Vaughan

You were lucky, in that case. The worst kind of ice for a boat is the very thin stuff, that has just formed on the surface, only about 3mm thick. No problem driving through it, you hardly notice - but I have seen it go through the stem of a boat as though it had been attacked with a cross-cut saw.

I quite agree. They have "managed" to re-use the tables and chairs, which now look totally out of place in what looks like a white painted conversion of an underground car park.

We can take your word for it on that one!

I read an article in the press recently, that there is no point in owning an electric car unless you have a smartphone, to work the charging points. That is, if you can find one that works. I have also found that you can usually tell when a pub is about to lose its present tenants, as the card machine has suddenly "broken down" and you have to pay cash.

Look out, you're starting to sound like me!

It could also be a question of Weights and Measures. If you have your tank topped up from a properly metered diesel pump there is little room for argument, whereas a reading off the notches on a bit of wooden batten can be open to dispute! We don't have dipsticks in France as everyone charges for diesel by the hour and we fill the boats up later during servicing. Even then we nearly got sued on one occasion, by some lawyer who complained that the VDO hour meter on the dash was not a certified time clock! There is also the fact that most older Broads boats have the diesel tank under the side deck against the hull but nowadays that is not always so, by the time you have found room for holding tanks as well. If there is a bend in the filler pipe then a dipstick is not possible. The tank should also have a striker plate on the bottom under the filler, to prevent damage from dipsticks being rammed down the hole! There is also the danger of slipping on spilt fuel on a Fibreglass deck.

Brilliant description! Except I think "tragi-comedy" would be more like it.

Absolutely! A coat of varnish - or paint - is only as good as the surface you are applying it to.

I wasn't thinking of polish, as such, but bringing back the bright colour of the copper. I have never tried it before, but how about a rotary electric toothbrush, and some Brasso?

As a traditional and time served boat painter, could I please make some suggestions? Your photos show that it is lovely mahogany (possibly Honduras) that will look gorgeous if you get right down to the bare wood before varnishing. Varnished mahogany has a quality of changing colours and hues as you look at it from different angles, almost like the back of a swimming salmon. Your photos show a lot of areas where there is still varnish which needs to be removed from the surface. It is not obvious now but it will show up yellow as soon as soon as you varnish, and then it will be too late! You need to achieve a nice even red colour to the wood, before you start sanding. I don't know what you are scraping with but I always use a good quality three corner scraper, sharpened in the same way as a chisel. It will need re-sharpening on an oil stone quite often. Always do your scraping with the grain of the wood. If you go across the grain, there will be tiny grooves left, that you can't see now, but you will as soon as you stain and varnish! I always use a liquid red stain such as International, applied with a cloth, before varnishing. Remember that you can only stain bare wood. If you try to stain varnish you will end up with brown paint. Try and take the time to polish those copper roves before you varnish. The shine will then be sealed in and she really will look like a new boat! It's a labour of love, I'm afraid, but it's worth it!

Especially the Doctor Who music, which was electronically created many years ago (late 50s?) by the BBC Radiophonics Workshop, on what later became marketed as the Moog Synthesiser. I don't think I have ever heard that played "live" before. My enjoyment of the programme has always been a bit like the "curate's egg" but there is no doubt that the anchor for the whole show is the music of Dave Arch and his band and singers.

Thanks for posting that, which shows how you end up with what looks like a normal oak tree, on an extremely long stalk! On the high ground to the south of the Thames valley at Pangbourne, where I went to school, is a large wood which was planted specially for the growing of trees for building ships. These trees were badly damaged in the hurricane force storm (was it 1987?) when many of them were blown over. I visited there not long afterwards when they were being cleared and was able to count the rings in the sawn trunks. I could clearly count at least 200 rings and there may well have been 50 more.

Your question has one or two answers : A clinker built wherry relies on its frames, "timbers", and knees for the strength of the hull. These were selected by foresters and timber merchants from the branches of the oak tree but not the trunk, so that the grain of the wood took the same shape as the desired frame. This gives enormously more strength. Oak forests and plantations, going back to the days of Nelson and before, were planted close together so that the trees searched upwards for the sunlight as they grew. This created (over about 200 years) very long, wide, straight trunks. But they still had the spread, knarled and crooked shape of the traditional oak tree up on top! It was from these crooked trunks that a ship or boatbuilder would actually select the "crooks" that he wanted to season and use, before the forester even cut the tree down! I am talking of a bygone age of course, but go into the depths of the New Forest, look at those huge trees and you can understand how HMS Victory was built. As Marshman says, the only way to reproduce this strength in the frames nowadays would be by lamination. As to GRP hulls, lots of traditional sailing classes on the Broads have accepted GRP as a building material and there is no doubt that it has taken those boat classes into the future, where otherwise they would have died out. In a wherry, however, I think it would also be a matter of weight, since it is a very shallow draft boat which, quite uniquely in a cargo carrier, has no standing rigging to support the mast and sail. These rely entirely on the massive strength of the hull and main beams. I am not sure how you would achieve that in Fibreglass. Significantly, I believe the Albion now carries over 10 tons of ballast in the hold, to maintain her shape and improve her sailing qualities.

First, you would have to find the right wood, including suitable "crooks" for all the "grown" oak frames, then lay it down and season it for several years. Just before Clifford Allen of Coltishall sold his boatyard, in 1976, he showed me round his boat sheds. He had built one of the last wherries, the Gleaner, and laid down in the sheds was all the wood needed to build another like her. Clifford said he was only waiting for a customer to come along! I always wondered what happened to all that timber, when the premises went up for auction.

The 4108 was developed from the 4107, which had a habit of bending the head when overheated. So the 4108 has a strengthened head with wider and stronger head studs. The size of the head fixing nuts is almost the only way to tell a 4107 from a 4108, without actually measuring the cylinder bores. All the same, the 4108 can still bend the head if it gets too hot. Duffields in Norwich (who developed the Perkins MC42) could successfully skim the heads but they are no longer with us and I wouldn't know where to go to get it done now. What is more likely is that the head has developed a small crack, which cannot often be seen without magnetic testing. These cracks would allow cooling water to escape into the cylinders. In my experience, the 4108 did not often blow a head gasket. Hopefully your overheating problem is coming from somewhere else and can be easily fixed. For instance, have you checked the rubber socks at the end of the heat exchanger and at the gearbox oil cooler, to see if they are blocked by debris which has got past the weed filter? If you have hydraulic drive, definitely check the intake end of the drive oil cooler. Raw water cooling systems will usually go to the gearbox oil cooler - and always to the hydraulic drive - before they go to the engine.

I noticed that too! Sam Horner was a well known sailor on the Broads and one of the stalwarts of the NBYC on Wroxham Broad. If, like my father, you had two of your hire boats crushed and sunk while on pub moorings on the Yare in those days, you would not have thought it quite so funny. The nature of the journeys made by these ships meant that they always came either upstream or downstream with the tide under them. So if a 1000 ton collier approached a bend too fast, its stern would simply wipe off any boats which were moored on the bend. Not funny at all if you have seen it happen. Holidaymakers were actually terrified and rightly so. At Thorpe, the bank outside the eastern bridge is made up with steel campshedding and reinforced concrete. It looks like a nice mooring these days but it was built to stop the coasters undermining the railway embankment when they ploughed head first into the bank by going far too fast on the bend. When a coaster (one of many) hit Reedham swing bridge in the 60s, they closed the bridge again afterwards and the railway lines had been forced out of true by 4 inches. They were very badly handled - whether or not they had a pilot - and were actually a dangerous menace to the navigation.

Which in fact, we can see moored there in the film. For quite a few years there was a business in Reedham that re-fitted offshore supply ships, as well as at May Gurneys on Griffin Lane, which is now the site of the BA's "temporary" tented encampment.

Incidentally, Archie's son Keith was the owner of the Ferry Boatyard in Horning and was chairman of Blakes for many years in the late 70s. There was an old folks' tale in Norwich, that when Archie King died, he lined up in the queue at the Stairway to Heaven but when his turn came, St Peter couldn't find him on the list of entrants, so he had to go and check in the office. He was only gone a couple of minutes but when he got back, Archie King was gone and so were the Pearly Gates!

Very true. Personally, I gave up walking when I came out of the Army!

On steel warps and capstans, stationed on the quay.

I forgot Stevenson's steel yard!

The main part of the port of Norwich was on the Wensum between Carrow road bridge and Foundry Bridge, beside the railway station, although Colmans had extensive quays between Carrow bridge and Trowse railway swing bridge. Half way up the port, the outside of the bend was widened out to form a turning basin for the smaller coasters. The much bigger colliers which supplied the power station were too long for the port and they turned in Trowse Eye, at the junction of the Yare and Wensum. Companies supplied by the port included Reads flour mills, Moy's domestic coal yard, Jewsons timber, Archie King's scrapyard, three large breweries and the big manufacturing factories of Boulton & Paul and Lawrence, Scott & Electromotors. All now gone and never to re-open, since they built the Postwick flyover on the Norwich southern bypass.

Arrrrghhh!!!!!! Now you've put me right off my lunch.

Therefore it should be known as a salting, or salt marsh, but perhaps not as a broad?

For that matter so did Cliff Richard, who was a great lover of the Broads and had his own cruiser built for him in Thorpe. I think the history of this unique wetland basin goes back a lot further than pop stars of the 60s. And does it matter? I think we all know what we are talking about, don't we?