Marina unsealed!

 It's official! The stop planks sealing Cropredy marina from the canal are to be removed this week.  Don't get excited though because the canal itself outside the marina is only navigable between Cropredy lock and Broadmoor lock, a distance of about 800 metres, and even then there's nowhere to turn a boat round, so we won't be venturing out yet awhile.

However many boaters in ther marina will be glad because they will also remove the stop planks between the three basins, so those who have been sealed off from the service pontoon in the main basin will at last be able to visit the diesel pump and the toilet pump out machine. Deep joy I imagine.

The irony is that as far as I can tell, the stop planks haven't done any good anyway as very time I've looked at them the water has been at the same height on either side. In fairness to CRT though, it might have been a different story if the canal pound outside the marina had drained or dried out.

In about three weeks time CRT plans a temporaty reopening of the whole canal to let those poor folk stranded away from their base to get back to their home mooring. It will be only temporay though as the feeder reservoirs are still extremely low.  At least one of the reservoirs feeding our bit of canal is still so low that the water doesn't even reach the spillway into the canal.  What's more the recent rainy spell seems to have stopped now and we're not due any serious rasin in the next couple of weeks at least.

Nevertheless we do plan to go and stay on Herbie later this week to get a couple of jobs done, one of which is to measure up a template for the tonneau cover we intend to make.  I now have a cunning plan for the hoops we need to give the cover a rain shedding arched profile.  Some bendy wooden slats held in an arch like an archer's bow.  Instead of a bow string there will be nylon straps with a buckle in the middle.

This sort of thing:

Using these, we can adjust the length and tension and also release the strap to let the slats lie straight for storage.  That's the plan anyway. We'll do a trial run this week. Wish us luck.

Hoop La

 The best ideas are always stolen. Adam has given me food for thought about shedding rain off the rear deck tonneau cover we plan to make. Thanks Adam.  Of course he knows more than most of us about narrowboat designs, having been Canal Boat magazine's boat reviewer for a long time. He says some boats support their tonneau covers using a system of curved slats.  Of course. Doh! There's me thinking about a tent ridge pole when at home I have a couple of tents that use fibreglass hoops to support the roof. In fact nearly all modern tents do that. Ridge poles went out of fashion a long time ago.

Hoops do require two things to be effective.

1. a firm anchor at their ends and

2. the fabric to be stretched reasonably tightly between the hoops i.e. at right angles to them

We would I suppose need two or three hoops to do the job and I would need to make some sort of brackets to hold their ends firmly, Thinking about our tents, which have quite flimsy but strong fabric, the lightness of the fabric is a help in avoiding puddles forming as it flaps a little bit in the wind.

Val Poore (Hi Val)  asks about the fabric we use. Its a finely woven fabric with some sort of waterproof impregnation on one side.   Its light but strong and comes in a range of colours.We got ours on Amazon, where there are several suppliers. Just search for waterproof canvas. Here's a screen shot of one of them

In other news: Our " little" grand daughter Grace is 18 years old tomorrow.  Where did all that time go?

Here she is at her last years birthday with big brother Jacob

Grand Designs mark II

Sometimes it takes two goes to get something right. Just ask Spacex!

Three years ago we made a rain cover for Herbie's side hatch doors. Here it is:

Good quality waterproof fabric with the cunning ruse of sewing magnets into the border seams.  

It worked a treat and cured the leaks of rainwater we were previously getting from the edges of the doors. It was simple to attach and remove too.

Then in sometime in the winter of 2023 it disappeared, presumably ripped off by one of the winter gales. So we're going to make another, still using magnets on the sides and at the bottom, but this time Ime going to use eyelets and turn buttons at the top.

The water proof fabric did what it said on the tin and was not expensive so we'll use the same.

This is all a pretty simple job, but we fancy having a crack at another, more ambitious, mark II.

The tonneau cover over the rear deck.

We did inherit one when we bought Herbie and it stood in good stead for some years. However it had one crucial fault. Puddles of rain would collect on top of it. Then in the winter of 2019 the puddle got so big that when I baled it out with a saucepan I calculated that the water weighed a hundredweight!

As you can see the poor old tonneau cover was stretched mightily and not long after that, after more heavy rain, it catastrophically tore apart. I vowed at the time that if we got or made another, we would rig up some sort of ridge pole so that the water would run off the sides rather than collect in the middle.  We still have hooks on the side of the boat to secure the bungee chords and there are some turn buttons on the roof just forward of the rear hatch, so that's our starting point.  

The difficult bit is going to be getting the geometry right and our plan is to bodge up a template using an old sheet which we can drape in situ and then tailor to fit.  I can put a bracket on the hatch lid to hold one end of the ridge pole but I'm not sure yet about supporting the other end. maybe some supporting A frame or simply a 'tent pole' standing on the deck. Hmmm, I could I suppose make a slat across the rear deck with a hole in it to locate the foot of the tent pole.  (I'm thinking as I write here folks!).  Actually I have a few old tent poles in the shed at home. I'll have a rummage and see what I can find.  See, this is one benefit of writing things down in a blog post; it gives you ideas.

Kath of course will be the sewmeister with her trusty sewing machine. One problem is that the fabric can't be bought wide enough to do the job without a seam, but having been campers for many years, we now about seam sealants so I'm sure we can amange that.

Stay tuned, but don't hold your breath. This looks like a non trivial task and could take some time.  There might well end up being a mark III before we get it right.

Is a shiny roof a good thing?

Is a glossy boat roof a bad thing because of the sun's reflections dazzling the helmsman?  I'd be glad if anyone can enlighten me.  

We've always gone for a matt or satin surface, mostly raddle, but I have a suspicion that it might not be so hard wearing and is more susceptible to grime.  I do notice that when we wash Herbie's roof that the run off water takes on some of the raddle colour. I don't know, but I imagine a gloss surface might not do that so much.

The gentleman a few boats across from Herbie has just repainted his roof with International Toplac Plus which is a more modern formulation with the advantage that you can just roller it on withouth having to lay it off with a brush.  He certainly made short work of it and got a good finish with just a foam roller.  It does however produce a gloss finish.

I know some hire fleets use gloss paint on their roofs, Wyvern and Heyford spring to mind.  These folks would go for hard wearing I suppose.

If anyone can venture an informed opinion, I'm all ears.

It would take a great deal of persuasion for me to change from Craftmaster paints on the cabin sides, which are of course gloss. It's such lovely stuff to paint with and goes on easier and covers better than anything else I have tried.  However, I have a problem because they no longer offer the Light Grey colour we previously used, and I don't have sufficient left of the old paint to complete the job. I suspect they might have abandoned that shade because it did change colour after a while, presumambly from the action of UV light.  Our old Light Grey has taken on a distinctly blue hue.  

I some lights it can look extraordinarily blue like here:

That was at our lovely mooring spot at Ventnor marina, which wasn't so lovely in that that flippin' weeping willow tree draped wet leaves all over the roof in winter and played havoc with the paintwork.  Which brings me back to my earlier question. Would a hard gloss finish survive that sort of thing better?