[Your Favourite hire Boat]

Without a doubt, the best hire boat I've ever sailed on is Luna from Hunter's Yard, though any of the four berths are good, and for the smaller party the Hustlers are very hard to beat. (Whilst the three berths are still very good boats, they suffer from a sub-optimal rig, not to mention the third berth sharing a cabin with the heads.)

Aside from the Hunter's boats (given that there are many people who would balk at the lack of an engine - as I learned to sail without an engine it doesn't bother me), I've had good experiences with the Eastwood Whelpton fleet at Upton - I really couldn't choose between Windjammer or Bootlegger, both are very pleasant to sail and fairly comfortable (though the Hunter's boats do have the edge in comfort over anything else I've sailed - huge berths, loads of storage, and whilst the facilities are basic they work very well).

The one other boat that deserves a mention, IMHO, is George Thetford, formerly from Camelot Craft at Wroxham, now available from Eastwood Whelpton. Whilst the accommodation isn't perfect, and I found her harder work to sail than many other boats, the electric inboard engine worked very, very well indeed (it was the main reason we hired her, having been impressed with the electric canal boats we'd seen a year earlier on the Monmouth & Brecon Canal).

If I were ever rich enough to consider commissioning my own boat (or building her myself), I'd want to take the lines, layout, and rig off Lucent from Hunter's yard, modified to account for the mass of a large battery bank to power a reasonably beefy electric motor hanging off the bottom in a waterproof pod, attached to a three bladed, feathering prop (I'd also be making alterations to the keel and rudder, but the details of those should probably be saved for a different post, as they're a bit techie).

[Raymarine Radar problem]

From the posts above, I think it's reasonably safe to say that the other instruments and display are working more or less as designed. Before getting into a long and potentially complicated series of diagnostics, is it possible to examine the inside of the radome with a Mk. 1 Eyeball? That would allow you to exclude one of the most common problems with marine radar (particularly if it's not been used) - corrosion of metal parts inside the radome, so that whilst the electronic components may still function, the mechanical components are locked solid.

[ink jet printers]

I've now had a chance to experiment with printing photographs, and I have to say that the results with the test pack of Epson Premium Glossy paper (and the compatible inks in the CISS) are generally very satisfactory, and where they've not been perfect as far as I can tell it's been my inexperience that's to blame, rather than the technology.

[ink jet printers]

Thanks to a very speedy dispatch and efficient courier (not often I get to write that), I now have something relevant to add to this thread. I finally bit the bullet and bought a printer that's primarily to help with my studies, but also for printing photographs. I had (if I'm honest) a non-existent budget, so printing costs were a big issue (all my other printers are old HP Laserjets and the toner cartridges last for years at the rate we print documents).

In the end, eBay proved my saviour, as I managed to get a brand new Epson Stylus PHOTO R285 with a continuous ink supply system (pre-filled with 100ml of each of the 6 inks, or the equivalent of about 15 sets of cartridges) for £75.50 inclusive of P&P. It arrived this morning, about 24 hours since I placed the order, and so far the results are very promising (with only a few ink stains on my fingertips, too), although I've yet to try printing a photograph, text on to 80gsm copier paper is very acceptable. It might be worth pointing out that my last experience with inkjet printers was an HP Deskjet 340 (I think, it was certainly the bottom of their range at the time) about 10 or 11 years ago, so I'm not that hard to please. Of course, it was a little bit of a worry to take the printer out of it's box and invalidate the warranty before I'd even seen it print a single page (it didn't come with any cartridges, just the CISS, which requires a couple of bits to be removed in order for it to be fitted), but everything seems to be working fine so far.

Now I just have to wait for the various different bundles of photo paper I ordered to arrive, as most of them are second class mail, this may take a while.

[Lord Roberts]

Hi thanks for the info, I know now where Turners was. I dont know of Janca, but I did know Spray, she lived in our wet shed for years, we did a fair bit of work on her in that time, she was owned by two doctors if my memory serves me correctly, she was very well looked after then.

My Mums house was used in Swallows and Amazons, it was the house where the twins Port and Starboard lived, the BBC painted it from blue to black and it has been ever since. they also filmed some kind of court room scene in one of the rooms, you can tell as the door handle opens upside down! The white rat or hamster or whatever it was lived there for the duration of the filming!!!

That was a long time ago, I have never seen it since it was on telly as we didnt have a video!

It's been released on DVD (with the title 'Swallows and Amazons Forever', despite neither Coot Club or The Big Six featuring either Swallows or Amazons) , I think I got our copy from play.com for about £6.

[Camera]

One thing I would say about using old M42 lenses on a DSLR is that you may well find it a pain using it in full manual mode (compared with say the kit lens that you'll probably have with it) and manual focussing isn't quite as easy either without the cut-glass focussing screens of old...

True, I don't envisage using them very often, but equally it's very nice to have the option if it's required, and at the price that some things are going for (£5-10 per lens) it's difficult to go too far wrong on a purchase.

[Camera]

I've got a Praktica too, albeit a more recent model, a BCA (aperture-priority automatic with bayonet lens mount, not quite the model I was after, but for £1.27 on eBay I wasn't complaining). I'm keeping my eye open for cheap second hand glass (and a body from the range that had manual controls, preferably a BMS) from the same source, so in a few months time I should hopefully have a decent set of prime lenses and a couple of zooms (I've got an M42 adapter as well, so most of the glass should be usable with a digital SLR+adapter in the future).

I've also been looking at getting a Zenit (or Zenith, it's the same company, but rendered in either the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets) Photosniper FS-2, a lovely piece of kit consisting of a Zenit SLR and 300mm telephoto lens mounted on a rifle stock with pistol grip and trigger for the shutter release, and a large focus knob built into the stock near to the front. A mate of mine had one when I was at Uni (and wasn't particularly interested in photography, I'm afraid to say), and he got some great pictures with it, and claimed it was really easy to use - it's certainly intuitive for anyone that's ever used an air rifle, let alone anything more powerful.

[point & Shoot]

Interesting... So did we! I can imagine wind being a problem. We had a cruiser (also from West Highland Sailing) but we did see a few yachts about and they didn't seem to be making a great deal of progress...

The wind was definitely a problem - if I were designing a pleasure yacht for the Caledonian Canal, I'd consider giving it a square sail, as there's no point in a more weatherly rig (in all probability it'd end up with a balanced lugsail, as I doubt that even I could be quite that antiquarian in my sensibilities). It'd also have an electric engine, to save bow-hauling it through the staircase locks (n.b. normal engines need to be switched off in the staircase locks to avoid giving everyone on the boats CO poisoning).

I did enjoy the week in Scotland, and it has to be said that the Caledonian Canal is by far the nicest bit of BW-controlled water I've boated on (though the Monmouth & Brecon Canal is also very pleasant, at least when it's in water). Having toilet/shower/laundry blocks at most of the free moorings (with keys available for free to every licenced boat) was an unusual (and very pleasant) change to the Broads, and I thought that the floating pontoon moorings worked very well, and could find a use on certain parts of the Broads as an alternative to piled bankside moorings - I know I'd prefer to wake up to a view of a reed bed next to my cabin window rather than a grotty bit of steel piling.

[point & Shoot]

Nice pic TeaDaemon - Looks suspiciously like Fort Augustus to me!

It is indeed, we had a week on the Caledonian Canal for our honeymoon - it was very pleasant, but not somewhere I'd go back to again, as we didn't get very much sailing done (being in the bottom of a valley meant that the wind was always either dead astern or dead ahead, and in our case we had headwinds all week, so only got to sail when we made a special effort to go out on to one of the Lochs).

[point & Shoot]

It's only in the last month that I've progressed beyond what could be considered a fairly standard (probably low-end these days, but a good deal when I bought it in 2005) digital compact, 8MP with a 7.5mm-22.5mm lens (an Acer CR-8530, to be specific). It was good enough to take this picture, which I have printed out at 12"x8"; ready and waiting to be mounted, framed, and put up on the wall of our new house:

I've recently (within the last month) upgraded to a Fuji Finepix s9600 (second hand, but less than 1000 pictures taken, off eBay with a decent case for £160), as for quite a while I've felt that I've been limited in what I can do by the capabilities of my camera. Although it's by no means as capable as even an entry-level dSLR, it's got enough bells and whistles to keep me occupied for quite a while, and takes some very good pictures indeed. Heartily recommended for anyone who likes photography but doesn't want the expense or hassle of a dSLR outfit. (I will be getting a dSLR, but I can't afford one for a while, so this will have to do me in the meantime).