Vaughan

I wonder what "seals" they are talking about, in the fuel system of a BMC engine? Wear in the rubber mounting rings of the in-line filter, or perhaps the diaphragm of the lift pump, is not going to wreck the engine. It would be very interesting to know what, precisely, is suffering wear, and why.

Please beware! The Nanni and Beta have a pressurised cooling system which is not the same as the good old Perkins or BMC. This is one of the main reasons why hire boat companies these days do not even "lift the floorboards" when giving a trial run to customers. They simply say "if it overheats, stop the boat at once and call the boatyard". On the other hand, and as ANNV describes, you can use the pressure in the system to blow an airlock out of the calorifier pipes, by simply easing the right Jubilee clip and bleeding the air out, while the engine is running at normal temperature - and pressure. Please NEVER take the pressure cap off the heat exchanger or expansion chamber of a Nanni or Beta engine when it has just been running and is up to its normal temperature.

Exactly what I was thinking! Injector pumps are lubricated by diesel. A modern common rail pump, as well as the old fashioned "jerk" pump (which is really the same thing) is so finely machined that if you simply pick up one of the little pistons in your fingers and put it down again, the salt in your skin will have ruined it.

Thanks for that, I hadn't heard of it. So if it's from natural gas it's still a fossil fuel then. "Here we go round the mulberry bush"!

At least I don't suppose that had anything to do with the fuel! The Bedford MK lorries in the Army had multi fuel engines which were diesel, but would run on paraffin or petrol if required. There was just a widget, for changing the metering of the injector pump. I didn't believe a diesel would run on petrol, but it does! So my guess would be, give it a go and see how it runs. If it makes a bit of smoke, it is quite easy to advance or retard the pump on a 1.5, which can also make it easier to start. If it starts knocking or hunting, that is more serious and would need a specialist pump servicing company, to meter the injector pump for the new fuel.

Isn't that a breach of our TOS, if you "name" a dog as a cat?

This all depends on the batteries. If they are lead/acid type which will release hydrogen vapour if they are overcharged, they must be in a sealed compartment, vented overside by a vent leading upwards as hydrogen is lighter than air. The size of this vent pipe will be specified in the regulations. The danger of explosion from lead/acid batteries is under-estimated by most boat owners. Until it happens to you! If they are of a modern sealed type which does not "gas off" when overcharged they do not need to be in a sealed box. The box must be of an acid resistant material, so not steel. Ideally of GRP but plywood will suffice, especially if you "glass it in".

Can't remember. The one I saw was 3 years ago and think it was a private boat.

Especially as Kris Cruisers are operating on a river with locks.

I have seen an AF38 Pearl fitted with rails inside the sliding canopy, on the cabin side behind the seating, going up as far as the front steps on that side. A similar arrangement on the port side, up as far as the helm seat. Looks to be a very practical addition.

Well, it is an otherwise quiet morning here, so I have looked up the BSS on their own website. For private craft, I have not found any regulation concerning handrails or any other deck gear. It is all concerned with interiors such as fuel, gas, ventilation, etc. There are extra rules for hire boats, which are very long, so I give a brief précis here : "External crew deck areas" must be non slip and provided with "suitable hand-holds in good condition". These are checked by the examiner, using "light manual force". Hire boat owners may nominate parts of the boat as handholds although they are not fitted as such. This might be the corner of a cabin top or the corner of a windscreen. It could even be the steering wheel! Owners should "base handhold provision on established boatbuilding construction standards". I assume this to be ERCD, since I am not aware of any others for inland waterways craft. So even that, would only apply to boats built after 1992. So, as I suspected, it all sounds rather vague and open to a lot of interpretation. Perhaps, as Wussername says, recommendations made in November by coroner's court will be rather more specific. All the same, there is an elephant in the room : Gaps between handrails in "crew deck areas" must not exceed 1.5 metres. I would think almost all traditional hire boats on the Broads, would fail on that one!

I have just checked and all the Connoisseur boats on Woods website are photographed with side handrails, although there is nothing at all for the first 7ft or so of the bow. On the fore-deck, you are on your own! To be honest I don't know what the regulations are about handrails ; I have always rather taken them for granted. Wussername says they had been removed, so he presumably saw screw holes where they had been before? If they are part of the BSS then clearly a boat without them would be a "fail" but as to how they should be constructed, how high, how long, how strong, etc., that would need looking up. I suppose it has always been a matter of very obvious good practice. Until a boat turns up in Reedham without any! A centre cockpit boat with a big canopy, such as these, always has a long gap amidships when the canopy is open, where there is nothing to hold on to at all, just where you need it when getting off, or when getting out of the cockpit. If there were clear regulations I would have thought this area would require a separate rail but as none of them have it, I assume the rules must be a bit vague.

How true. Never approach a strange dog if it is attached by a chain or a lead, so that it cannot escape if it thinks it needs to. Especially outside a supermarket, where it doesn't know where its owner has gone, so it is stressed and will want to defend itself. If you need to approach a strange animal, there is a procedure : 1/. Get down low, on its own level, so that you are not "overpowering" it. If possible, sit down, and let the animal come to you. 2/. Hold out your hand in front of you, so that the dog can smell it. Your smell will always tell a dog if you are friendly. 3/. TALK to the dog as you approach. Talk in a calm, conversational and friendly manner. Talk about the weather, if you like! Animals (especially horses) will always react to the tone of your voice, and will be calmed by it. Even if you speak in a broad Norfolk accent! But please, never approach anyone's dog if it has been left outside a supermarket tied up on a lead. You are just asking for trouble. Whether the dog's owner should have been so irresponsible as to leave an animal tethered, in that situation, is entirely another matter!

At this time of year I don't think you will see it back on hire again until the Spring. Unless they are a great deal more fully booked than they appear to be at the moment.

Also, sailors in the Yare Navigation Race will confirm that the ebb on the Yare is very much stronger than the flood. This is because it is fed by the headwaters of the both the Yare and the Wensum. Both these rivers go right over into west Norfolk, not all that far from Kings Lynn.

Ah, but would the salt water go as far up it? Perhaps we can think of it this way : if you have a 10 litre saucepan with 5 litres in it, it is half full. If you pour another 5 litres in, it fills up. If your bath is half full and you pour in the same 5 litres, it won't even go up an inch. "Eureka!" as Archimedes was wont to say.

I can't help remembering one day when I was standing outside that cottage with Reggie Reeve, the manager of Woods, and Paul Greasely, the then owner. Paul remarked to Reg that he had cut a whole row of trees down, when he thought they were only going to be trimmed. Reg had one of the most well known senses of humour on the Broads and replied : "Well now thass loik this hare. Yew look at the nearme on that cottage an that say Marsh Voo. So now, your' got a good voo over the marsh. Now if yew'd a' wanted ter call it Willer Voo, oi wouldnt'er had ter cut the trees down."

Well done Paul and I agree with all your points, which are well put. I too have noticed that there are far more marker buoys on the inside of bends on the lower Bure than there used to be. The inside of a bend flows slower, so this is where an alluvial river will deposit its silt. Interesting to see the hydrothingy survey of the Yare between the Haven Bridge and the Breydon Bridge. See how the deep water under the Breydon Bridge is right at the outside of the bend in the channel. See also the area of shallow water right across the channel upstream of the Bure junction. I guess this will be because the tide turns on Breydon, an hour before it turns on the Bure. The scheme for a flood barrier in the early 70s was turned down for more or less the same reasons that you give in your post. Here we should remember that the Broads area is not natural. It is all re-claimed land, drained and made usable by Dutch immigrants fleeing the Catholic persecution of the Huguenots in the 16th century. That's why we have all those Dutch type wind pumps all over it. In other words, it is Man-made and must be maintained by Man. So if Man doesn't like what is happening to it, Man must make adjustments. Or perhaps more accurately, correct some of his recent mistakes? There are two important points in addition to those that you and Marshman have made : 1/. Depth of the Yare. The whole of the Yare used to be dredged to a minimum 12 feet at MLWS, for the sea going coaster traffic to the port of Norwich. I doubt it is more than half that deep now. A huge volume of water, that used to absorb the surge tides as they came up over Breydon. The Principle of hydraulics (this is a "hydraulic" problem) is that you can't compress a fluid like water : a given volume of water in one place will be the same volume when you move it to another place. You can't squeeze it and you can't stretch it. So all those millions of gallons that used to be absorbed by the Yare have got to go somewhere else. Up the Bure perhaps? Or over the banks in Beccles? 2/. Washlands. To make matters even worse, up until the early 70s - and for hundreds of years before - large areas of grazing meadow in the lower reaches of the Yare, Bure and especially the Waveney, had their river banks set at a height where they would deliberately be flooded by a surge tide. They became enormous water retention basins which stopped the surge going further upriver. Grazing land is not much affected by brackish water, so you could get the cattle back on the field a few days later. This was fine until the farmers decided to try and make more money out of arable, rather than livestock farming. Arable land will be ruined by brackish water for 3 or 4 years after a flood and you also need a lower water table in the field, to grow the crops. So the farmers lobbied parliament to have the river banks built much higher, to allow "deep dyke" drainage of the fields. Sure enough, now that the rivers were enclosed by the banks, the water had to go somewhere else! Old Archimedes again! So now we have to have flood banks in the towns and villages as well, where we never needed them before. If the water is too high under Potter Bridge these days, I am not at all surprised! I am not saying we should dredge the Yare to 12 ft again but now that the farmers have turned back to dairy and livestock and re-instated the grazing meadows, I see no reason why breaches cannot be made in the high banks to allow the use of washlands again. A cheap and immediate solution. Climate change. Of course we have climate change : we always have done and always will do. The planet Earth is an enormous lump of molten rock which, for millions of years, has been slowly cooling from the surface inwards. That's why we still have volcanoes, earthquakes and tectonic plates. Personally, I don't believe our puny efforts as humans are going to make any difference to that. If it were not for climate change, the whole of Norfolk and Lincolnshire would still be under a glacier. The same one that scoured out the low basin that we now call The Broads.

Yes. On the Norfolk Broads?

Incidentally - and also topical - I see that in the shot of Paul driving the cruiser, we can see that the wake at the stern of the cruiser has a trace of white foam in it. This is a sure sign that you have entered an area of brackish (salty) water. In "my day" this would start to happen around the Buckenham/Cantley area but nowadays I hear it can get as far as Brundall.

I am not trying to advertise my own movies but I don't know how to move things from one thread to another and it has been mentioned that Paul Wright's boatyard at Buckenham Ferry is coming up for sale. The yard was first owned by Paul's father Gilbert, who was the local farmer and land-owner, also a good friend of my parents, who brought his sea-going cruiser "Joker" up to visit us often, in Thorpe. At 4m 01 secs into the film, you can see a Hearts cruiser being driven by Paul Wright, with his father Gilbert on the aft deck. Later you see the sunken cruiser Four of Hearts being hauled out on the slipway at Wright's boatyard. The tractor is driven by Gilbert Wright. So yes, large boats could be hauled out on the slip there. What it's like now, I don't know. In the first shot, of Paul driving the boat, you can just see in the background a steam tug, towing the coal barges up to the gas works in Norwich. It had to go by barge as it passed under Foundry bridge, to unload at the coal staithes just downstream of Bishop's bridge, now part of the extended yacht station. Photos or film of these long barge tows seem to be quite rare.

Perhaps the difference is that CaRT own the banks as well as the canals, so you are always mooring on their land. On the Broads (which has no towpaths) I believe the BA can only remove a boat if it has become an obstruction to the navigation. Which effectively means, once it has sunk.

Sorry Chris, I missed it. I was a little distracted at the time. All the same I am surprised no-one else has commented. Something like this affects the whole balance of nature in the Broads system and is of concern to fishermen as well as all others involved in the river system.

In this respect I note that the new Prime Minister is quoted in today's papers, when talking about the bill : What I want to make sure is we protect the under-18s from harm, but we also make sure free speech is allowed, so there may be some tweaks required. I wonder what her new deputy prime minister has to say about her use of the Oxford comma. Not the first time this has been said and I agree. I have noticed for months that there is very much less discussion about day to day topics which concern the Broads. There have been several articles in the local paper lately that would have at once been linked here by some of our (ex) regular contributors, to animate a forum discussion. For instance (and very bad for the heron) there have been hundreds of thousands of dead fish in the north rivers over the last couple of days, with the EA and the BA involved in rather tense debate. Not a word about it, on here, that I have seen.

Sauf que la loi a changé depuis ma retraite, vous avez besoin d'un permis, mais si vous en avez déjà, aucun problème. Le mien n'a jamais été controllé en croisière, même sur la Seine à Paris! Unless the law has changed since I retired, you need a permis, but if you have one, no problem! I have never been asked to show mine when cruising, even on the Seine in Paris! In the photo I notice you have a whip aerial for VHF radio. Very useful for calling up lock-keepers, on the commercial canals.