Anniversay Awards Quiz part 2

 Spoiler Alert!  The answers to yesterday's quiz about the first part of our Best Ever Cruise lie at the foot of today's questions.

So here we go with another 10.This time we'll be covering waterways somewhat less travelled by narrowboaters so the questions will not be so much about 'where is it?' but 'What's this that we saw?'. If you hadn't already guessed from yesterday's quiz, we're about to enter the Middle Level Navigations and cross the Fens.

1 After filling in forms to cross the Middle Levels and getting our special windlass we squeeze under the lock footbridge and enter what seems like a new world of high sided narrow dykes. The crossing of the Middle Levels is a strange experience and a bit of an adventure. One of the first things we see  is not especially encouraging

standing on tiptoe we can just see over the sides of the dyke and spot a large factory in the distance.  It's a well known national brand using crops grown locally..  Can you guess the name of the company? You might just make out the logo on the factory side

 2. Not long after we arrived at Whittlesey and what  I think this might be the tightest bend on the entire English canal system. The infamous Briggate Bend approached from a narrow concrete sided corridor.

 Don't try to get your 70ft widebeam round here. We only just managed on Herbie!

and so on to Marmont Priory Lock one of only 5 locks on the middle levels. It seemed to be run by a lock keeping family who all rushed to help us through.  There seems to be an expectation to give them a tip so I gave the old man a pound.

The question is - how many miles of navigable water are on the middle levels 47, 67 or 100?

3.  The next day we pass through one of my very favourite places. With the waterway seeming not much more than a ditch we pass through the middle of  two charming small villages where it feels like the waterway is the High Street and the bridges are very low. Maybe you can name the villages, but if not can you say what county we're in at this point?

3.  And so onto another lock where you have to book a passage. This time to leave the Middle Levels.  

Opening hours for this lock are short and variable. Do you know why? 

4. Next morning the scene could not be more different. We said goodbye tonarrow waters and poky little bridges and locks. Now things looked a bit more serious. The infrastructure around here is responsible for flood management for a good bit of East Anglia

  

Gone are the cloudy days and the narrow dykes. As if my magic, our world changes and the sun is out and the river is wide. 

5 Before long we see this building in the distance.  What is it?

here's a shot I took of the inside

6.  Next day we passed through the permanently staffed Hermitage lock. Where the river beyond becomes tidal for a while

It was on that tidal stretch that we first encountered an unusual river dweller. Who or what?

7.  We were now in the waters where most boats are plastic

Leaving the tidal section we passed through Brownshill Staunch - another magastructure and on to one of our favourite waterside towns which has a more famous namesake in the west country. Can you name it?

 

8.  Next we drop into the marina where our son Richard lives on his boat.  In the clear waters of the marina we see this fish next to his boat.  What species of fish is it?

9. Miraculously Richard actually takes Herbie's helm (he never moves his own boat)

as he steers us to our next overnight stop in a little backwater just beyond Huntingdon in the village of ?? It shares part of its name with a city.

How nice is that?

10. Out here on the east Anglian rivers, what we canal folk call Lock Paddles are called something else. Do you know what?

Eventually we seem to have left the concrete structures behind and passed through the lovely Great Barford Bridge

 And so we reached our furthest point, by this time we had travelled a surprising 258 miles and worked through l63 locks! And of course we've still got the return journey to come with some super detours. though our return route has some super detours.  Annoyingly I don't have a photo of our final stop so I'll give you a proper quiz question. Our final stop was in Bedford which is the limit of navigation on the River Great Ouse.  

11 The Great Ouse is more often seen by narrowboaters as it passes under a tall canal aqueduct a number of miles upstream.at what place?

It had been a lovely trip thus far, but the best was yet to come.

For anyone who tried to guess yesterday's answers, here they are

Starting out from our base at High Line Yachting on the Slough Arm we cruised out the the grand Union and turned northwards through Cowley, Uxbridge and Denham and to one of favourite spots shown in Question 1.  This finds us moored up just north of Black Jacks Lock. A lovely peaceful spot except perhaps for the calling of the pair of peacocks living just across the canal.

Question 2 shows Herbie being hauled out of the water to be blacked by Darren at Cowroast Marina just south of Tring

Question 3 finds us moored up just three or four paces from the door of the excellent Globe Inn in Old Linslade 

Question 4 takes us a lot further north where we rested Herbie on a pontoon at the bottom of the garden of a lovely American lady at the top of Buckby Locks

Question 5. Turning south again after a break we cruised back to Gayton Junction and turned into the Northampton arm where we encounter those 17 narrow locks.

Question 6 is where we drop down onto the River Nene with its flood control locks and stopping places like Cogenhoe where the cows came to investigate. The whole Nene basin is prone to flooding and the river water needs to get away so the topgates of the locks allow the water to spill over and the bottom guillotine gates are left raised up.

Question 7 has us approaching Thrapston Bridge where according to local custom the pronunciation of the river's name changes from Nen to Nene

Question 8 brings us to Fotheringhay.  Just past the bridge is the spot where in 1587 Mary Quenn of Scots met her end at the hand of the axeman.

Question 9 shows us the embankment at Peterborough where we wait for our appointed time to enter the Middle Levels

Question 10 shows us leaving the Nene and entering Standground Lock which is the entrance to the Middle Level Navigation.  This is where you need to purchase a special windlass to fit their unique paddle mechanisms.

OUR BEST EVER CRUISE - GUESS WHERE WE WENT

 Oh yes - the award season is upon us -Golden Globes was on yesterday but did they combine it with a quiz?  No they didn't. But in our 20 year celebration long term Herbie Awards, you do get a quiz.  Here's the idea.  We give an award to some aspect of our years on Herbie but you have to guess what the winner is from the clues we give -mostly photos.  And here we go with a biggie

What do we think has been our best ever cruise?  Kath and I have no doubt -it's an absolute no brainer for us.  The award winner is a cruise we did considerably more than a decade ago when our home mooring was on the dear old Slough Arm.  In fine weather we cruised on and off for a good few weeks, covering a number of waterways.  It was such a long cruise that our quiz questions will need to be split over a few blog posts, so her are the first ten photo questions.

1. Only a day or two in, we stopped here at a favourite spot - where?

2. A couple of days later at a marina a nice man called Darren hauled Herbie out of the water to wash off and repaint Herbie's hull blacking. Any ideas which marina?

3. Then we resumed our cruise stopping a few days later as near as we could to a favourite pub door. Can you name the pub?

4. Suitably refreshed, on we went for a few more days up to a place where we rested Herbie for a couple of weeks while we went off and did other things. Herbie's resting place was at the end of  a kind lady's garden near the top of a flight of locks.. By then we had turned Herbie round. You might just recognise the spot.

.

5. Then it was a retrace of our steps for 12 miles where we branched off and descended this flight of 17 locks. Can you name the waterway?

6. and can you name  the waterway we next took where some of the locks have top gates like this?

and the gongoozlers look like this

7. Later on we cruise beneath this bridge where something significant happens to the name of the waterway. Any ideas what?

8. Later on we moor up at a  site.close to where what famous historical event took place?

9. And so on to a large town where we wait on this embankment for the time to move onto yet another waterway just downstream. Can you name the town?

10 And finally for this post, we enter a lock where we had to book our passage through. Can you name it. or the waterway it gives entrance to?

Next time we'll carry on with our best ever cruise and more questions. There are some great places to come

A big anniversary coming up

Hi dear readers, a Happy New Year to both of you. Yes we're still alive an kicking despite not having updated you for far too long. Well, not much has happened on the boating front apart from emails from CRT reminding me to pay our next licence fee and renew the insurance so there's not been much to tell Herbiewise.

However this is a significant year for us and Herbie because in a couple of weeks time we mark the Twentieth anniversary of when we first met Herbie and decided to buy her and the day when I wrote the first Herbie blog post.  Blogging was a relatively new thing then so we were being quite trendy and teccie I suppose.  If my sums are right, we've published 1860 blog posts in that time.  As well as being a record of our adventures, it's also led to us finding so many good friends on the cut.  

Here is Herbie when we first laid eyes upon her in Stanstead Abbots on the Lee Navigation in a cold January day in 2006.

Her then owners Roy and Val had kept her beautifully clean and tidy and she seemed so cosy hat we fell for her straight away.

I recall that we had travelled all over the place looking at boats, finding nothing that ticked all our boxes so it was a surprise to us that here was the boat we couldn't resist. After our viewing , Kath and I sat in a nearby pub and somewhat in shock, knew that this was it. We were to become boaters.  "If we keep Herbie for five years," we said, "It'll be worth it."  Well here we are twenty years later and Herbie is still a much loved part of our family. From the kids to the grandkids and even to Gertie the cat, Herbie is our second home.

Now regular readers will have noticed that in December we skipped the annual Herbie Awards. This is because our boating was so limited in 2025 that there wasn't enough material. But fear not, our 20th anniversary gives us the chance to indulge in some long term awards. What's the very best cruise we've done, where is our favourite spot, what was our worst disaster  . . .  ?- there's plenty to go on, so stay tuned while I trawl the archives.  I might even compile a little quiz question or two.

In praise of tillers

The lovely Adam and Adrian, whom many of you will know, pick up their beautiful brand new boat from Braidbar today, and watching a video tour of it I was amused to see that in spite of the boat being really really really high spec, they had decided not to have a bow thruster (or as Sue No Problem used to call it ' a girly button').  Apparently Adam had said something like (don't quote me) we're proper boaters and don't need one.

That got me thinking about how brilliant a tiller is.  You can go from full lock one way to full lock the other in a blink of an eye as well as making fine adjustments with a slight movement of your arm.  Not only that, you can feel the water force on the rudder and most of all, you feel 'at one' with the boat.  It's also of course an incredibly simple device in which there is hardly anything to go wrong.

I'm the first to admit that there are times when a bow thruster would be handy, but it shouldn't be used as a substitute for knowing how to handle a tiller.  Years ago we were walking down the snaking flight of locks at Marsworth when a very posh new boat came past with the 'helmsman' steering entirely with the bow thruster, even on the straight bits of the canal.  Every few seconds that familiar roar came from his bow as he adjusted the boat's direction.  His wife was on the towpath and when I questioned her why, she said "Oh he can't get on with the tiller so he only steers with the thruster" .  I thought to myself that he must only cruise in the mornings because his battery would be flat by lunchtime.

Some boats have steering wheels, which you might have thought would be easy. Well that's not my experience.

In 2014 I had to get my Inland Helmsman's Certificate in order to act as a volunteer boat mover for CRT, and a group of us were instructed and tested by the redoubtable Andrew Phasey- at that time Commodore of the St Pancras Cruising Club. 

Having been a boater for nearly ten years at that point I was quietly confident - until that is they asked us to do complicated manoeuvres on a CRT work boat with a steering wheel.

Dear reader I can't begin to tell you how hard it was. For a start the wheel had half a dozen full rotations lock to lock with nothing to tell you where the middle setting was. and being a hydraulic drive you got no feed back at all through the wheel. I'm embarrassed to tell you that even going straight along the middle of the canal I was doing a slalom. I suppose it didn't help that the boat had no rudder, but instead the Archimedes screw propeller swung right and left as you rurned the steering wheel amking coming into the bank a right nightmare. Talk about prop walk! Give me a tiller any day.  The ever patient Andrew didn't seem very impressed at all with any of us but as we knew all the other stuff about safety and using ropes and using locks etc, he passed all of us. In the succeeding weeks I drove this kind of boat on a number of occasions and although I improved a bit I never got the hang of coming neatly into the bank.

Shortly after qualifying,  I was also asked to drive CRT's whopping great exhibition boat Jena on a number of occasions. Here she is tied up on the narrow Slough arm after having turned round.

You might get a better idea of her size by seeing the inside:

Jena is 12ft wide and 60+ ft long and one time with several dignitaries on board I had to turn her round in a spot where the canal was only a couple of inches over 60ft wide, but with a good old tiller I managed it without much problem.  Would a bow thruster have helped?  Maybe, but I'm sure a pesky steering wheel wouldn't.

Now I'm just remembering an adventure on even bigger boat with a tiller. She was called Olive and she was a humber keel 14ft wide. Here she is at her berth in Cowley on the GU.

Olive was owned by a friend of a friend and they asked me to helm her down the GU to Brentford and onto the Thames. It was all very exciting because she only just fitted under the bridges and huge tiller arm, about eight feet long meant you had to walk from side to side to swing it through it's great arc. Boats coming the other way tended to panic and head for the bushes when they saw her coming.  In the end the whole trip was a failure because when we got into Norwood Top Lock she got wedged against the sides and it took over an hour to get her unstuck. Dave, her owner lost his nerve at that point and issued orders to abandon the trip so we backed her up to Adelaide yard where we turned her round and headed back home where we turned again and fitted her snugly back into her berth with only a few inches space fore and aft.  Despite all the problems we had that day, the tiller steering wasn't one of them and she steered really easily.

Sometimes the simplest device is the best.

Canal open!! plus the report of the commission looking into boat licencing and mooring

 I was quite surprised to receive the notice that the long term water shortage closures on the South Oxford have now been lifted. Some recent photos still showed the reservoir levels on the summit to be very low, although another report said that the reservoirs at Calcutt were now full. Anyhow that's all good news for the time being.

I've just finished reading all 82 pages of the independent commission reviewing CRT's licencing framework. I was one of the many boaters who respoded to their survey questionnaire. It certainly makes interesting reading and will no doubt be the subject of much debate and give CRT a lot to think about.  It's a complex problem and those who want a quick simple solution will be disappointed.  I don't yet have any clear opinions on the recommendations, but some interesting facts came to light and raised our eyebrows.  In no particular order, here are some:

CRT issues a cheaper "Rivers Only" licence -well we knew that, but hadn't realised it is available to all the boats on the Lee navigation. Some 800 boats(mainly residential) on the lower Lee in London in places like Hackney and Tottenham are getting their licence at a 40% reduction.  The reports recommends scrapping that type of licence.  There'll be uproar!

The number of unlicenced boats at the time of writing report was about 3500, costing the Trust around    £4 million in lost revenue

The number of ongoing enforcement cases was 5725 -that's an astonishing average of one boat in every six although some boaters have multiple cases.!!  The vast majority of which are due to unpaid licences

If a boat is removed from the water by CRT due to being abandoned or in some way non compliant, it takes an average of 257 days to complete all the necessary processes.

The total cost of enforcement over the last year was £4.31 million, which works out at a cost of £120 on everyone that does pay their licence.

If a licenced is revoked for any reason such as non payment or failure to comply with the rules or even abuse or threatening behaviour, CRT has no powers with refuse a re-application for a licence.

CRT has in effect one hand behind its back in trying to enforce anything. Its powers are limited and the legislation is unclear.

Sort that lot out!  That's just a sample of the problems with the current arrangements. The report also goes into congestion in urban areas, the unclear rules on 'continuous cruising', the 14 day rule and so on.

It makers recommendations on all these things and I need to re read them before taking a view, but I thought you might like to hear some of the findings early on.

Should you want to read the report, start here

https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/boating/boating-news-and-views/boating-news/commission-to-review-future-framework-for-boat-licensing

Making a meal of a "quick" job

Here's another entry into my "DiY how not to do stuff " annals. Read on only if you've got a strong stomach for details of technical incompetence. I'm just writing this to get it off my chest.

Our grandson Jacob stayed on Herbie recently for a weekend break and reported that the lock on the front doors had jammed.  I wasn't unduly surprised in that it had been a bit sticky for a while, so I thought I'd better install a new one pronto.

Ideally I wanted to replace it like for like to save having to drill new holes and cut new recesses in the doors, so I found one that was pretty much the same at good old Toolstation. Error numbro uno. In retrospect I'm not sure that was a good idea because the latch looks pretty cheap and nasty.  Should it fail when we're outside the boat, we probably wouldn't be able to get back in without damaging the doors

Anyhow, even though the new lock was near identical to the old one it still had a common problem. 

Most night latch locks are designed for doors that open inwards, but on Herbie (and most other boats I suspect) the doors open outwards. So when you get your new latch you have to dismantle it and turn the latch bolt (the brass thingy that sticks in and out as you operate the lock) the other way round.

Of course I had no idea how these things worked so when I took it to bits I was nervous of not being able to reassemble it. Error number 2 - always take a photo of  how it looks before you dismantle it. Of course I didn't. Fortunately I was able to practice on the old lock first so that helped a bit. Sometime later after pinching my fingers several. times and grovelling on the floor to retrieve a little spring, I managed it. So feeling pleased with myself I offered the new latch mechanism up to the door and was pleased when all the old screw holes were indeed in the right place.  

One thing you do have to do is to cut to length the tongue that pokes through from the actual lock on the outside of the door. (see that long sticky out thing in the picture above) Could I find my junior hacksaw? Of course not. It's probably hidden in plain sight like the pen that you put down which immediately disappears. So using two pairs of pliers I snapped off the excess length, and slid the new latch over it and screwed everything into place.  Job's a good'un. Well it should have been!  Now the b*&$y thing wouldn't turn.  Error number three -check you have trimmed the lock tongue short enough.

After taking it all off again and dropping little screws and wasting time looking for them, I deduced that the tongue was still a tad too long and was jamming against the latch cover. It looked like it just need a couple of millimetres trimming off. Well you can't do that with two pairs of pliers and I still could find the hacksaw so I resorted to my recent new friend the Mr Anglegrinder. Laying him on his back and wearing protective gloves I gingerly ground off the requisite 2 mil and set off back to the doors and screwed the latch back in place for the nth time. It worked! All I had to do now was to fit the thingy on the other side that the bolt slides into.  I screwed in on and tried the doors.  

Aah. If only it was that simple. You see, when you turn the latch bolt over, the flat side is now too close to the door surface to locate into the thingy on the other side. 

Doh! Now I could chisel a rebate to sink the thingy lower, or I could use a gasket to raise the latch a bit further from the door surface. Hmm. Of course my chisels are all back at our house.  So I called it a day for now. 

The latch does stop the door from opening - just -so it'll do while I contemplate getting a better quality lock - one I can trust. Of course that almost certainly will require reversing its bolt and drilling new holes in the door.  let's hope it goes better when I do it.  The cost of the lock and latch this time was only £14 so I can write that off to experience.

Cropredy takes a step up

While I was packing up ready to go home this morning, some gentlemen were busy installing safety ladders at the end of some of the pontoons in the marina. It didn't take them long, just a few minutes in each spot. I don't know how many were installed in total, about one for every half dozen pontoons at a guess. I'll check next time I'm there.  Anyway they're a good idea. Anyone who has fallen off a boat knows how hard it is to get back out of the water.  I think the water depth is such that you could wade across to the nearest ladder if you were unable to swim although short people may struggle. I like the bright yellow for visibility.

There now follows a long bit of no interest to people who don't enjoy watching paint dry, but for those that might (and for the record) . . 

Over the last couple of days I have been taking advantage of our move to the other side of our pontoon and getting to grips with Herbie's port side handrail and the gutter inboard of it.  A lot of rust had gathered there and a fair bit of angle grinding and sanding was required to get rid of it before overpainting with some rust beater paint.  More coats will be needed, probably in the spring but it should hold it through the winter.

Once I had painted the handrail, shown above I set about the rusty patches you can see in the picture. That was taken after a preliminary 'grind' to remove all the flaky paint and loose rust. Then lots of sanding and wire brushing got it ready for a coat of the paint. 

What I don't have a photo of is all the dust I created with the angle grinder, but believe you me there was a heck of a lot of it.  The hoovering up and  washing down took longer than the grinding /sanding. Then a good wash with Sugar Soap, dry off, then wipe with a tack rag and finally a wipe over with white spirit to cut any grease, and on with the paint. Just a three inch strip down the side of the roof for now. Something I learned from Phil Speight's boat painting course years ago was that if you are just repairing a patch of paint, it looks much better if you mask off straight edges around it and paint within that. Hence the masking tape you see below.  I think the splodgy bits you can see at the far end are just where the paint was still wet.  This hammerite stuff actually dries pretty fast, even in the cool temperatures we had.

So not too bad to get to that from this:

in a couple of days, is quite satisfying.

Whilst I got into the pits with a wire brush on my drill, the pits have not yet been filled to get a flush surface.  That can be done later on top of this 'holding coat' before the undercoat and top coats. Time is short at this time of the year with only narrow windows of time to get the job done at the right sort of temperature and humidity. 

Interestingly I read that many paints require you to ensure the temperature is at least 2degC above the dew point. There are simple calulators on line to calculate the dew point. Here's the one I used

You have to know the air temperature and the relative humidity, both of which you can get with reasonable accuracy from the Met Office weather forcast for your area. So using that I knew I was well in the clear. Later in the autumn it could well be a problem.

Loads more to do of course, but it's all moving in the right direction.

 

Servicing stuff.

Not all tools have to be expensive.  This week a toothbrush was all I needed to fix Herbie's Morco gas water heater.  The heater was firing up when I turned the hot water tap on, but then cut out some seconds later. I had a good idea what to do about it as it has happened before.  I don't have a clue about the inner workings of the pressure switchs and wotnot that these things have, but fortunately I don't need to. If the Morco is left unused for some weeks there's a good chance that incy wincy spider will get in there, either through the open pilot light vent or perhaps down the chimney flue and start laying cobwebs. 

So it's off with the heater cover (don't look now if you are squeamish about naked gas heaters)

and out with the toothbrush. Couple of minutes brushing the pilot jet and the burner jets (a bit hard to get at) is all you need. And then comes the really hard bit, getting the flippin' cover back on again. Its held on by stupid little hooks at the back and they don't seem at all easy to re engage.  Anyhow I did it and now the Morco is back in action.  Regulations now forbid the installation of these heaters unless they are "room sealed", but those like ours already installed before the regulations came in are permitted. Despite making a rather alarming roar when the light up, they're super things, giving piping hot water on demand and lying idle the rest of the time. We don't normally need it when cruising though as the engine heats the calorifier tank "free of charge".

It seems to be a week for getting things serviced.  First the Morco, then our car is almost due for one, and Kath and I are about to be serviced by means of our twice a year Covid jabs and annual flu jab and on Tuesday my best guitar goes to the guitar doctor for a set up. The instrument seems to need this every tnow and then. last time was ten years ago.  Even the best wood moves about a little bit when it's under stress. Believe it or not, the strings on yer average guitar create a total tension of 150 lbs or more on the instrument and good guitars can be very lightly built in order to make them more responsive. Then if like me you keep torturing the thing by changing to different types of tuning which means slackening some strings and tightening others, the instrument eventually gets a bit out of kilter and needs an expert tweak to set it up so it's easy to play again. We're only talking a millimetre or so but it makes a huge difference. With solid electric guitars you can do it yourself because of the way they are engineered but acoustics are more of a dark art and an amateur can do more harm than good.

So because of the jabs and the guitar appointment I'm back home for a couple of days before returning to Herbie on Tuesday afternoon to carry on with the work on the roof and the handrail. I need to get a protective layer of paint over the newly exposed metal before all my grinding and sanding work is undone. Even after two days a thin film of rust is appearing over the bare metal so that'll have to come off before giving it a coat of rust treating paint.

See you next week with more on Herbie's refurb.

Off to a flying start - partly thanks to WD490

 At last being able to get at the port side roof of Herbie, I've got off to a good start in just over a day.

The first job was to remove the old wooden handrail like we did earlier this year on the starboard side. Because it was to be broken up and disposed of I was able to use brute force and a big screwdriver as a lever. Here it comes

I got the whole handrail off in about half an hour., slowed down by some gert big screws that had secured cleats on top of the rail.

Brute force tool number two, an impact screw driver swung into action and after some hefty coults with a hammer, out they came.  Lots of smaller screws still remained in the steel

Being rusty they snapped off with some pliers and then I cut them off flush with the rail using a cutting disc on my battery powered angle grinder. That made some lovely sparks, which was fun. I resisted having an angle grinder for many years but now I'm a big fan. It makes short work of otherwise onerous tasks.

Swapping the cutting disc for a grinding pad got rid of all the loose crusty flaky rust and got us back to this.  The dark colour you see is some of Herbie's original dark blue paint

By now the roof ( and a lot of me) was covered in brown dust and out came the next super tool, our little Dyson vacuum which got rid of most of it in a couple of minutes. These tools are best friends

It's not just the handrail that needs doing, there are quite a few places on this side of the roof that need work so while I had the angle grinder handy I made a start on them. Here are some, posing with my old bottle of Fertan rust converter which seems to last forever.

While I'm happy to use Fertan on the roof, and it does work,  I'm not going to use it on the handrail because of what happened on the starboard side when a shower of rain spread the residue all over the side of the boat.

It took a lot of elbow grease and cream cleaner to shift, and I was not a happy bunny.

So this time I'm going to rely on Hammerite No 1 Rust Beater primer which dries pretty fast and can be applied directly over non flaky rust. I was a bit concerned about starting with paint this late in the year, but according to the blurb the Hammerite can be painted at anything between 8 and 25 deg C, so Ill do that next week. Then pits will need filling with Isopon filler, which according to their blurb can be applied on top of paint providing the paint is given a coarse sanding first.  It certainly worked well when we did the other side.

Meanwhile my attention turned to another port side job that has been waiting for me to have access.  When we repainted the port cabin side before we moved pontoons eighteen months ago we used some posh masking tape which was supposed to, and did, give a really sharp edge. Well, I won't be using that stuff again because it left a sticky residue where it had been. Our move of pontoons came so suddenly after we had painted that we didn't have time to get rid of the goo, so It has sat until now picking up dust. I wasn't sure how to get it off either, until someone said to try good old WD40 and I'm here to tell you that it did indeed work a treat. Here's before

and after

It still needs a second go here and there but it works.

While I was using the WD40 I had a ghastly thought.  Does it contain silicone? Painters know that new paint wont stick to silicone, no matter how little there is of it and that light grey paint will need to be repainted soon.  In fear, I studied the spray can, and then let out a little cheer

Phew!  Good old WD40.  I also noticed on the can that it says you can use it to remove wax crayon marks, which might be a bit akin to what I was doing.  Here's a free of charge tip of mine for you. If you are sawing wood and it's hard going because the saw is sticking, spray the blade with some WD40 and it'll go much easier.

So after moving to the other side of our pontoon only yesterday morning we've made some good progress.  Another bite out of the elephant.

Saturday Monday and Tuesday are out due to previous engagements but hopefully I'll be a lot further on if I can get back to Herbie later next week.

Herbie on the move!

 After many months shackled to her berth in Cropredy, Herbie now lies in a new spot.  I was somewhat amazed when Herbie's trusty old BMC engine burst into life at the first turn of the key this morning.  That's the first time she's been started up in a good six months. 

So it was tiller on, and off we go!  50 feet in reverse, two feet to the right and 50 feet forward - to the other side of our pontoon.  Yes, sorry to get you all excited, but we were just swapping places with the boat next door so I can get to work on the port side of the roof and handrail. Now the work can begin. Having done most of the starboard side I'm somewhat more confident this time because it's just a repeat exercise.  How much we'll get done before the weather stops work we'll have to see. I'll try to keep up before and after photos this time. I won't get too much done before the weekend, then we have to leave the boat for other engagements.

Poor Gertie was confused and disturbed when we let her out because everthing was a bit like a mirror image of what she had got used to.  

Anyway here we are a few feet further west.  The climate is pretty similar here although we are a bit more sheltered from the wind that blows across the marina. Hopfully it will blow us on to the pontoon side rather than off it.

Stay tuned for pictures of the work.

CRT can't win

 I've just finished reading the report of an independent survey commissioned by Canal and River Trust, one in which I sent in my views along with 4000 odd other boaters some months back. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I wouldn't want to be the new chief exec of CRT having to sort this lot out.

In a nutshell, 

1. Half of boaters think CRT is too zealous with licence and overstay enforcement and the other half think they are too lax

2. Every type of boater (those with home moorings, continuous cruisers, narrowboaters, widebeamers) think that what they pay is unfair compared with the other types

3. People want licencing to be less complicated but they agree that CRT should move away from to variable  rates to reflect the circumstances of different types of user

3. Everyone wants CRT to spend more on canal upkeep but everyone wants licences to be cheaper

4. Liveaboards want more moorings and facilities in urban areas and to be able to stay longer in one place but leisure boaters are annoyed with overstayers clogging up visitor moorings..

and so on.

This is all nothing new of course. Another example of consultants being paid to tell organisations what they already know.  Clearly whatever CRT does next will upset half the boaters.  We await their response with interest.

In other news, we are back aboard Herbie for a few days with some jobs to do. More on thet in the coming days. We are no longer sealed off from the canal but can't go anywhere because all the locks are shut. Ship's cat Gertie seems to be enjoying it though. Home from home.