JennyMorgan

It will all depend on what you are on at the time! Is your body up to another fifty years of misuse?

Adnam's Broadside, good Suffolk Ale https://www.adnams.co.uk/beer/shop-by-taste_1/ale/adnams-broadside-bottles.htm# Non of that foreign, fizz-pop stuff!!

If I believe what some people claim then the sea will break through and flood the Broads at some point in the next fifty years. If this is really the future then why are worrying about planning for example? Why are we building roads and bridges if within fifty years they are going to be under water? Sea levels are rising, ground levels are sinking, are we returning to the fabled 'Great Estuary? I've been on this earth for seventy years and my father for seventy years before that and I don't believe that things have changed much over that time so why should things accelerate, as some are predicting, over the next fifty? Just curious! Does any one really know?

The before and after pictures are only a few years apart, horrifying! It shows very clearly how quickly varnish work can go to the dogs if it's not cared for. Sadly, a lick of paint can cover a multitude of sins! Whether that applies in this instance I can only guess. To my way of thinking she looked superb in her previous, varnish & white guise.

According to Craig's list there was only one Defender and that has the same registration number throughout.

The varnish work all painted, arghhhhh, after all that hard work at Martham!

Several pictures of her on Craig's List. When white she looked splendid but in the picture where she's been painted cream she looks a bit shabby, not least with the less than Bristol Fashion display of fenders .http://www.broads.org.uk/wiki2018/index.php?title=Photograph_Gallery&classname=Defender&returnpath=Boat_Details&returnpage=54502&style=Dfnd

About ten years ago I was working on a boat in Martham's shed at Cess Road. Next door to our boat was Defender, an ex Truman's hire boat, clearly undergoing extensive restoration. Was she ever relaunched? Anyone seen her afloat? In her day she was Truman's flag-ship, a stylish boat and an easy one to handle.

I don't doubt it but there are some that would suggest that there is an unhealthy level of control from above.

If it is the case that a leccy outboard is exempt but a petrol one isn't then it's wholly laughable.

Which in turn would doubtless demand a change in personal agenda at the top.

Yards that sell on their old boats will, sooner or later, hit the buffers so to speak. The buffers being the availability of moorings. Fifty years ago I worked with a boatbuilder in Chichester Harbour. A very solvent business, whilst it was able to provide moorings. The same happened on Oulton, many years later. In regard to moorings people's demands and expectations are such that the availability of moorings is further restricted. Add to that the constant demands on visitor moorings and the problem becomes even more pronounced. A case of supply & demand. Already I see the advice to prospective owners as being to firstly find a mooring and secondly to go out and find a boat!

But is it? Compared with other waters where a toll is charged it is certainly cheaper than some until you take the toll and then divide it by the navigable miles, and consider too that our toll doesn't pay for numerous bridges, aqueducts, tunnels and locks, thankfully. On top of that I have never paid a toll on a number of East Coast Rivers. Consider too the costs of boats on the Broads when compared with other waterways, again and again I hear or read that boats are cheaper elsewhere.

If I had to nominate my favorite waterway then it would be the swatchways & backwaters of the Suffolk & Essex coast. However, life has dictated otherwise. Jobs and family have a lot to answer for so the Broads, being my home, is where I do my boating and I'm content with that.

Especially after twelve o'clock! They are very pedantic north of Sutton Bridge.

Very true but I suspect that we have all seen boats surging ahead with someone on the bank trying to stop it!

Blo*dy well not, the place is inhabited by miserable old gits who are forever complaining and whinging on about the place being called an (insert naughty word) national park and people who get in their way or who go to fast at 4.5 mph or who clutter up their favorite moorings and who hate . . . . . . . . . .

Engine off perhaps? Gear lever creep is not uncommon, for whatever reason, even I have done it, in my formative years!

You are on thin ice. Man to man, good luck, you are going to need it!

It could be a winning tactic, potentially expensive though.

No new shoes?

I'm sure that you will make up afterwards!

Give into the inevitable and accept your punishment!

I just knew that you would relent!

Surely not lost for words? This must be a world first!