Vaughan

That is something, in my life, that I have only done once, when late on the tide and will never do again. Setting out onto Breydon in the dark is folly.

Even so, this is a hire boat with a much reduced gaff rig. They take a great deal of sinking! The keel falling off is about the only thing to cause it, unless they got the gaff caught up in a tree while "running free" . The last Cruiser I heard of that lost her keel in a race was Queen Mab, a famous yacht of the same class as Maidie, which capsized straight on to the committee boat during a race on Wroxham Broad, carrying well over 1000ft of canvas. But that was before the First World War . . . .

Capsised? It takes an awful lot to capsize a Broads keelboat. In theory, it's impossible.

I quite agree with you but all the same : There were red kites around the marshes of the Yare in the 1950s and they were quite common. I saw them with own eyes.

In fact the red kite has been on the Broads for a long time. I remember my father pointing them out to me when I was a boy, in the early 50s. You could often see a Hoopoe at this time of year, flying over the river in the area around the Postwick marshes and Bramerton. If you see something looking a bit like a Jay but with black and white striped wings, that might be a Hoopoe. Best seen in the early morning, about an hour after dawn.

It sounds as though whoever installed the plumbing has mistakenly put the PRV in the wrong place. I confess I can't remember seeing one there before. Your system should have : An inline filter between the fresh water tank and the pump. After the pump will be some sort of pressure vessel. There will also be a pressure switch, probably called a "Square D". If your pump is a new type with its own pressure switch, you don't need the Square D and you can't have both. From there, are the feeds to the cold taps and one feed to the bottom of the calorifier. It is on this last feed that there must be a NRV. The calorifier must also have a PRV on the hot water outlet, ideally drained out through a hull skin fitting, if not, into the bilge. Modern automatic pressurised systems mean that there is a danger when turning on a cold tap, that the hot water runs backwards out of the calorifier and you can easily get scalded by turning on a cold tap! The NRV in the line will prevent this happening. This is, of course, very important if you have grand-children on board.

You don't mention if the hot tank had a PRV. If you are buying a new tank make sure to fit one, on the hot water outlet. Sounds as though your system may have seen a few years, so make sure also that you have a NRV on the cold water feed to the calorifier.

That sounds more like a kite, as they fly around in groups and are much less wary of humans. You said it came very close to you. There are a lot of them on the Thames where they are now considered a bit of nuisance. The marsh harrier is rather more insular and will fly slowly over the marshes, hovering a lot and usually at a distance. The best way to tell a kite is by its fan shaped, twin tail, which the angle of the photo did not show.

But isn't the Broads supposed to be a "staycation"? I suggest the Med has no more or less appeal this year, than it has had for the last 15 years or more.

And from what I read on this forum from those who have been out on the water this past week, this holiday season has not got off to a good start! Everyone is saying there is plenty of space at moorings ; some have suggested there are more private boats out than hire boats and someone even suggested that one yard had only one boat out for Easter. And don't say Easter is early this year : the beginning of April is a normal time. I wonder what reason there could be for this, other than cost?

And thinking a bit more . . . . If you keep it there, fit its outlet with a pipe to drain down into the bilge. That way, it won't rot the floor in the engine compartment!

Just thinking a bit more about this, the PRV on the calorifier is there in case the tank boils if the engine is overheated. So the PRV at the water pump would not protect against boiling as there should be a non return valve (NRV) on the cold feed to the calorifier tank. On the other hand if you have a PRV on the hot tank, then the one at the pump end would be superfluous. No harm in leaving it there, though!

Perhaps a Marsh Harrier?

Looks like a Red Kite.

If the calorifier has a PRV this is more normal. It is a very simple affair inside, with a spring which holds down a valve. If it is dripping it may have got furred up with calcium, in which case unscrew the spring, take out the valve and clean it. It is difficult to set the pressure unless there is a gauge somewhere in the line, but it should be set at a bit more than the pump cut-off pressure, to protect against a failure of the pump pressure switch. If these modern pumps keep pumping, they are powerful enough to start bursting water pipes and tanks. The good old Stuart Turner type is a turbine pump, which agitates the water rather than physically shifting it with a diaphragm or impeller, so it will only pump up to a certain pressure but no more. Only problem then, is that if the batteries are low, the Stuart pump can't build up enough pressure to cut off, so it just flattens the batteries. This is largely why they have been replaced with the diaphragm type.

Pic 1 is a pressure relief valve and the screw inside the cap is to adjust the pressure setting. It prevents the danger of a modern water pump with its own pressure cut off switch, being powerful enough to inflate a copper calorifier tank. Best leave it in place - it does no harm!

Sorry, but if we don't understand where Holt drains to, then we don't understand where all this floodwater that we have been bemoaning over several months, has come from. And all this just creates run - off into the river system, from what what used to be absorbed into traditional Norfolk Farmland.

I did! Indeed I did! The reason I had to suffer them for a further 5 years was because it took that long for them to find the slightest excuse to get rid of me. I, and my friends and colleagues who had grown up in the hire boat business, had to watch while this shower of "marchands de tapis" * set about systematically destroying all that we had built, over the years. I was just one of the "old school" of senior managers who were eased out because we knew more about running a boatyard than they would ever know. They even managed to kill off the three most prestigious brand names ; Crown Blue Line, Connoisseur and Emerald Star, that they had bought at an exorbitant price, in favour of the ridiculous nick-name "Le Boat". And look at them now : I went past one of their big bases on the Midi last Tuesday and they had easily less than half the fleet out on hire. * A common expression in French which refers to a North African carpet salesman.

I quite agree!

They do make dreadful fools of themselves, actually. I was the only English manager in a French company which, of course, conducted all of its business in French. Until we were sold out to a UK tour operator! They decided to hold a manager's meeting to introduce themselves and outline their plans for the future. Unfortunately, over the next 5 years I never met one of them who spoke a word of French. So there we were, all the base managers and their secretary/receptionists, plus the management team from our head office, about 40 in total. Some "spiv" from London got to his feet, "all done up like a dawg's dinner" and proceeded to give a "bullet point presentation", assisted by an overhead projector. The first slide came up, with the title on top : MISSION STATEMENT. All eyes in the room turned to me, to find out what on Earth this meant. After a couple of minutes of discussion between ourselves, while the spiv from "Human Resources" just stood there, we decided that this expression just didn't exist in French and did not translate. To say that the rest of his presentation went off like a damp squib, is an understatement! What really annoyed me was that there we were, the management of what was, at that time, the best hire fleet in Europe, and my friends were so often obliged to sit there all day in these meetings, whilst not understanding more then a handful of the words spoken to them. When I think of all the boats I could have painted or the engines I could have serviced, while wasting my time on all these "team building" winter conferences . . . .

So, let's run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it. Then, assuming on-target client take-up, we can go forward with a ball-park figure. I used to work for the Yuppies as well! What is more, I had to translate their gabble into French, for my bemused colleagues in meetings. Sorry - "workshops".

I haven't and I don't intend to! The hanging participle is something I am also fed up with. * In Norfolk dialect, the sentences are always "sing song" and go up in pitch at the end - as in : Ha' ya' farrer got a dickey, boy? Yes, an' he want a fule ter ride him, are ya coming? Norfolk people never drop their aitches. * That is a hanging participle.

Incorrect. The term is "I hear what you're saying" used as a polite and superior dismissive. Do they know what you are saying? Almost certainly not.

I've got a small cask of it 'ere. And once it's been opened, you know, it won't keep, So do drink it up, it will help you to sleep . . . . .

I have seen a lot of your videos and thoroughly enjoyed them. I am not a technocrat but I fear that what started out as an innocent method of sharing common interests and tips on a bit of DIY, has grown "like Topsy" into a commercial cyberspace enterprise. I see in the national press today that national parks are being invaded by "Tiktokers" who have spread the news about the delights of doing selfies in an ancient system of caves and have clogged up all the roads in the area of the national park to the extent that a lot have had to be towed away, leaving all their litter, graffiti and assorted defecations behind them. Perhaps this is what is coming to the Broads, if the Good Doctor's aspirations are allowed to take over?