At day's end, I tied up the boat near a Canal & River Trust service shack: water, elsan, toilets and shower.
A shower! 🚿
I hurried from the boat to the CRT building in only my shorts, T-shirt and shoes, towel and soap in hand. (These places lack clothes hooks, so fewer items is better.) They did have a wooden bench, and a disabled grab handle that I used as a towel rack.
The locks toward Haigh Hall are deep. Their massive gates weigh more than a tonne each. A number of the gates have chains and pulleys to help boaters open and close them.
To share the work, I asked another boat to pair up.
Quite a few of the #locks are covered in a lush, living carpet of #vegetation (see photo).
Going through a flight of double locks, traditionally boats would be tied together to move more easily between locks.
You don't see it often because newer boaters don't know how, and —oh no— they'd have to talk about something other than the weather. It takes experience, trust and collaboration.
In the photo, one boat is crewed. It is steering both, using only one engine. The other boat crew is operating locks.
Not as "prise it out of my cold dead hands" as I expected, so I won't be grappling with the dilemma of paying Elon more than £1k/year. Phew!
It's impressively easy to set up and use and works on the roof of my #narrowboat. The 45W consumption has some downside but the fact is I really can do 99% of what I want using a 4G mobile at £240/year. So it's not worth the money to me.
My friend, also on a boat, uses it for endless video conferences. #offgrid
You know how Mastodon/Fediverse has Everything? Truly you can hear about any old thing that previously existed but you didn't know existed, and lo and behold there's a hashtag for it. Last night's insomnia offered me #NarrowBoat videos and there is, indeed, a hashtag for it!
(If you didn't know, it's just the type of boat people used to and still use to traverse the massive system of canals criss-crossing the UK. And you live on them, either all year or some of the year, depending. Look up photos, they're kind of amazing from the inside!)
Living on a boat with a refillable water tank, I've learned to conserve water.
I wash daily but only shower once a week, because:
It's a waste to run lots of water over your body and then pump it overboard.
Human skin is great at keeping clean and oil-free without any help from Proctor & Gamble IF you let it recover from the chemical abuse of "body wash" etc.
Canal and River Trust brought 3 steel barges to the marina. Each one arrived on its own lorry/truck. A separate crane lifte them into the basin.
Here you can see a tug (blue) holding a barge in place in the basin, while a crane (yellow) lifts another barge over to the basin. A second tug has already left with the third barge.
That's yesterday. Today, three CRT vehicles and crew are parked here, waiting for …?
if not, I highly recommend grabbing one if you can afford it. powder is a good place to start, since it works for almost all household fire types and is safe around electricals. a brand new 1kg one is about £15 and a 2kg one is about £20.
a few years back I had an incident where having a fire extinguisher in our kitchen saved me from severe burns and limited the fire damage to stuff I could cheaply repair. coincidentally, I had bought it that day.
@SnoopJ
In principle perhaps, but I know plenty of homes where escaping a blaze would be a lot harder than a #narrowboat.
I'm not complaining, but I have to have three extinguishers, one in each of the main areas and they have to be less than four years old regardless of the gauge reading.
Although whether you get pulled up on that depends on the inspector you get. So far only one in three. 🤷♂️
It’s #Caturday and we’ve brought Ajay to stay on our #narrowboat for the first time. We’re not going anywhere, just staying on the marina overnight so she can get the hang of the boat. She’s settled down pretty quickly despite what it looks like in the photo. We’re hoping she’ll understand that not all trips in the cat carrier have to end up at the vets!
Well-argued article in the discrimination against boaters without home moorings. Like Braverman saying make tents for the homeless illegal rather than providing affordable homes, CRT’s intention is to price ‘homeless’ boaters off the canal. The itinerant boaters who are perceived as a problem are those unable to afford any other home—and why is that?—but the impact is felt also by those who happily choose a life exploring the country. https://www.narrowboatworld.com/14940-boat-licence-discrimination #BoatLife#Canal#Narrowboat
We were busy with locks and watching for a chandlery to buy coal, not watching the sky.
By the time we descended Church Minshull lock, it was full sun—but low in the sky because it's less than a week to November.
Photo: We are passing a traditional carrier type of narrowboat, with its 2-stroke engine. It's not a putt-putt-putt sound; it's lower and more blutt-blutt-blutt.
We waited in vain for the fog to burn off. After wasting the morning with that, we have decided to get moving.
We're winding the boat after bridge 91, and then heading back north to the Middlewich Arm, which connects Shropshire Union canal to the Trent & Mersey canal.
Rainy-day boredom:
• I took a photo of an open porthole. (See below.)
• My husband discovered that his nose fits in my ear in some new way, which he demonstrated.
At 4pm the rain is scheduled to ease, at which point we'll get underway. No point in getting soaked now when there's no place else we have to be.
#Narrowboat engine service done for another year 🥳
Also saved a packet. Two years ago I decided to have it done professionally to check if everything I've been doing was adequate. It was, though it was useful to be reassured and to have them change the coolant and radiator hoses. That cost £450.
Many canals converge on Manchester—under brick arches and steel railway bridges. Former canalside warehouses are in rough shape, except those converted to housing or offices. Footbridges, unexpected stairs, and stone towpaths along the canals and basins make a delightful maze.
Maximum stay: 72 hours. No return for 14 days. There are many museums and architectural marvels to see, and the Alan Turing memorial.
Science/coastal hivemind, I need your help. We’re working on the underwater acoustics of small all-electric boats (almost certainly far less underwater noise pollution than engines). We would like to do some trials - just measuring the sound near an electric boat - but we’re struggling to find someone in (or very near) the UK who has an electric boat we could use/hire. Has anyone got any ideas or know anyone who owns an electric boat?