Vaughan

Just to point out that the personal and public liability insurance involved in that would be totally prohibitive. It might also require a training licence from the local authority. After all, boatyards have licences.

Funnily enough I have been thinking about this overnight and I was going to talk a bit about trial runs this morning. I will start with two absolutely true statements : 1/. In 40 odd years I don't think I have ever given a run without forgetting to tell them something or another. And that's with or without a check tick list. More often than not, I forgot to tell them how to stop the engine! 2/. I am certain that I have never given the same trial run twice. All trial runs are different as all customers are different. It is a personal and hands-on interaction between the instructor and his clients. This is what a video or a manual can never make up for. And now as to staff training. I know some seem to imagine us as local yokels having a good time on the river making money out of innocent tourists but there are a lot of risks around a boatyard and yes, a lot of staff training is involved. Can you imagine the risks involved in hauling a 12 ton cruiser up a slipway into a shed, using a winch wire running through pulleys at different angles and strains? Or lifting one out of the water on webbing straps, under a crane and then positioning it on a trailer? Have you seen what happens when a boat falls off its chocks in a gale in winter? We know all these risks and we train our staff for them. Of course we do! Then there are all the factory regulations (it is a factory) for the woodworking machines, pillar drills, lathes and power tools. Anyone who touches gas is CORGI qualified. If you have a table saw or (worse) a planer in your garage, have you had formal professional training in its safe use? Our staff have. So training staff to do a trial run is equally important and yes, we do a lot of it actually. If you have invested over a quarter of a million Pounds in a new boat that you want to last for 20 years, you don't want to see it wrapped round a bridge pier in Reedham just because one of the lads didn't do the trial run properly. My job involved training staff on 15 different bases in France and I did it by getting all the mechanics on a boat and giving them a trial run, as though they were novice hirers. They could then ask questions, discuss and make suggestions, since every cruising area is different, so its trial run is also different. A run on the River Lot, or in Alsace, is a very different thing from the Canal du Midi, or the Charente. The instructor also needs to be able to tell his own story. He knows what he has to cover but he must develop his own personal "performance" with a few little jokes thrown in, to keep people's attention! Reading things off a risk assessment tick list is nowhere near good enough. During this training we established that a basic trial run to novices on a modern cruiser with all the electrics, takes 45 minutes minimum. If the hirer doesn't pick up the boat handling part first time, then it can easily take an hour and a half. So you have to have enough staff to get all the boats out on a busy turnaround day. My staff were always told that once you are giving a trial run, then it takes as long as it takes, until the customer is happy. No-one ever got criticised by me for taking too long over it! Finally on the matter of day boats. Just imagine if Broads Tours in Wroxham had to spend 40 minutes instructing each one of all those day boats that they let out on a Sunday morning in August. Some of them for only a couple of hours anyway. They wouldn't still be in business.

If you are making a railway for a boy it will need to be something with a lot of activity. Lots of points and sidings for plenty of interest, but it doesn't matter too much if it is not accurately prototypical, so long as it runs well. Peco make very good simple track work. It will also need to very robust, as young boys can be a bit rough on things. Hornby are famous for making trains that young children can throw at each other across a bedroom, but might still work afterwards! You will also need to decide from the start whether you want DCC control, or traditional DC analogue. I prefer DC as the points can insulate trains on the sidings and it tends to lend itself to the realistic running of a railway model. It would be far too late now, for me to put DCC chips in all my models. I have found also that all the "realistic" running that you get with DCC is not a lot of good if you don't have perfect current contact with the track. I find DC a lot more reliable. At my age, I get far more fun out of trying to make the layout look like a real railway and don't care much whether I actually run trains or not but I started with a layout that my father built me as a boy. On a boat! If you buy a locomotive for your son and the first thing he wants to do is pull it apart to see how it works and then put it back together again, you may have a young railway modeller on your hands! Have fun!

AND NEVER HAVE.

I am not a railway forum person either and have always preferred the railway magazines. I have stopped bothering with Model Railway Journal as I find they get a bit too far up their own vacuum pipes. British Railway Modelling is good for beginners but I find the best is, and always has been, Railway Modeller, which also has the most comprehensive amount of advertisers for parts and materials. If you subscribe to them, you also get access to all their archive on line.

Thank you for that and I have just read it through carefully. In the job that I did in France before retirement, as technical director, I had to be very aware and conversant with all the rules and regs applying to boat hiring. Navigation authority as well as local authority and sometimes different rules for different countries. So I can tell you seriously, that the proposed hire boat code above would not make any difference whatever to the trial run that I have been giving to hirers for the last 20 years. Nor would it alter the paperwork and documentation in any way. Nor would it alter the installation standards, safety equipment or standard of maintenance, on any hire boat that I have operated. In fact I could suggest there are areas where our own standards are better than those laid down in this document. I would like to emphasise these paragraphs : 2.1. Shared responsibilities. The licensing and/or navigation authority, the hire boat operator and the hirer all have responsibilities for safety in hire boating. 2.3. Adequate hirer ability. (3). Hirers are responsible for taking heed of instruction in the safe use of the craft, given by the hire boat operator and the licensing/navigation authority. 2.7. Hirers are responsible for the consequences of their actions. This should be made clear during the handover. All the risk assessment stuff in the annexes is the usual guff which has a lot more to do with "risk averse" than "risk aware". I was once sent a risk assessment form by my wonderful and far distanced employers in America, which included the questions "Have you advised your staff of the risks of driving company vehicles in snow and ice" and "Have you lubricated your ski lift?" When I pointed out that I was running a hire fleet base in the Rhone Delta at the time, I just "got wrong" for it! Maybe I should just have ticked those boxes as "yes"? As Marshman has already suggested, this appears to me as just another layer of window dressing.

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?