain that's predicted, I'm gonna have to go out and extend my risers, we were getting uncomfortably close to one of the trees on the bank as it was rising last night. I've been told that the Fire Brigade were out rescuing a friend of a friends boat which is moored to the railings below Churchill Bridge in Bath. It was listing badly being held down by its ropes, apparently they have slacked off the ropes and rigged up some sort of riser, which I believe is above and beyond as there wasn't actually anybody on board in danger.

Currently on Phoebes mooring in Saltford, river level is very high, all the land next to me is under water, the only way on and off the boat is kayak or waders. River level still seems to be rising and more rain is predicted for tomorrow. So how is it elswhere?

A friend of mine has a boat where the gas locker vents are well under the water then the water tank is full, probably an inch or so of water sloshing around the base of the gas bottles. It's never caused him any problems but I certainly wouldn't like it. As others have said I imagine it's a BSS fail (it certainly should be, given the purpose of the vents), but I'm assuming most examiners wouldn't notice provided the tank isn't full on the day of the inspection. edit: typo

There's a few different techniques for this, the most obvious being finding a way to tie up your boat on the swing bridge side of the canal (easier for some bridges than others), there are people who have clever ways of doing it involving ropes and barge poles. Personally, I have always gone with moor up and wait for another boat or a friendly cyclist/pedestrian, this has worked fine every time, except the time that a jogger put her back out, I felt pretty guilty about that.

We had pantry moths earlier this year, turns out the problem was a food packet (Paxo stuffing, I think) that had slipped down into a gap behind one of the kitchen cupboards. Chucked out the offending item and anything else that looked like it had been in the cupboards too long, gave the kitchen a deep clean and no problems since.

I'm assuming you're talking about Dri-Dek or similar, I gotta say I disagree about the comfort thing, we've got in on the bow deck and although it's not a soft surface to stand on it doesn't have the hot/cold problem you get standing on steel. I do love how dry it is to stand on, you can go out for a few minutes in socks in light rain and somehow still come back in without soggy socks, it's quite amazing from that point of view. However it's worth noting that the area under the Dri-Dek was by far the most pitted part of the boat when we painted this year, although I suspect that wouldn't have been such a problem if we'd picked it up and cleaned underneath it more often. The main downside in my opinion is the ridiculously high price, although you can get brandless Chinese stuff for much less.