Oddfellow

You have no need to take this to an extreme, but when we're talking about ignoring laws, there's no finer exponent of this than those that have set them. We are talking about a few people making a point. We we so angry about the Fuel protests of the early 2000 when the problem was the price of fuel and not how the burning of it was damaging the climate? Perspective. The bigger picture. These two things are often overlooked when we are personally impacted by a minor irritation.

Listen to yourselves getting angry at a few people making a point and a bloody fair one at that. Yes, we know it's disruptive. That's the point of the protest. We know something needs to be done for a sustainable solution and we have known for years. Problem is that for years, virtually nothing has been done and now it's all getting a bit 11th hour and we're moaning about a bit of inconvenience. Let me assure you that this is nothing to the inconvenience of being flooded out.... Yes, it's a ball ache, but get behind this before the only thing behind you is a tsunami. If only more of us has the balls to do things like this, we might have been able to affect change years ago when it wasn't so urgent.

Well, until you have run a business in this sector, Fred, I am afraid that all you know is assimilated from being an outsider. You are just someone looking in with whatever coloured spectacles you fancy wearing at the time, casting assumptions. It's only Vaughan and I that have first-hand experience of this business. Read what AndyG said about fuel if you still think I am talking out of the top of my head. If you don't want to have a real insight, I will be pleased not to have my hackles raised by people who think they "know" what they are doing and walk away just as others have. It bothers me nowt either way as I have so little exposure to the rivers now that I really don't care much.

Well, you clearly don't understand, Fred. You don't get cheaper fuel the more you buy because there are break points on taxes in the supply chain. If we bought more than X thousand litres of the stuff, it became MORE expensive. We has to have multiple deliveries to full our tanks at the right price. Not everything is as you believe it to be. You also need to consider the costs of equipment. A new weights and measures pump can cost many thousands of pounds. A 2000l tank will cost a couple of grand too. Everything is way over-simplified in the minds of people who only see the smallest aspect of a business.

I considered it the most important. I put a lot of work into the skippers handbooks and our trial runs were probably the most comprehensive of any yard at the time. I also got a lot of positive comments on my video handovers which are still available on YouTube today. Finger trouble exists in all of us. I am an accomplished photographer, but I make simple, stupid mistakes most days. Mistakes that I know not to make, until I make them. You can train a great deal into someone, but you cannot impart a career's worth of boat handling or operating skills into a handover.

Ah, the dreaded "finger trouble" Just look at the high number of customers not doing what they should. I will guarantee this number remains high throughout fleets today. It's worth remembering this when people try to count the "breakdowns" of any given yard by the frequency of seeing their vans at moorings. I guarantee that the bigger the fleet, the greater the percentage of "finger trouble" call outs and for many reasons, not just the sheer number of boats, but the number of customers, the reduced amount of time possible on a hand over and so much more.

I am surprised that the fuel deposits haven't increased yet. The cost of fuel has rocketed in recent weeks and although it may have settled, it has done so at an exorbitant rate that may be unsustainable for all-inclusive operators and is likely to give returning holidaymakers a nasty shock when asked for more money to cover their usage. This year, we may think the pandemic is behind us and act like we used to, but many of us will soon be priced out of things like Sunday Drives, pub trips and even fish and chips as the cost of cooking oils has rocketed too. I read a headline that fish and chip shops are very worried as this is the perfect storm for them - Gas & Electric up hugely and now the oils they use for frying and, obviously the wholesale cost of fish too as you don't catch Cod without Diesel. Strap in folks. It's going to be a long and bumpy ride.

Because, Fred, Boulters use low fuel prices as a LOSS LEADER to get other work. Boulters is a WORKING yard and chatting to customers when filling up is part of its sales process. Also, when a yard has 100 - 250 boats, it stands to reason you will see more of their engineers on the banks. Some yards don't have liveried vans either.....

It was not and NBD Boat.

Hire boat batteries take a beating every night. Engines and Alternators can do 20+ hours running a week and if something in that power circuit goes faulty in all that work, all that vibration, things can happen. It's very different from a private boat that might get only 60 hours running a year by someone who's gotta cough up if something goes wrong. Monitoring the electrolyte levels in batteries is a good weekly indicator of how the system is performing and can give you an early-warning of a failure in the battery or, indeed, the charging system. Running a boat is very different from running a hire fleet. VERY different.

Very cynical, Fred. Let me assure you that there's bugger-all profit to be had from fuel sales. And in no way was my explanation some kind of justification for doing a bad job. BUT, it is a likely reason that a bad job can be achieved because the pressures to work to a very tight schedule are very real and let me assure you that a customer mouthing off in reception with a queue behind them because their boat might be 15 minutes beyond the time they think it should be ready impacts upon all the staff and other holidaymakers that witness it. The point is that things happen. Sometimes things aren't always checked as fully as we might like, sometimes not at all. To err is human. I really don't think most of you get the pressures of working in or running a hire fleet. Comments like this cement this. In an ideal world, nothing would go wrong. But this isn't an ideal world no matter how much we might demand it to be. Many change over days are a matter of fire-fighting problems. LOADS of customers come back and report problems that have existed since the morning after they took the boat but never reported them. These need investigating and repairing and all this stuff takes time and time is the one thing you can only get more of by paying more staff and that is an immediate impact on the financial position of the company, more so now that NI has gone up. It all sounds so simple from the comfort of an armchair.

You make it all sound so simple. 15 minutes doing this work is 15 minutes. When an engineer has another 20 boats to do, what's 15minutes x 20? 5 Hours in old money. How viable does that sound now? Not convinced? The boat is vacated by 10am and needs to be engineered, repaired and cleaned by 2pm. That's a 4 hour window. Perhaps you are now beginning to understand the problem. Let me compound the problem for you. Every time you loosen the nut on the battery terminal and remove from the post to do a test, you are weakening the post and the terminal. You may easily damage the post and terminal too meaning that you can't get a good electrical connection when you next reconnect it. This leads to a failure point. Maybe the engineer notices its not nipping up properly and tightens further, bending the clamp bolt in the process and further damaging the post and connection. Maybe the terminal snaps and he has to fetch another from stores that's a 5 minute walk away. All these things are not only possible but highly likely. It's not as simple as you think. Nowhere near,

I think you're over simplifying this. Replacing all the batteries on a boat with AGM variants and upgrading the charging system with decent regulators that will last a long time is not a low-cost option. Anything but. You could be looking at £1500 per vessel and whilst there are obvious advantages, it's an expensive solution to a problem that would barely exist if the batteries were properly treated and monitored.

Absorbent Glass Matt - a sealed lead acid tech that is a significant improvement on standard plate cells. More expensive and requires a controlled charging sequence but with better output potential. Naturally, at least 1/2 as expensive again as a SLA.

You would be surprised. We had very few power issues at Freedom once we had properly educated the customer base on what to expect. Most people care that they have an uninterrupted holiday more than watching TV 24/7, they really do.

Adding bigger alternators is not always practical or possible. A spinning alternator provides some resistance and you can only go so far before a singe-v belt won't cope. Most smaller marine engines, though, cannot use multi-v belts as their pullies are single-v. This poses an immediate problem in that you simply can't drive a bigger alternator. There are probably solutions around, but in my experience, not many and they are expensive. There's a similar problem to dual alternators and this can be even more of an issue as you need both space to mount the unit AND available bracketry to fit it AND, very likely, double pullies on the engine to drive it as you really don't want one single V belt being responsible for two alternators and engine cooling. The facts of the matter are that a good 70amp alternator can handle a bank of 5 batteries quite well if those batteries are in good condition and properly treated with the requisite 4 hours of cruising done each day: just running the engine at idle is not good enough and it's bad for the engine too. The problem is that too few hirers have an appreciation for the limitations of the system and the solution to that is education rather than throwing more gear into a boat that you then need to burn more fossil fuels to operate.

Also, the instruction of putting the oven on to stay warm is appalling advice. For every litre of LPG you burn, you pump a litre of moisture into the air and that creates condensation which will already be a real problem at this time of year.

Oh dear. I was talking to an engineer at HW a couple of years ago and he really wasn't impressed with the level of maintenance that was happening. Engineers were flying all over the place to replace batteries the day after handover. He himself witnessed a good percentage of a battery bank that was on hire had actually exploded on board. There is no real excuse for batteries at the start of the season to be shot. It's plain and simple, the boat either hadn't had a proper engineering check or they simply ignored an obvious problem. Either way, the holidaymaker is being abused in my opinion. Grendel says that a proper drop test should take hours. Yes, that's true, but a full capacity drop test is quite unnecessary on a boat prep day and a simple load drop test will quickly identify iffy batteries. It takes moments, trust me, I did it for more than a decade. We resovled many battery issues by installing chargers on all boats. When it came into port, we plugged it in and walked away. Very few batteries died after this as the battery banks remained largely unchanged because there was no swapping. It cost a lot of money but that was quickly saved in the changing process that could take 20 plus minutes per boat. It also saved us having 15 or more spare batteries on the shelf.

The incoming water feed from the pump should be before the non-return valve. The purpose of the valve its to prevent hot water entering the cold water system. If the blue hose runs to the pump, it is in direct contact with the hot water in the calorifier and the additional pressure developed in the tank will have a knock-on effect on the pressure effectiveness of the pump as the pump now has to push against the pressure in the HW system.

What is the Blue flexible hose on D after the non-return valve? It won't affect your air lock, but it's curious as I can't think what purpose it serves. Air locks in calorifier systems can be a real pain, but the easiest way of solving them is to put pressurised water though the whole Calorifier circuit until you get no more air and then reconnect. I moved a calorifier about 10 ft further away from an engine many years ago in a refit and suffered hot water issues, so I rigged up a few valves in the system with points that I could put pressurised water though. It made the whole process pretty simple to solve in the event of a problem.

I think it's very dangerous to consider the value of a vessel in your evaluation of the value of a holiday upon it. Really, these things have little correlation except a false one in our perception which states: If the vessel owes the company nothing, they should vastly reduce the cost of the holiday. This is a dangerous though process. It ignores the huge cost of annual maintenance, refits, reengining, repairs, operating costs, costs of labour, employment costs, insurance costs, licenses, regulatory costs, building and site costs, quay heading renewals (the list is endless) and the need for a company to make money so that it can operate next year and the year after and after. The Broads has ALWAYS been the cheapest place to have a boating holiday in the UK by some margin. It's also the most popular in terms of the sheer number of boats available on a system that, whilst offering over 100 miles of water, is quite compact. It is interesting that there are now comparisons being made with The Thames and I have not looked at prices at all this year, but if the Thames is becoming a comparable price-wise, it shows that, finally, there may be a bit of parity in the costs across navigations.

For that price, I could drive to Great Yarmouth and have an ice cream but I am not sure I'd be able to afford the fuel for a return to Martham.

One of the problems with Hickling is that the BA needs a licence from Natural England to do weed cutting in Hickling as its the site of a rare water plant and NE has all-but withdrawn licences to cut. How long before Hickling has virtually no navigation? I am told that the effects of the weed growth is causing a lot of problems with props, dagger boards, keels and rudders.

I don't think it's odd at all. It could be an in-house project that was started and had to stop for client work. It could be a cancelled order that needs a new customer. They can't store it inside and have it waste space and if there's paying work going on in the sheds, then it will get left until such a time that there's a need to revisit it. That's speculation too, but positive speculation that won't impact the business should others read it and think negative things.

I think its dangerous to speculate on a business like this. Projects get shelved, put on hold and so on all the time in business. Just because you can't see activity outside means nothing, especially when you don't work on GRP outside if you can help it.