Vaughan

In view of all I have tried to explain about boat hiring in this thread, I shall treat that remark with the contempt that it deserves. Meantime, Oh, excuse me - a Freudian slip . .

And before that?

Thank you very much. Who are you, by the way? Have we been introduced?

Oh, but it has. I don't know how to quote things off different pages, so have a good read of Realwindmill, on page 8 of this thread. If you read back to the beginning of the discussion you can also see that it was only after page 8 that the thread was turned into such a contentious argument.

I also think a Broad needs a bit of flow through it. If you close it off from the river it will become stagnant. Vis : the green algae in the Whitlingham gravel pits, which seems to have come as a surprise. No surprise to me, after a very sunny summer! The main thing though, must be the state of the bottom, where too much silt means the weeds can't grow. I remember the spectacular and rapid difference on Cockshoot, after they had done the mud pumping. Cleaner water also means the sun can get through to the bottom, and grow the weeds. Meantime, Wroxham Broad has somehow maintained the colour of old squit, in all the years I have known it!

By who? You, maybe? Expand OK I will assume that is an honest straight forward question and will answer it as such. Put simply no. I do not live in Broadland yet, that may well happen in the near future. My career is not in auditing and I would not be interested in auditing hire yards. This proves that at least two of my posts in the last three hours have been hidden, when none of them broke the TOS in any way and the posts to which I was replying are still there. This shows a preferential bias which I do not accept. Please explain to me why I am being censored, in such an important debate.

They were answered, by me, with one word yes, but you reported that, so my answer was removed. Again the answer is Yes. All this has been in place for donkeys' years. By who? You, maybe?

You keep coming back to this theme of yours but you don't substantiate it. What campaign, exactly, are you referring to, other than that which has always been the responsibility of those involved in the management of the Broads? What are suggesting that is new, about this?

So why have the mods sat back, as they often do and allowed this very important discussion to continue virtually un-restrained for 2 or 3 days? I call that excellent moderation.

Excuse me but some of that forum rubbish has helped you with the restoration of your boat, before now.

So here we are again, in the cold light of another morning after two days of this discussion, and I have to say that, looking back, yesterday was an unpleasant experience for me. I had not realised that there are members here who, despite our mutual love for Broads boating, have such a deep mis-understanding of the workings of the industry upon which it depends. I notice Andy seems to have stopped contributing and I don't blame him. Luckily, I think it is Motorboater who has restored my sanity and I thank him for that. To ECIPA I would suggest that if he insists on posting in the aggressive way that he sometimes does, then he is surely going to wind people up into an aggressive reply. I am sorry if he didn't like my reference to Fred Carno's Army but that is what he was trying to make our industry sound like. To Realwindmill I would say that, for the third thread running, I have given you long, considered, factual and detailed answers to your "genuine questions" based on my own experience in the particular fields you wanted to discuss (such as skippered motor cruisers) but in the end and yet again, you don't seem to have listened to a blasted word of it. In a long thread 2 days ago, I even opened my heart to the forum, about how I feel so passionately for customer service, in a way that I never have before, but seemingly to no avail. So today, I'm going to have a better day. Today I am going back into my garage to play trains. Full many a gem, of purest ray supreme; the darkest depths of ocean bear : Full many a flower, was born to blush unseen; and waste its sweetness on the desert air. Gray's elegy.

I most certainly agree with you there!

So you need to take your thinking into the next stage. Charter yachts in the Caribbean or Med, which I have crewed on in the late 60s, are big enough to have accommodation for the owner and his wife in an aft cabin, the crew in the fo'csle and the charterers in 3 double cabins amidships! Translate that onto the Broads and you are talking about a wherry yacht. A motor cruiser with a skipper (and we have looked into this concept in France) would have to have separate accommodation, presumably aft along with the galley, so that he (or she) could cater for them as well. You can't just have him bunking down in the saloon! So you are definitely talking of a cruiser of the size of what you would call a behemoth but in order to provide this layout, would only accommodate about 4 berths for hirers. In France we didn't find this idea to be commercial, so we left the concept to the large converted hotel barges, which glide down the canal offering their exclusively American clients all the possible luxuries and services without having to lift a finger to help themselves. Maybe you are forgetting that the boating holiday on the Broads or English canals is an adventure holiday. An activity holiday where half the fun of it is just that?

Agreed this is not aimed at the large high tech behemoths that you mention but it shows how involved Blakes were in training and in tutored holiday courses, as long ago as 1975. In fact, the first inland waterway courses of this kind were run by John Loynes, before WW1 and before the turn of the 20th century. He hired out groups of half deck yachts which went out together on a planned itinerary every day, accompanied by a large cabin yacht, which would do the catering, on the river bank, store all the clothing and bedding and accommodate the instructors. The hirers would sleep two to a boat, in sleeping bags on the floorboards, under an awning over the half- deckers. A wonderful way to see the Broads and true "flotilla sailing" almost a century before the modern expression was invented. Could we still do this now on the Broads? Of Course! If someone wanted to create a market for it . . .

Come off it Peter, you know very well this is what boatyards have been putting across in their brochures and in their arrival procedures ever since the last war. They have always advertised the training that they offer. I have often said on here that the trial run is the most important part of a boatyard's whole operation. All the other work that you do, all through the year, revolves around getting the customer familiarised, comfortable, and happy with the handling of the boat. That way they enjoy their holiday and that way they come back and book again, year after year. A good trial run means less damage, less breakdown call-outs, less winter maintenance, less engine wear and fuel consumption, less wash and hopefully, better customer behaviour. There are those on this thread at the moment who are far too keen to try and make our traditional hire fleet and boatbuilding businesses look as though we came down with the last shower of rain.

I seem to have had a post removed, but the post to which I was responding, is still there. Despite the spurious allegations against the tourist business on the Broads, which have been posted here all morning, and yesterday. If that is the judgement, then that is me out of this discussion.

You forgot the paddle boards Fred.

This has been available as a suggested adjunct to a holiday, for several years now. Funnily enough its popularity does not seem to have taken off! Congratulations. Again I resent your implication, as you stated earlier, that the boatyards don't care to make things safer. If you really want to know, when I was chairman of the technical committee of Blakes Holidays in the 70s, I wrote the original draft of what became approved by the River Commissioners as installation safety standards for all boats on the Broads. This was later adopted by the NRA for all UK waterways and has now become the present day BSS. I am pleased to see that in its main detail, it is the same document that I originally presented. Perhaps you may now understand why I resent throwaway remarks about hire boat safety.

I had a horrible feeling someone would pick me up on that! All the same, it is a 2 day course, taken in one of their centres or "on your own boat". Does that also mean a hire boat on the Broads?

Please try to avoid throwaway remarks such as that as they simply show ignorance of the subject and are insulting to those of us who know the real figures.

No, I don't think you have. Part of what I am saying involves Sod's Second Law of Engineering : If it is running well, then you don't need to mend it. In other words, (and in my own experience) the method we have always used to instruct our customers in boat handling is not made in any way better by a rubber stamp on a piece of paper. The other part is that if you want extra training, such as an RYA ticket, this would take about 3 days (I believe) and I doubt someone would want to dedicate 3 days, out of only a week's holiday. Third point is that at least the French have a specific inland waterways licence category. Their "yacht masters" is a different licence. I don't believe an inland waterways licence, or course, exists in UK at present. By the way, an RYA yacht masters is not valid as a French waterways permit!

I am surprised that no-one took me up on this comment as it was meant to show that Breydon has not changed over many years. The Longshore Sharks were very well known on Breydon, back in the days of the trading wherries. I am surprised that no-one now seems to have heard of them. As to the marked channel, well surely you keep all the red posts on one side of the boat and all the green posts on the other, with the yellow post as a "middle ground" marker at the junction of two channels. If you want to go into a little more detail, then you leave the red posts to port when going upstream, but perhaps best not to confuse hirers with too much detail! Does it really need new regulation, to make it any more complicated than that?

Why, or perhaps How ? ( genuine question ) Well, all that yesterday blew a bit of soot out of the pipes anyway! I would just like to take up on the point about driving licences, as I have worked for many years in countries where a skipper's permit is obligatory, for hire as well as private boats. In fact UK is one of the few places where it isn't. In France, you have to have a "Permis" to drive a private boat. This involves half an hour in a class room answering questions on the rules in the "Code Vagnon" and you don't have to step on board a boat to pass it. So another effectively useless piece of paper with a stamp on it. Hire boats get round this by issuing a "Permis de Plaisance" which is valid for the dates of your holiday only and certifies that you have had instruction from the yard and are competent. The yard and its instructors are all licensed to issue these permits and in fact we make them into a nice looking certificate on stiff card, for customers to take home as a souvenir. This at once means that a hirer, after our trial run and a week's experience, is far more competent to drive a boat than most private owners! As to how we run our business and how we do our trial runs, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to what we have been doing for the last 70 years. Just another piece of paper, which French Administration dearly loves to see. In other countries such as Germany and Switzerland you cannot hire a boat without a recognised skipper's licence. So the Germans and the Swiss are our best customers in France, where they don't need a licence! It also means there are pretty well no hire boat companies on those countries' waterways. Perhaps that, in itself, is a salutary thought?

In order to try and explain Andy's (and my own) frustration at such a long-standing conundrum as boat instruction, I would like to tell a couple of little stories : Not long ago, when I was working for Locaboat at Argens as a part time job in retirement, I gave a trial run to three middle aged ladies who had flown from New Zealand to have a month in France, including a week on our boat, on the Canal du Midi. "The holiday of a lifetime", for them. When I took them out for a drive, they were utterly hopeless. Completely unable to drive the boat at all. I suggested (as I often have) that they might spend their first night on the yard, get settled in, walk across the canal bridge for a nice supper in the restaurant under the plane trees and I would come back next morning about 10AM, to take them out and have another go, when they were more relaxed. The relief on their faces was memorable! I wasn't on duty that Sunday morning, but I came back in my free time and took them out for a run. The first lock up from the base is about a mile away and I took them up and down there no less than seven times, before I felt they had some idea of driving the thing! I stayed with them while they took the boat themselves, through the first lock, and then let them go, on their own. As they left, one of the ladies gave me this key fob, which I have always kept on the keys of my van (now not the same van) and always will. A memento of how customers can be helped to have a good boating holiday, if they want to be helped. The other time was a lot earlier, in 2001, when I was manager of the Crown Blue Line base in St Gilles, and a Swiss family of three, a husband and wife, with a son of about 25, turned up in their camper van to hire a boat, for 2 weeks. They were all physically and mentally handicapped. The husband mostly in a wheelchair, the wife with both physical and mental incapacity and the son not much better, although at least he could drive the camper van. I got them on board the boat but I was very worried. I told my secretary, Corinne, that this might be one of those times when I would have to refuse to let them have the boat. Apart from anything, they spoke no French or English ; only German Swiss dialect. In the end Corinne and I decided to have a try, as she spoke fluent German. So she was there, translating my trial run, from my French into her German, for Swiss people who couldn't understand a great deal in the first place! It was also rather funny as Corinne didn't like boats! She was an excellent secretary and receptionist but she only went near a boat when she was showing her customers on board. So this went down in local history as the only time Corinne was ever seen out on the canal in a moving boat! In the end, with mental butterflies in my stomach, I let them go, and hoped for the best. We heard nothing for the first week, until the Port of Sète phoned me at 11PM to say they had a boat full of water in the port. When I arrived they were in an awful state, with water over the floor in the fore and aft cabins. It turned out later that they must have hit the prop on something, which disturbed the stern gland and they had also switched the bilge pump off on the dashboard. I had no choice but to put them in a local hotel for the night and as it happened, I had another boat nearby, which had been left by people who had family problems at home. So next morning I got cleaners out to the other boat, collected them from the hotel and set them off again! They came back at the end of the week with no further trouble and delighted with their holiday. They came back to us for 2 weeks every year for the next five years, until I left, and maybe for longer than that. And yet my wonderful new Wizz-kid conglomerate tour operator employers would probably have condemned me if anything bad had happened, because I hadn't ticked enough of their boxes. I am not sure, to be honest, if those customers could even sign their names. When they came back the first time they gave me these, to say thank you. The 20 Euro note is folded, Origami fashion, into a little boat. These are probably my most treasured mementos of a life in the hire boat business. I suppose the moral of the story is that you can give customers all the information they need, if they are prepared to listen and you can give them the time and personal service, even if you work for a huge and impersonal global tour operator. In that, I don't suppose I am any different from the instructors these days, at Richardsons or Woods. It is "in the blood". As for Breydon, it has been the same for hundreds of years and I don't suppose we are going to "tame" it now!

I have only ever tried one of these quite disgusting concoctions once ; on the concourse at platform 9 on Liverpool Street Station. It was one of the worst things I have ever tasted and I left it on the table to go and board my train. There I was most relieved to find the buffet car already open and serving a fairly passable rosé wine which turned out to be cheaper than the "coffee". It bears out what I said this morning on a another thread : never drink anything you can't see through!