Job description for a boat plumber /mechanic

I’ve just been doing one of my unfavourite jobs at home.  Clearing out the gunge traps under the sinks and washbasins.  The worst is the bathroom washbasin where the necessary bits are hidden behind a ceramic pedestal.  It’s so hard to get at even though the pedestal can move a bit.  I couldn’t help thinking about so many jobs on the boat which ought to be easy, but take ages of cursing and aching fingers and stiff necks to accomplish.

Had the money I would have a permanent handyman on tap to free me from these miseries.  Here is my proposed brief Job description.

Principal duties

Removing and repairing or replacing parts from engines, plumbing, electrical apparatus etc.  in the employers home, his car, and aboard his narrowboat.

Qualifications and Experience

No essential formal qualifications, but experience of keyhole surgery performed upside down in a small dark cupboard desirable.  Preference will be given to candidates who have trained and worked as a contortionist.

Required physical attributes

The successful candidate be able to work blindfold inside a 2ft cube, but possess the reach of a basketball defender.  Must be able to apply a torque of 20 Newton Meters to a greasy plastic nut using fingertips only -  preferably behind his /her back while his/ her forehead is pressed against a hot copper pipe.  The ability to see round corners will be an advantage, as will the ability to assemble the parts of a clockwork wrist watch placed on a shelf two feet above the employee’s head. Must be able to perform complex tasks with strength and fine dexterity with frozen fingers whilst oily water is dripped into his/ her eyes.  The ability to swim may prove valuable from time to time.

Working hours

This is a part time job, but the employee must be available at any time day or night.

Any volunteers?

Insulation demonstration

Looking at the snow on Herbie's roof this morning I was pleased to see that the only bits that had melted were the areas of roof around the stove chimney and the water heater chimney. That must mean that the ceiling insulation is pretty good because we were toasty warm inside the boat.

There must be some heat escaping from the hull though because the other night I went outside to take a last breath of outside air before retiring to bed, and shining a torch into the water I saw a large shoal of small fish around the boat. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of Crick's monster carp were sheltering beneath our baseplate.

Snow always makes the place look fresh and pretty and our corner of the marina was undisturbed by vehicle tracks. The white snow showed up the colours of the bare trees. Colours which you wouldn't notice in normal weather.

We're back home now, but we'll be back afloat at the weekend giving Grace a half term treat.

Winter electrickery

There's a fair old blizzard blowing outside the boat. Despite us being hunkered down safely between Owl and Henry Cleaver either side of us, we are getting quite a buffeting. The wind is howling a bit. The afternoon Rick and Marilyn came over in the rain for lunch and by the time they left all outside was white. Here aboard Herbie I have spent a fair part of the last couple of days doing electrical jobs.

The main job was to put together and install the new ammeter and shunt to measure the output of the solar panel. Until now we have never been sure of whether it is performing to spec. Subjectively we know that it helps us to get through a day moored up without running the engine, although recently I had been suspicious that it wasn't doing as much as I would hope. Little did I know I was about to find out why.

I installed the shunt in the return earth wire between the batteries and the solar controller. As it was dark when I did it I had to wait until daylight this morning for the solar panel to put out some power to measure. Somewhat excited (I know I'm sad), I pressed the button and the meter read . . . . Zero! Oh dear. I double checked the wiring. All ok. Then I noticed on the controller box, instructions about in what order the wires should be attached. Apparently it makes a difference. the instructions say to flow them "in strict order". So I covered up the solar panel to stop it generating, undid all the wires and replaced them in the correct order. Oh dear again. Still no result. Perhaps I have bust the controller. Grrrrrrr.

Desperation now. Out with the voltmeter and I start measuring here and there. Hmmmm, the wires from the panel to the controller show about 20 volts. As it should. The wires to and from the battery read near zero. That can't be, can it. They just measure the battery voltage and I know that is about 13 v at the moment. So outside I go into the engine bay to look at the wiring at the battery end. There is the answer, but gawd knows how it came about. The positive wire from the controller to the battery was not attached. All I can guess is that the guys at Calcutt removed it when they were working on the engine or on the alternator. That would explain what the solar panel seemed not to be doing much lately. It was't doing anything!

Well it's all working now. This afternoon in the gloom and the rain, the panel, lying flat on the roof was putting out about half an amp. Not a great deal, but acceptable in the conditions and quite enough to keep the batteries up while we leave the boat here over winter. If the sun ever really shines again we're right back in business.

More else trickery tomorrow, I'm replacing our old built in radio with a new one which has a socket for us to play music from our iPads. About thirteen different wires to connect in a cramped space. Deep joy.

Hello World

Weeeeeeeeeh!

This is my first blog post using our new WiFi setup on board Herbie. Installed five minutes ago. So far, it's looking good. Here at Crick the phone network is pretty ropey and the marina's WiFi is very weak in our spot, but we're getting quite fast Internet response from our new setup.

Basically we have copied the setup shown to us by Kathryn on NB Leo No2. Thanks Kathryn. What we have is a Huawei E586E Mobile WiFi thingy bought from Amazon, connected to an outside antenna which has a good magnetic foot (just the job for a boat roof) and a longish lead. We are using a 3mobile pay as you go sim 3gb /3 month for about a tenner.

The Huawei thingy is nearly the same as the wireless pointer sold by TMobile but their's doesn't have an antenna socket. We do seem to need the antenna, the signal inside the boat is pretty poor without it.

Kath and I are both on our iPads as I write and we are both agreed the Internet speed is the best we have ever had on board. Also the WiFi seems to work well from one end of the boat to the other.

Herbie seems to have survived her winter lay up. No burst pipes or leaks. The bilges are dry. The batteries were Ok too.

Next job is to fit the new ammeter to the solar panel circuit so I can see what they are generating. In theory this should be simple, but these things never are quite as easy as you hope because of fitting stuff in a tight space. Should I succeed tomorrow, I'll post a picture.

What a difference a year makes

This time last year we were worrying whether there would be enough water to go anywhere.  Now look at it!  I thought those folk who headed down to the rivers last spring had got the right idea.  Now some of them are still stuck on the fenland rivers.  Now much as I like the fens, I do sympathise with anyone trapped over there for so long and waiting to get back to the good old canals.

Now we’re looking at this year’s itinerary and wondering if we’ll get on any rivers at all.  I’d love this year  to go down the Soar and then up to Nottingham, but I imagine it might be a while before it is safe to do that.  Does anyone out there know? Then there’s the upper Thames that we failed to get onto last autumn.  A good job we didn’t or we might still be there!

I don’t know how much longer we’ll stay at our Crick mooring after the coming year, splendid though it is.  We do miss the ease with which we used to take the boat into London for a few days when we were based near Slough.  So this year I’d like to get as much of the south /east midlands done while we are still up that way.  The change has done us the world of good and the places we have been able to reach have all been good, but do you know what?  I still reckon the southern GU is as nice as anywhere.

We are hoping to get out to Herbie for a few days R&R later this week.  We might have gone earlier but Kath has developed a mystery spontaneous crippling pain in her hip.  Yesterday she was completely immobile.   Thankfully she is a bit better today.  I’m keen to bring Herbie back to life after a too long winter hibernation.  Also I have jobs to do.  Fit our solar panel ammeter.  Try out our new WiFi gubbins.  Get and fit a new radio – one that has an auxiliary socket so we can play music form our ipads on it.  Sounds like quite a screwdrivery few days.

The cat is truly among the pigeons

Well I don't suppose there is any surprise that there is an explosion of debate about CRTs new visitor mooring proposals.  At my last visit, the canalworld forum thread was up to seventeen pages.  As usual the quality of the debate is pretty mixed, varying from distressingly dumb to quite sensible,  but one or two good points have been made.

Perhaps the main one is "why bother?" -  for most of the people most of the time it is not impossible to find a spot to moor overnight at or close to hotspots.  Certainly at the ones specifically listed that we have been to, we have always managed to squeeze in, albeit getting the last spot at the end of the row.  I wonder if the Southern region has been chosen because it is the least contentious? Now if the consultation concerned the Regents canal I would feel quite differently.  In our experience you have a poor chance of getting in for the night at Victoria park, an virtually no chance at visitor moorings at Islington tunnel and Camden.  Ditto Little Venice.  But on the GU, its busy and fullish but do-able.  I have never cruised the south Oxford in high season but I suspect that may well be a problem.  In any case I can't see why any measures couldn't be seasonal, confined to the peak holiday weeks.

Will it get adequately policed?  Most doubt it.  Some of these places are fairly out of the way, and the system as proposed depends on a volunteer logging boats each and every day.   Many fear that the loggers will be unreasonable types, but in the old mooring warden days we found most to be very reasonable, so I don't accept that as a reason.

Supposing you stop for an hour for lunch or to shop when the counter walks past and logs you in, then move off and  you return two days later to stop for a couple of days.  Will that be an overstay?  The only solution I can think of to stop that happening would be for the counting patrols to take place late evening or early morning when anyone tied up will have properly stopped for the night.

What about hire boats?  Well of course they are extremely unlikely to stay put for more than a day or two because they are paying a fortune for their holiday and want to get on with their journey.  However, as some one pointed out the same boat will be back most weeks, therefore breaking the number of days in any month rule.  People suspect that hire companies would get separate treatment because of this.

What about "weekenders?"  This is one I hadn't thought of.  If you have a permanent non residential mooring and you work during the week, you may want to take your boat out at weekends.  Inevitably that means that you will end up mooring at the same spots with some regularity and fall foul of the rules.  I don't call that hogging a mooring.

Then one last one of my own.

Is two days enough in a tourist centre?  I'm thinking of Oxford.  If you can only stay two nights, then that really means only one full day to visit the town.  Not enough.  Three nights would be better.

These all seem to me to be valid points.  On the other side of the coin there are the stupid points that just wind me up.

 "It's all a ploy for CRT to make money" - Don't be stupid, if they wanted to do that, they would make the overstay a fiver or a tenner, payable in cash at a meter.  That would raise money because people might think it worth it for an extra day or two. The point is to get people to free the space, so the inducement has to be high. In fact if I were CRT I would make the fine £50 a day or even more.  That way people would actually move, and I wouldn't have all the costs of fighting for the money.  At £25 CRT wont even cover the costs of recovery.  (In fact on the Regents canal I would introduce towing away as the only way of making the buggers move.  I accept that people may wish to moor their boat permanently, but not at a visitor mooring in a city.  It's like parking your caravan at the only bus stop for ten miles.  It makes it very difficult to plan a journey through east London.)

Nor do I accept remarks about the Thrupp mafia.  What they have created there is a pleasant row of moorings with a very reasonable length of stay.  All are welcome as long as they don't stay any longer, and the mooring wardens or whatever they are that I met were pleasant and courteous.  There is not a lot of mooring down that end of the canal and if people were allowed to stay there for weeks on end, then the traveller would have nowhere to stop.

Then a gang of folk are whipping up a petition against the proposals.  I fear they are wasting their time.  Not because CRT will steamroller it through, but because they will either change it in the light of comments or abandon it, albeit perhaps after a trial period.  Sure it'll work at places like Thrupp, it already does, but at others I think the volunteer loggers will be the problem as will the people who just ignore the rules and refuse to pay anyway.

I shall send in my comments along the lines of the above.  If there were to be an early trial, then I suggest Thrupp is not a good place because is is atypical.  I would go for Bulbourne or Marsworth or Banbury if it were me.  A definite trial with a start and end date and an open review to follow.

PS All praise to Alan Fincher, who has made the most balanced and sensible (and informed) comment on the forum.

Lewis does it again - walks from Oxford to Uxbridge in seconds

Not for the first time has Kevin Whately broken the world distance walking record. Tonight Inspector Lewis and his lady friend walked along an Oxford Street, over a bridge, jumped over a fence and landed on the GU towpath in Uxbridge. This time I think it was opposite the dolphin pub unless I am very much mistaken.

I'm guessing they must be using film studios locally, of which there are a couple. Not that I mind, it gives Kath and me a lot of pleasure spotting the discrepancies, and it's only that we happen to know that bit of canal so well.

As well as the Dolphin smoking area with wooden railings shown in the reflection, we recognised the windows of the boat behind the one on fire.

A tortoise and a blackbird walked into a bar . . . + a first look at new mooring proposals

. . .and met up with two Herbies for a curry and a couple of drinks. Nice to see you Simon and Carrie.

I can recommend the Watermans Arms in Brentford, a nice little pub which you can find if you walk along the high street in the direction of Kew Bridge.

Anyway, on to the main business of the day. I got an email from CRT with consultation documents regarding new visitor mooring policies in the Southern Region. Maybe you did too, but in case you didn't, let me summarise. Bear in mind I've only had a quick skim through, so I don't guarantee I've understood it all.

The idea is to give boaters a greater chance of getting in on visitor moorings at popular stopping places. They list a fair number of these on the Southern GU, the Oxford and the Leicester line as far as Foxton. The details are quite specific in each case, giving details of particular stretches between bridge numbers etc.

What they are proposing is that at the most popular spots, eg town centre moorings like Banbury or at Marsworth or Thrupp, they will restrict mooring to two days. This might not seem a lot, but they will also maintain seven or fourteen day moorings a short walk away. So at Banbury for example, the moorings opposite the Castle Quay shops would be two days, and then back by the park it would be fourteen days. The whole of Banbury would be designated as an "Area" and no boat would be able to stay in the area for more than fourteen days in any month.

The papers give details of the notices which would go up in any area, using Thrupp as an example. There would be signs with diagrams showing the exact positions of the two day and fourteen day moorings. Then the papers give example letters which would be given to boaters on the day they arrive, making clear the policy. Then a letter you would get on the last day of your permitted stay, then a letter you would get if you overstayed.

Volunteer mooring monitors would record which boats were there each day and deliver the appropriate letters. Overstayers would be charged £25 per day, billed to their licence account, payable within 28 days. I suppose if you didn't pay up after being chased up and all that might follow, you wouldn't get next year's licence until you had paid.

Now who will be made happy by this policy, and who will not?

I think people on the move will be happy. People like me, who are generally on a journey and rarely stay anywhere beyond a couple of days. If the policy works, we will have a better chance of finding a free spot at popular places.

Continuous cruisers who tend to stay somewhat longer will have to moor a bit further away, but not too far.

Continuous moorers, who make a habit of overstaying won't like it at all I suppose, but they don't abide by the rules now so it may make no difference. In reality though, this policy only seems to relate to a relatively small number of popular hot spots, so those who want to stay around semi permanently will no doubt need to move out of one of the designated areas.

The consultation papers invited detailed comments on each of the proposed hotspots, so it'll be interesting to see what people say.

What do I think? Well I think it's as fair a policy as I could think up. The devil may be in the detail. Of course it'll all depend on how well it is policed.

The document didn't cover London. Maybe they have a separate one I haven't seen. I can safely say that that one will be pretty contentious.

Cabin fever

I haven't been in a cabin, more's the pity, but I do confess to a bit of cabin fever. This weather has confined us to home somewhat. Hence no blog posts lately. We phoned up Crick to ask if conditions were ok to come and spend a few days on the boat and they politely put us off. Apparently the marina surroundings are nearly a foot deep in snow.

But today we got ourselves out and actually spent a little time afloat, albeit not on Herbie.

We popped over to the Wey navigation at Addlestone to visit Kathryn aboard NB Leo No2 after she invited us to come and look at her mobile broadband setup. She's using a T Mobile mobile hotspot device giving internet access to up to 5 devices on board. She's also using an antenna to collect a better 3G signal for the device. It works well I must say. Between us we were running 3 iPads at the same time with quite respectable browsing speeds. We'll definitely get ourselves a similar set up for Herbie.

T Mobile have a unique (I think) policy, in that if you exceed the data limit on your tariff they allow you to continue to access the Internet for email and simple browsing without further charge. They just stop you from doing stuff like YouTube and downloading music and other high demand things. That suits me fine. I do do the odd bit of you tubing and music over the web at home, but I reckon I can live without it when we're on the boat. In essence it means we can work on a cheap tariff while away.

Having said that, as I'm writing this Kath is watching a video of Prince Harry on her iPad, so she might prove me wrong.

Speaking of iPads, this is my first ever iPad produced blog post. I hope after all this typing that it doesn't get lost in the publication process.

Techno grappling for Boaters - how to set up an iPad for cruising.

Yes I am still alive, albeit barely sane, but I’ve been too busy to post anything.

It all started when our daughter Claire bought a (hardly) used iPad from a friend and gave it to Kath for Christmas. There’s a blessing in disguise. Kath loves her web browsing and her on line embroidery classes and her on line genealogy, but she would never claim to be a tecchie, so muggins gets the job of sorting out all the bits that don’t work.  In particular I have to get her iPad ship shape for cruising.  We can’t go cruising until everything is set up to work, or Kath will get cabin fever.

In the old days, I was a bit of an IT whizz kid.  I worked in IT for over ten years.  What I didn’t know about MSDOS wasn’t worth knowing.  At Lotus 123 I was the master. Relational databases and query languages held no fears for me and I could even do a bit of hardware fixing. But now, like car engines, it’s all changed so much, myold knowledge and expertise isn’t worth the space it takes up in my brain.  I thought the idea of iPads was supposed to be that they are simple and intuitive.  All I can say is I hope we never get Parkinsons disease ‘cos it seems that a mere flick of the finger can send the gubbins off into unknown areas from which there is little chance of escape.

Our main aim for iPad boat cruising of course is to get set up for 3G connectivity and get email going.  Luckily Kath’s iPad has a sim card port.  Well that’s solved that you may say.  Unless you have looked at 3G tariffs lately.  The man in the 3 store was very nice.  Too nice.  All we wanted was one answer, not twenty seven. Should we get a contract with a free MiFi gubbins (more of that in a minute), should we get a PAYG 12 months x1Gb or 4x 3 months, or etc etc.

This MiFi idea is good.  A single gubbins connects to the 3g network and then sets up a mini wifi hotspot that any of your laptops, iPads, smartphones can share. I looked it up on Canal World Forums and a number of boaters seem to be using them successfully.  So K and I can browse on separate devices at the same time using one 3g connection which can be put where we can get the best signal.  We don’t have to sit near the window or whatever to keep the signal.  We’ll get one of them when we can work our way through the tariff maze.  If you live on a boat full time, the choice is simpler, but if you are using it for a few weeks here and a few days there, you need to be more careful about not paying for data when you don’t need it.

Anyway back to the wretched lovely iPad. We have worked out how to install Kath’s Genealogy app which takes her data from our PC programme. If Herbie looks to be sitting low in the water, it’s because Kath has all her ancestors with her. We have worked out how to download and store all her podcasts from the National Archives weekly talks. We have even worked out how to download and store all her embroidery PDFs. This might not seem a great feat, but nothing on an iPad tells you what to do.  There are precious few menus and help screens and you just have to wander about through the maze poking and prodding at the screen until you find something that looks like it might be the thing to do.  Then if you get it a bit wrong  you can never remember how you got to that screen so you can go back and try again.  I love it.

Setting up the email was the best bit.  The setup path was surprisingly clear and simple. Apart from the fact that it didn’t work.  It would be OK if we were using Gmail or Hotmail, but we like to keep our proper POP/IMAP/SMTP mail on Virgin Media cos that’s our ISP at home and we only want one email system thank you very much.  Going to the Virgin Media help pages was a waste of time because they specifically state that they can’t be bothered to mess about with people who have iPads, well words to that effect anyway.  Eventually, after midnight last night, I found a page from some kind soul who had worked out the problem for himself and posted a solution.  I can’t explain it all now but suffice to say that it involves totally ignoring all the advice from Apple and Virgin Media and entering the mail server by a back door route via Microsoft Exchange!  Don’t ask me how it works.  It just does. Clever guy.  Our inbox now has a thousand, well  twenty, emails entitled Test, Another test, Test 3, Maybe It’ll Work This Time,  etc.

Meanwhile Kath is besotted with her iPad  She sat in bed the other night using it to watch a missed episode of Pointless.  What more can I say!

The Greatest Thames Boating Disaster

Little did I realise when we were aboard Indigo Dream on the pageant rehearsal last year that we passed the spot were the Thames’s most tragic accident had occurred some 120 years earlier.  My two photos here were taken as we edged along the north bank at Barking – well out beyond the Thames barrier – and some 11 miles from London Bridge.

Browsing in the London Metropolitan Archives today while Kath was ancestor chasing, I came across the story of the SS Princess Alice, a pleasure paddle steamer that collided with the 900 ton displacement SS Bywell Castle which was running out of London on the ebbing tide, very close to where I took those pictures, but on the other bank.  It happened in September 1878.  It was dark and as the boats approached from either side of the bend just up river from Barking Creek they could each only see the navigation lights on the other boat.

SS Princess Alice was carrying over 700 people returning from a pleasant outing to Gravesend.  On her deck the band was playing and couples were dancing.  It seems that she headed out towards the Barking bank and then seeing the Bywell Castle, swerved back in towards the south bank.  As I understand it, the skipper of the Bywell Castle, who was aiming to pass behind the other ship passing port to port saw the change in direction too late and his boat, much bigger and stouter than the other ploughed at and angle into the Princess Alice just forward of the starboard paddle wheel.  The Princess Alice broke in two and sank almost immediately.

Few of the revellers could swim and in a matter of minutes and before any rescue could be arranged over 650 passengers and crew were drowned .  To make the matters worse the water was thick with recently discharged raw sewage from the Beckton Sewage works outlet opposite.  It is thought this contributed to many of the deaths.  A subsequent Board of Trade Inquiry and an inquest both placed blame on the skipper of the Princess Alice, (who perished in the disaster) although mistakes were clearly made on both sides. 

The Bywell Castle skipper claimed he was following the Rules of the Road, which many had learned via this little poem.

 

The Rule of the Road

When all three lights I see ahead,
I turn to Starboard and show my Red:
Green to Green, Red to Red,
Perfect Safety -- Go Ahead.

But if to Starboard Red appear,
It is my duty to keep clear --
To act as judgment says is proper:
To Port or Starboard, Back or Stop her.

And if upon my Port is seen
A Steamer's Starboard light of Green,
I hold my course and watch to see
That Green to Port keeps Clear of me.

Both in safety and in doubt
Always keep a good look out.
In Danger, with no room to turn,
Ease her, Stop her, Go Astern.

 

For some reason his final order of Full Speed Astern was not followed in the Bywell Castle engine room.  So with engines at idle and the tide and momentum behind them they ploughed through the flimsy sides of the Princess Alice unhindered. 

A large proportion of the dead were women and children.  120 of the victims were buried in a mass grave at Woolwich Old Cemetery, Plumstead.

A very sad story but one I thought worth sharing.  Maybe you already knew about it.  You can find out more on Wikipedia.

Its a National captain, but not as we know it.

Us boaters tend to like old engines.  Well a lot of us do.  One favourite is the National engine, but we don’t see any like this in a boat.

I don’t think Sarah could squeeze it in to Chertsey.

This is one of a pair of National gas engines which used to pump sewage and surface drainage water from Cambridge to the sewage farm at Milton a couple of miles away.  The old pumping station is now  the Cambridge Museum of Technology which we visited at the weekend when they were having a steaming day.  These of course are not steam engines, they ran on town gas, but were amazingly smooth and quiet.  Looking closely we see the operator has stood a coin on the top of the running engine. Bang in the middle of the photo.

Sadly we missed the running of the original beautiful big steam engines that the Nationals replaced although they were still warm as we passed them.  Several other steam engines were running though, all fed by the central boiler

Interestingly they still have (not working) the old “Destructor” boilers that used to burn domestic waste to generate the steam.  People think that waste to energy plants are a new thing, but they were at it a hundred or more years ago.

A very good museum, right along side the Cam.  Well worth a visit, but best of course on one of their steaming days.  Grace didn’t come with us, but playing with my new Photoshop elements I could pretend she had.

Who says the camera doesn’t lie!