Jump to content

The Modern Boater


Tuscan

Featured Posts

52 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

I had a very fine time in the 90s 

 

I've been canaling since the early 70's and would say that mid 80's to mid 90's was th best experience, with regard to the balance of maintenance, number of boats and lack of hassle.

  • Greenie 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

I've been canaling since the early 70's and would say that mid 80's to mid 90's was th best experience, with regard to the balance of maintenance, number of boats and lack of hassle.

It was probably best that I never went anywhere near a canal at the time :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, tree monkey said:

I had a very fine time in the 90s 

 

I had a very fine time just last summer!

 

Spent all of July and August on the boat with 4 weeks on the Thames and 2 * 2 weeks on the South Oxford. 

 

No unpleasant experiences at all as far as I can remember.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Sea Dog said:

But, if you remain open to it, someone lovely will be along shortly to restore your faith in human nature. Only if you remain open to it mind, otherwise you'll find you somehow keep meeting gits. ;)

 

Funny you should say that. Feeling very disgruntled at having a lock turned on us because we were 'only a hire boat' we were operating the paddles when a lady with a windlass popped up from under the bridge saying 'isn't it a lovely day!'

 

She was right, you know

 

 

  • Greenie 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

A day of boating encountering the odd inconsiderate person is better than not boating at all.

Surely one of the pleasures is the adventures, stories and characters boating furnishes us with.

Remember that today will always be 'the good old days' to some :)

Rog

  • Greenie 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

Its the result of an ever increasing population stuffed into the same amount of space. 

 

Rats develop similar social structures to humans and experiments show (IIRC) that the more dense a scientist makes a rat population, the less they cooperate and the more they fight with each other.

 

Seems to me this is what's happening here in the UK. Trouble is, governments of all hues far prefer a growing population to tax and control than a shrinking one, so they all encourage methods of expanding the population and packing us in ever more densely, whatever they might say to the contrary. 

 

 

As  an aside from this excellent thread...

the overcrowding and concomitant behaviour is one of the main reasons why people leave the UK. Another reason was amply put to me by my wife yesterday tea time, who came back from the car with my car key in her hand, and said do you want your key back? Mystified, I said yes, at which point she said good, because I found it in the ignition, with the radio still on. I’d last been in the car early that day....I do have previous on this, having once leant out of an upstairs window and wondered what was sticking out of the car door, and yes it was the key, had been there all night. Middle of a small town, very safe place!

My earliest boating was in the late 80s, and it was very rare to come across gits on the canals I used (midlands mainly). Last boated about 4 years ago and have to say there are more people, and thus more gits than there used to be, and because there are more people, the gits inconvenience a lot more people.

Name and shame is good.

  • Greenie 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Its not just gits boating on the canals though. In all walks of life there are more awkward beggars making life unpleasant for the rest. 

I dealt with the general public in a service industry most of my working life. In the '60s and '70s it was fun, I enjoyed it. We made plenty of money without too much trouble.

In the '80s we began to get some difficult customers, more demanding and less reasonable. 

By the end of the '80s we were regularly getting insulted, sworn at, and some physical violence too. the Lottery winners, celebrities, smart immigrants, drug dealers, benefit cheats etc. were horrible to do business with.

In the '90s it became intolerable, you could not reason with many people The " I know my rites" brigade dominated, many stopped paying their bills because they could "get away with it" , we were sueing more and more to get our fair wage.

In the early '00s we gave in and retired early, it was just too unpleasant a way to make a living.

Now some of these rear passage orifices are on boats, they should me named and shamed.

The worst offender I came across has now thankfully died on his boat so I will not speak ill of the dead.

 But in future I will note them and shame them.

Edited by Boater Sam
added more
  • Greenie 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Then there's the "Slow-Down Brigade".

We came by Gayton visitor moorings a week or so ago. On tick-over, moored boats either side of us.  I saw the git ahead sitting in the front of his boat giving us the stare and knew exactly what was coming. He clearly sits there waiting for boats to come through so he can shout at them to slow down. Sue's response is to greet him with a cheery "Good afternoon, what a lovely day" which throws him as he is expecting to get in to a heated exchange no doubt.  He must have had a field day when the hire-fleet turned out from Gayton Marina!

 

  • Greenie 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, roland elsdon said:

Emigrating does not help. The problem follows you went to victoria 2005 population  5m now 6.5m

used to be livable now overcrowded and full of drunken drugged gits

Couple of hundred years ago it was full of thieves and murderers. They went there by the ship load 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Stilllearning said:

I got shouted at for going too fast past a long line of moored boats a few years ago. I was going fast, the alternative was to hit every boat as there was a howling gale blowing from the right that would have pushed me straight onto the boats moored on my left. 

 

 

Don't let it get to you. There are people about who will yell at you to slow down whatever speed you are doing. They just like yelling at passing boaters, a bit like the way some dogs bark at anything. 

 

If you slam the boat into full astern, reverse back up to them and say 'sorry, what were you saying? I couldn't quite hear', they tend to say something else I have found on a couple of occasions. 

 

 

 

 

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, dogless said:

A day of boating encountering the odd inconsiderate person is better than not boating at all.

Surely one of the pleasures is the adventures, stories and characters boating furnishes us with.

Remember that today will always be 'the good old days' to some :)

Rog

 

You find grumpy, idiotic, terminally stupid (see what I did there) people everywhere.

 

I don't think that canals especially attract them or change normal folk into 'gits'. It's more that we have relaxed our guard when boating so are perpetually surprised when we encounter them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Chris Williams said:

So, you have tried doing it?

Sugar in the diesel is also good.

And could get you prosecuted for criminal damage. I don't know what the answer to these inconsiderate folks is - I suspect there isn't one. :(

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Sea Dog said:

And could get you prosecuted for criminal damage. I don't know what the answer to these inconsiderate folks is - I suspect there isn't one. :(

 

 

Untying the lines of a boat running its engine well into the night then giving it a gentle push off, or even bow hauling it 100 yards then just leaving it to drift, would perhaps go un-noticed by the selfish and anti-social TV-watcher inside.... and could hardly constitute crim dam. 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, this is all a bit of a giggle - there comes a time for every generation, at about the time they've reached a certain age, when they start to moan and grumble about the generations younger than them. Forgetting that they themselves are the parents or grandparents of these selfish and entitled little ne'er-do-wells, that it was their job to pass on their values, so is it the selfishness of the younger generations or the parenting skills of the older ones. Of course it would never be your children who did this so it could never actually be your parenting skills, obviously. 

 

And then there are all those pesky people who keep encroaching upon the space of the grumpy old generations who then grumbles that "everybody else" had four, five, and six kids, who went on to have four, five, and six kids and now look at it, the country and canals are overrun with the grubby oiks, and "it's all their fault, innit", and "this isn't the world we created now is it". :rolleyes:

 

 

Just musings really......

 

 

 

  • Greenie 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

We've all got tales of ignorant boaters, and I'm sure that some of us have unwittingly fallen into that same category without realising it at the time or sometimes for very good reasons, such as speeding because its unsafe to go slower, as has already been highlighted on an earlier post.

 

My most recent example of being on the receiving end of such ignorance, or in this case, selfishness (is there a difference?) happened last summer. One morning I was helping to move a boat back to its home mooring when we arrived at a lock to find a pair of "liveaboards" tied up on the approach bollards leaving our steerer hanging in midstream whilst we turned the lock. A guy came out of the pair apologising as they'd only arrived late the night before. I bit back a retort as I was a guest on the boat we were moving, because I'd come across this same pair tied up on the approach bollards of another lock a few weeks earlier whilst cruising my own boat, the same guy came out & gave the exact excuse, word for word.

 

I'm no longer boating now, that experience I've just related was the last of a fairly long list of things that have changed our waterway life over the last few years which have made me realise that I've enjoyed some of the best years on our canals & the time was right to give it all up. It wasn't planned, many circumstances dictated that the end was nigh, so, as cruising was not really much fun anymore, we sold the boat. I won't bore you with all the reasons, but I suppose the saddest thing is that we don't miss it, but then there are still towpaths to walk and we can still get our waterways fix whenever we like.

 

Cheers all.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.