Boating–just what the doctor ordered.

Interesting programme on telly last night.  Horizon I think.  For those who didn’t see it, it concerned weight loss and fitness and some new research by academics in various countries that is showing that traditional long held beliefs about fitness and exercise are somewhat askew.  To cut a long story short, it seems that whilst sweating it out in a gym for hours a week does no harm, it is in fact is no better for your general health than a few very short, very intensive bursts of exercise.  In this case the presenter, a doctor, was asked to go flat out (and he really did go hell for leather)  on an exercise bike for three twenty second periods, three times a week.  This it was claimed is all the cardio vascular exercise you need in order to get healthy.

At this point I couldn’t help recalling our descent of the Hatton locks flight last year.  Those big lock paddle mechanisms are just right.  Twenty seconds of lung bursting activity every few minutes.  I have a habit of jokingly chanting “It’s doing me good, it’s doing me good” at such times and now it seems that that might be true.

The other interesting finding of the programme was that sitting still for long periods does you no good.  In fact it can be harmful.  You don’t have to leap about and fling heavy weights all day, just get up and walk about a bit at least every hour.  Even just standing is better than sitting.  Perhaps that’s why my mum lived until she was 94.  She couldn’t sit still for 5 minutes.  Anyway doesn’t all this sound like a day boating?  On your feet all day, frequent opportunities to walk about a bit and occasional bursts of frantic exercise.

Maybe that explains why Kath and I are laid so low with a fluey virus at the moment.  We haven’t been boating since well before Christmas. 

Next time I go off boating, I can say I’m only doing it for health reasons

The difference between buying cars and buying boats

Our family (me , Kath, our daughter Claire and the grandchildren) have all been laid low these past two weeks with some kind of flu like lergy.  In fact it hasn’t gone away yet, we keep having relapses.  That’ll teach us, Kath and I have  been on a weight losing campaign since Christmas –strict healthy eating, exercise and no booze.  There’s a lesson there somewhere. 

However we haven’t been as bad as my poor old car, now ten years old and 130,000 miles.  It nearly had a terminal event last week, a suspected gearbox failure.  At that age we were ready to evoke the Do Not Resuscitate rule as the repair would have cost twice what the car is worth.  I was qetting quotes from recycling yards to take her away.  Then at the last minute I softened, and I sanctioned a short investigative operation at our local garage and it turned out to be just a drive shaft bearing failure, so after a short operation the patient is restored to health.  We have however cruelly decided to get another younger model before the old one costs us any more.

Being house bound with the lergy, I have been car shopping on the net.  Plenty of cars there, ebay, Autotrader etc.  Pretty much like browsing for boats on brokers’ web sites.  Then I came across something quite different.  OK for cars but not for boats.  You see the thing about narrowboats is that almost every one is different.  Granted you can get a standard Liverpool boat or a formulaic Polish jobby, but in general narrowboats are bespoke.  Contrast with cars where companies like Ford churn out hundreds of thousands of identical Focuses (or should that be Foci?).  That’s were Tesco’s come in.  (Bear with me I - have not lost the plot.)

Someone at Tesco has realised that one used low mileage Focus Zetec TDCi estate, say, is much like another.  So much so that if they could assure the customer of the car’s good condition through independent surveys and money back guarantees, they could sell the car unseen. Try that with a boat.  Furthermore, they sell the car before they even receive it!  What they do is get the cars from leasing companies at the end of lease.  The end of lease date is known in advance, and from the service history, the likely mileage is calculated in advance.  The car is advertised on the web at a fixed price(cheaper than forecourts because of the low cost of doing it this  way) and the purchaser puts a £99 deposit on the unseen car which is then taken off the site and allocated to the customer.  The car eventually arrives and the RAC give it a thorough going over (all in the price).  The customer gets the RAC report and if he or she is happy the deal goes ahead, although the customer can first go to inspect the car personally if they like. They can in fact walk away and get their £99 back at any time before they finally commit. Once the customer is happy the fixed price is paid, the customer gets a 7 day money back guarantee and a free short but full warranty to cover any unseens.  Simples.  The testimonials on the web site all say one thing – a scary way to buy a car, but it works and everyone would do it again.

Is this the future of boats sales?  Will Whilton marina advertise a five year old Steve Hudson tug due in shortly and sell it unseen? Hmmm I doubt it somehow.

Hang on though. What about new boats? Well they’re almost all bought unseen aren’t they,  because they are built to order and bespoke.  Compared with buying a used car unseen, having a new boat built for you must be  really scary.  Will the builder go broke half way through?  Many have.  Will the builder produce precisely what you asked for?  Many don’t.  Will the original price hold good until the end? Hardly ever.  (admittedly often the customer’s fault for changing his mind halfway through, or over looking things at the beginning).  Or worse still will the builder turn out to be less than trustworthy?    A certain Mr BH springs to mind.

No, to me, buying a new boat is more scary than buying an unseen used car from Tescos.

The great battery experiment - interim findings

Whilst my heading today might have put off non boating readers, I know I have the rest of you in my grip.  Oooh yes. For a boater it is good to be obsessed about batteries, because unless you are, they will probably fail and let you down when you need them most.  One of the few grumbles I have heard from people with shared boats is that some of the owners don’t know or care about battery maintenance and ruin it for the others.  I’m also quite sure that half the moored boats you see with engines or generators running practically permanently would need to do that if they had looked after their batteries properly.

This week I was sorting out some old boat paperwork and came across the receipt for our last lot of new batteries.  Judging by the date, I reckon our current set have now done a good 200 charge / discharge cycles which is the point at which normal wet cell batteries would be starting to show signs of age i.e running down more quickly.   When I bought this set I took a gamble and bought some sealed units (Numax CXV) that claimed to go to 500 cycles.  So this year should start to reveal if it worked.  These batteries cost 15% more than standard open cell types, but I thought that if they did really have double the life, that would be a bargain.

So far, they are doing absolutely fine, helped considerably I reckon by the solar panel which keeps them up while we are not there and helps us to get charge up to a proper 100% when we’re cruising.   We very rarely need to let them go below about 70% charged which is also good for them. However there could yet be a dark harbinger of doom sealed inside their impenetrable casings.  Sealed batteries are risky because if they overcharge and bubble off gas, you can’t replace fluid.  I have no way of knowing if ours are full or not.   If they have gassed a lot then they will probably die this year and the extra 15% I paid for them will not have been worth it.  The literature on these batteries is very skimpy and doesn’t really tell you how they work.  You would think that the batteries could in some way condense and reuse some of any vapour that boils off, but that might be my wishful thinking.

I try to avoid the batteries gassing by carefully watching the charge voltage when we are cruising.  Once we get to 14.4v (above which boiling happens), I deliberately turn the fridge to a lower temperature to take the surplus power away from the batteries.  This works a treat because when you stop in the evening you can reset the fridge to its normal setting and being extra cold already, it uses less power overnight.  of course I don’t always spot it when the voltage goes a bit higher so I might have let them gas a bit.

Will the CXVs get me my extra money back, or have I been conned?  2012 holds the answer.  If they’re still doing well this time next year, I’m quids in.

P.S. Can you get treatment for battery OCD?

How I’m not voting

Leesten very carefully , I shall say zees only once.  I generally make it a rule that I don’t sully my blog with my opinions because they’re only mine after all.  I also try to steer clear of waterways politics although I do have views.  However in this case, I’ll make an exception and declare my thoughts on voting for the Canal and River Trust boater’s representatives.  If you’ve got a boat licence you should by now have been sent your voting pack.  I haven’t entirely decided yet on my choice but I’m happy to tell you the types of candidate I will not be voting for.

I don’t know how much influence the boaters reps will have, but I expect it depends on how well they conduct their business.  One thing I’m sure of is that if they argue amongst each other, we’re done for.  We’ll be divided and ruled by the others.  This means that whoever does the job needs to reflect the needs of us all, and not any particular group of boaters over another. So my vote will not be going to any candidate that claims to especially represent any single group or type of boaters.  No matter how much I might sympathise with their views, there are more important things at stake.

The thing we all have in common is the need to have the waterways in good running order and open for navigation.  To my mind anything else is secondary.  With the budget CRT now has and the huge challenges of dealing with water supplies, dredging and general maintenance anyone taking their eye of the ball to argue about who is in charge and how much they earn or  about minority issues will be fiddling while Rome burns.

I shall vote for candidates who get about a bit and talk to all kinds of boaters and focus on the needs we have in common.  I shall reject anyone who takes a pride in being argumentative or intransigent because they won’t make progress, they’ll stunt it. I’m looking for people who can listen, negotiate sensibly, and consult others before putting forward proposals.  Lastly and most important of all my vote goes to people with a positive attitude who want to make things happen and build bridges (literally would be good I suppose, but not necessarily).

There. That’s my two penn’orth. Now I’ll revert back to impartial mode. 

gadgetry–any ideas?

Yes I’m still here.  No posts lately because I’m up to “other” stuff, amongst which I am attempting to fill in a gap in my knowledge.  (That reminds me of a Batman episode when Robin says “Gee Batman you must know everything” and Batman , with great gravitas, replies, “On the contrary Robin, there are several things I do not know”.)

Anyway, I decided that in the 21st century a chap ought to have a passing knowledge of electronics.  And I didn’t.  So I got some books and some bits and started reading and playing.  So far, my piece de resistance is this little ipod amplifier /speaker, built inside a cardboard tube from a bottle of single malt.  To my surprise is actually works.

Outside:

Inside:

I could let you have one of these for free.  All you have to do is send me the cardboard tube with the bottle of single malt inside it

My researches have led me to discover that building little devices that might be useful on a narrowboat might be fun and not be too hard and would also be very cheap.  Examples might be a water tank gauge, an intercom between the deck and inside the cabin for ordering more tea, security alarms etc.  Why don’t I leap into production mode then?  Well mainly because of the wiring problems.  Most gadgets would take a couple of hours to make and most of a day to install! Herbie has nice trunking for wires but dismantling it is a pain, especially if you don’t have a helper as the trunking is overhead and the sections are long and heavy.  Also, most of these gadgets run on very low voltage and low voltage doesn’t like long runs of thin wire.  You end up having to buy long lengths of expensive fat copper cable which in many cases would cost more than the gadget.

The water gauge tempts me, although I would have to drill holes in the well deck floor to get the wires into the tank.  I could install a little box inside the cratch which had a few LEDs which would light up in order according to the water level.  This could be powered by a some AA batteries and switched on and off when I wanted a reading, so no long wires or power lines.

Making circuits that respond to light or dark or temperature change or touch, or damp seems to be fairly do-able.  I just need a bit of inspiration.  Could you think up something that might be handy on a boat?  I might even try to make it.

How insurance companies value a boat.

I just renewed my boat insurance and made a couple of changes to the requirements and saved some money.  I also learned a bit of good advice regarding how they estimate the value should the boat be stolen or written off.

First the changes.  I thought I should drop the value of the boat as the amount it has been static for six years now, ( a four year old boat is worth more than a ten year old don’t you think?) so I knocked five grand off.  Then I doubled the contents insurance as we tend to have more valuable stuff on the boat these days.  The result?  A saving of nearly £30 on an already reasonable premium.  The whole lot now costs £179 including a tenner for legal cover.

Now the interesting bit.  I asked how they would value the boat if it was destroyed.  First of course they said they would look at the make and original price of the boat, and its age.  But then the lady said they do like to take account of how well the boat has been improved and maintained.  “If you do have photos or other evidence of how well you have cared for the boat it can make quite a difference, especially if you have made improvements.” 

Aaah – another reason for recording all my work on the blog then.  I’m afraid I shall have to continue inflicting upon you any tales of DiY or other improvements to Herbie.  I can’t afford not to.!

The Sinking Fund

I think that when we first looked into having a narrowboat, we were advised that the annual running costs would be between two and three thousand pounds a year.  That’s excluding depreciation.  With hindsight does it look as though the advice was about right?

Based on the advice we got, at the outset we set up a separate account which we laughingly call the Sinking Fund and planned to put three grand a year in it.  I suppose the first thing to say is that having set ourselves this budget, then that affected how much we spent.  After all we could have gone for a central London mooring, or one in a BW marina, and that would have blown the budget right out of the water.  However by shopping around we have found good moorings, first at High Line Yachting in Iver and now at Crick which cost well under £2k.  And that reminds me that the other controllable factor is how long a boat you choose to buy.  Big costs like mooring and licencing are charged by the foot (or metre).

So our sinking fund has  to cover

Fixed annual costs like insurance, boat licence, mooring fees, RCR membership

Diesel, coal

Servicing costs – filters, oil, antifreeze etc

Unforeseen repairs – I mostly do them myself but parts and tools cost money

Improvements to furniture and fittings in the boat

Major cost that occur every few years like painting and blacking, new batteries

and so it goes on.  We rarely escape from a visit to a chandlery without spending more than we planned.

So how has our three grand per annum held up?  Well, not too bad actually.  Some years we spend less and that helps us towards paying for other years when we have big jobs like having Herbie’s bottom blacked, or repainting.  I was interested last year to be shown some of the annual costs charged by boat share companies.  Suffice it to say they were far above what we manage on.

This year we’ll overspend our three grand because it’s bottom blacking time , and I think we’re going to lash out on a two pack epoxy job. There are lots of arguments for and against epoxy blacking, but for me the choice is not what's good about epoxy, but what’s bad about bitumen based blacking.  With bitumen I’ve learned to consider it a success if I can get out of the boatyard where the job has been done without scraping some off!

Reservoir check - a look at Welford

We’ve had a bit of rain lately – hooray.  Are the reservoirs filling up?  If our visit yesterday to the BW reservoir at Welford is anything to go by there is still a very long way to go.  Here is my picture taken yesterday.

This is taken from more or less the same spot as the photo I showed a few posts back – scroll down a couple of times and you’ll see it.  That picture was taken by Rick  shortly before Christmas.  personally I can’t see any significant change.    I reckon this reservoir is a good fifteen feet below its full level.  A local man who we met there told us that he had never seen it so low in all his life.  In fact he had never before seen the concrete culvert block you see here.  He said Saddington reservoir nearby is no better.

There is a slight ray of hope though.  There are in fact two reservoirs here, Sulby and Welford.  Here you see the two of them side by side.

 

Sulby on the left looks a lot fuller, although according to the measuring posts it  is still some two metres down.  It looks as though Sulby feeds into Welford when it gets full – down the shute you can see at the bottom right of this next picture.

 

Maybe things will look better when Sulby fills up and tips its surplus into Welford.

The retreat of the waters leaves some strange sights,  like this tree, which to me looks like some sort of camel!

Late night rescue - Herbie crew abandons ship - and Herbie's law of DiY,

High drama on the open seas.  Read about how our gallant crew was forced to abandon ship and spend the night in the seaman's mission.Well, when I say open seas I mean Crick marina, and when I say seaman's mission I mean Rick and Marilyn's house, but life and death drama nevertheless.

On Sunday we arrived to board Herbie for a few days R&R.  We lit the stove and began to settle in.  It was a cold night and despite our best efforts the stove wasn't getting all that hot.  Then when Kath was returning from getting a fresh bucket of coal (she has her uses), she noticed a big lump of metal on the floor at the back of the stove.  On closer inspection it turned out to be the circular blanking plate that seals the alternative chimney flue orifice.  That explained why the stove wouldn't draw properly, there was a five inch hole in the back of it!

Further inspection revealed a broken clamp that seals the plate from inside the stove.  Here you see the plate and the cracked clamp.

No fixing that in a hurry.  What should we do?  Soon I realised that this was dangerous.  That big hole might well allow a lot of carbon monoxide to flow into the cabin, especially if we damped the fire down for the night.  Extinguishing a stove, once lit, is not all that simple, and anyway it was freezing cold.  ( I should perhaps point out that we do have a carbon monoxide detector but I don't know how much I wanted to trust it in this case.  Incidentally Kath calls it a monosodium glutamate detector but she was never all that good at chemistry.)

The only other choices were a) risk headlines like "retired couple found dead aboard narrowboat - carbon monoxide poisoning suspected", or b) abandon ship.  Had we been out somewhere in the sticks this would have been a big problem.  We would have had to carefully empty the hot coals from the stove and spend the night with the Eberspacher roaring away like a jet engine or freeze to death.  Remember the boat had been uninhabited for several weeks and needed a lot of warming through.  Luckily Crick is only a ten minute drive from Rick and Marilyn's house so we resorted to appealing to their better nature and they offered us a bed.  Thanks R&M.

A quick scan of the internet showed that a new clamp could be obtained, but not in less than 14 days.  However if any one can fix something like this, it's Rick.  Next morning, in about fifteen minutes, he made a substitute clamp out of an old bit of steel strip using naught but a hacksaw, a hammer and a vice.  Here it is

Eagerly I retired to the boat to fit the new clamp, and it did fit!  Were my troubles over?  No.

To fit the clamp I had to remove the fire bricks and the flue baffle plate inside the stove.  Easy.  Then I had to refit them.  Aah, not easy.  When I removed the bricks the baffle plate fell out on its own before I could see how it fitted, and it seemed no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it back in.  In the ensuing struggle, now joined by Rick, I managed to crack two of the three fire bricks.  Later investigation showed that the best price for these bricks was £35 (ebay).  Rats!  Now I had caused more expenditure than I had saved.

Slowly our luck began to turn.  Scanning the internet I eventually found a diagram showing how to fit the baffle.  After three hours of failure, we found the answer and fitted the baffle plate in thirty seconds.

By now we were both very black and sooty, so once again retired to chez R&M for the night.  Then, Kath somehow recalled that we saved the old firebricks from our previous stove, which was the same model.  After some rummaging in the log box I found them intact this morning and to cut a long story short we are now up and running and warm and cosy.  Total cost -£0.  If I had to do the job again now, I could do it in a couple of minutes instead of several hours.

Which brings me to Herbie's Law of DiY.

DiY saves you money and is not too difficult,  the second time you do a job.  The struggle the first time is the price you pay.

There is a second law of DiY.  Get a friend like Rick :-)

What is a boat worth?

 

Its that time of year when I have to reinsure Herbie.  Our policy is based on the “market value” of the boat. We’ve been declaring the same value ever since we bought the boat, but I suppose that is now over optimistic, and I might be able to get a lower premium if I declare a lower figure.

But how do I decide what Herbie’s market value is?  I can think of a number of ways to look at it.

is it:

1.  How much I might expect to get if we sold the boat.  I haven’t got a clue what that would be.  Boats aren’t like cars.  You can’t pick up a copy of What Boat and look up the model and year and read off a price according to what mileage band you are in.  They’re a bit more like houses where you need an estate agent to survey the place and set a price according to local conditions and current trends. I suspect that condition is a good part of setting a price for a boat.   A broker once told me that the exterior paint job makes a big difference, closely followed by the ambience of the cabin.  Apparently it’s the women that have the last word when a couple buys a boat. In any case, whatever the selling price we wouldn’t get the full amount because a broker would take his cut.

or

2.  How much money it would take for me to part with the boat.  This may well be more than it’s true market value.  Herbie may well be worth more to me than the price I would get. Also, you only have to look at some of the boats for sale to realise that sellers are often over optimistic in what they will get.  You often see boats advertised on brokers pages as “reduced price” as the seller is finally convinced by the broker that his original price is too high.  In any case, boats are always advertised at a higher price than expected, to allow scope for a bit of haggling.

or

3. What would I have to pay to replace the boat if it was written off.  Even harder this one, because there isn’t another boat like Herbie. Like so many narrowboats, it’s a one off.

Now you might say this is all a bit academic for insurance purposes  because the chances of having the boat written off is pretty remote.  I suppose it would have to be gutted by fire, or sunk, or successfully stolen.  I say successfully because getting away with stealing a narrowboat isn’t easy because they move really slowly and aren’t easily hidden, and because individual boats are easily recognised.   I once said to the lady at the insurers that they probably don’t often have to pay up for the whole boat and she said “You’d be surprised!”

One thing I will be doing is paying the extra tenner for legal cover.  Knowing how cantankerous some boaters are I reckon the likelihood of litigation after an accident might be  costly.

Keeping warm and the technology placebo effect

Yes I am still alive.  I just haven’t had much to write about lately and I wouldn’t want to waste your time dear reader with idle chit chat.

Last weekend we had one of the very rare home visit fro our son Richard who lives aboard his narrowboat Bankside near Huntingdon.  Surprisingly we talked very little about toilets and batteries, but the subject of keeping warm on a boat did come up.  Richard uses a squirrel for this purpose.  Now for anyone who thing Richard snuggles up with an arborial rodent, let me explain the a squirrel is a popular make of solid fuel stove.

A couple of posts back I mentioned that a stove would be one of my “must haves”  when choosing a boat.  Talking with Richard reminded me of things I should have added.

Stove position. – if you have a 70ft boat and the stove is by the front door, it won’t keep you very warm in a rear bedroom unless the stove has a back boiler to drive radiators.  The best place for a stove is as near amidships as you can get it.  On Herbie we are lucky, in that our stove is bang in the middle, both fore and aft wise and side to side wise.  Actually we’re in a good position to judge the relative efficacy of stoves versus central heating because on Herbie we have both.  Does the central heating get the boat as warm as a stove?  No way!  Not by a country mile.   The CH gives a gentle background heat, but the stove if well stoked up, can get you to open the windows on a frosty night!

Every now and then some unwitting soul puts a post on Canal World Forums on the Interweb asking for opinions on the efficacy of Ecofans.  For the non cognoscenti, an Ecofan is a clever fan that sits of top of the stove and by fiendish electronicery converts heat into electricity to drive itself round, thus moving the hot air from the stove to further afield.   For about a week after the question gets asked the forum buzzes with alternate  praise and scorn for this rather expensive but fascinating device.  People who have them generally believe they make a difference.  People who don’t have them generally have doubts.

Well we’ve got one and Richard has one too.  What do we think? In a practical sense they certainly do work, in as far as when the stove top gets hot the fan whizzes round very fast and does generate a gentle current of air.  Does it help warm up the boat?  Hmmm, Richard does and we feel as though it does, although that might be the placebo effect.  But hey, if a placebo works, it works!  Here’s an old snap of Kath with her feet up in her favourite spot by the fire.  You can make out the fan whizzing round atop the stove.

 

I’ve lost the Ecofan instructions now, but as far as I recall,I think you’re supposed to position the fan in front ofthe chimney flue so that it daws air around the hot flue and pushes it out front.  Sadly our little stove is a bit too small for us to be able to do this.  Late in the evening we generally try to position it so that it wafts the warm air towards the bedroom.

Ecofans are great fun anyway, and do give an indication of the state of warmth of the stove – the hotter the faster.  Richard uses his as an indicator of when to put on more coal.  I use ours as an indicator of where the fire is capable of rekindling when we get up in the morning.  If the fan is still slowly turning, I can generally re kindle from the embers.  If the fan has stopped I usually have to relay the fire.

There  are ways to keep warm on deck on cold days, including eating porridge for breakfast, keeping the hot drinks going and being dressed properly.  As the old saying goes, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes”.

Good News, Bad News and a civic award

Which do you want first?  Let’s get the bad news out of the way.

Following my recent post about the dire state of the Marsworth reservoirs, it seem things are even worse than I thought.  As from Wednesday BW will be closing the entire Tring summit pound, 3 miles through the lovely Tring cutting, and lowering its level by a foot.  This is apparently because the surrounding land is so dry that the canal is loosing water through its bed and sides at the rate of 61 million litres a week in this stretch – that’s 220 lock fulls!  As you will recall from my photo in an earlier post, the reservoirs are in no state to make up this loss, so BW have little choice.

For those who don’t know the area or the canal, this is serious.  Tring is close to the middle of the Grand Union canal, effectively the equivalent of closing the M1 motorway.  Worse really, as it leaves only one alternative route south from the midlands i.e. via the Oxford canal (already short of water) and the Thames, which happens to be reasonably full at the moment.  So Rainman, keep getting out there.  Maybe organise a game of cricket or something – that’s often good for rain.

Now a bit of better news.  Although the reservoirs on the Leicester section are still very very low – Rick recently sent me this photo he took of the Welford reservoir,

it seems that recent rains have put enough water into the actual canal along the 20 mile pound between Watford and Foxton for the restrictions at Foxton locks to be suspended.  So Market Harborough is no longer cut off from civilisation ( or is that vice versa).

I think we’re in for an interesting year.

Now for a totally unrelated message.  Despite the Queen having strangely overlooked me yet again in the New Year’s Honours List, I have today been promoted to the rank of Senior Citizen.  Yes, as of today I am officially an OAP, so I shall expect a bit more respect from my friends in future.  Please speak loudly an clearly as you offer me your seat on a crowded bus and refer to me as Dear or Dearie.