Vaughan

I think I'll take the 5th amendment, on that one!

I have just remembered something. The BMC 1.5 block can be re-bored 3 times and both the Perkins and BMC crank journals can be re-turned 3 times. I am not so sure that would be possible with the base Kubota engine.

Mine was Norfolk. D634HCL

I don't know if it has anything to with it but I was told about 10 years ago, by CORGI, that refineries intended to phase out butane gas and it would then be propane only. This is why LPG appliances nowadays as sold as dual fuel, with the regulator set at 30mb, which is about halfway between the two gas operating pressures. Experience has shown that dual fuel appliances only work properly on propane.

If the deck has been painted with a two part paint such as International 709 and sanded beforehand to give a "key" to the paint, you will be lucky to get it off. This sort of paint is a gel coat in itself and will have bonded thoroughly with the original gel. I am afraid painting over GRP should be considered as a last resort, especially if you try to change the colour! All that happens is the next time you go under a tree branch, the scratches show through the original colour. I haven't seen the boat, but if you can't get the paint off it probably isn't going to come off. Sand thoroughly to give a key, and paint over. Once you have started painting GRP you have to keep renewing it regularly, just like a wooden boat.

Ah the FL10. Known among drivers as the "Wendy house". I drove one of those for 5 years - and lived snug and comfortable in the cab. Try backing a 40 ton artic down the loading ramp onto a ferry in Zeebrugge harbour in the dark, with all the yard floodlights shining in your mirrors and then placing it exactly where they want it on the vehicle deck, among the line of other trucks. Sorts out the sheep from the goats!

I agree with you, but let's look back a bit. Why were there so many (cheap, let's face it) Eastern European drivers before Brexit? Because the industry, and the government, had made it less and less appealing for British candidates to bother doing the job, for more and more restrictions, more and more working hours and less and less money. It's all part of the reason why we buy cheap goods from Taiwan, because there is no more British production, providing British employment. Same thing applies to merchant shipping. Even ships built in UK are registered in Panama or other "flags of convenience" as British restrictions and regulations, over the years, have made it un-economical to run a ship under British registry. Even so, those "Panamanian" ships are mostly crewed by British officers. All that is left of our once proud Merchant Navy is the P&O ferries that ply out of Dover and those of us on the Broads who wear the Red Ensign on our boats! Sorry, but I don't blame Brexit for this creeping malaise that has been going on for decades.

Or vice versa, if you live in France!

Can't say I like the sound of that. In modern central heating units you don't see the flame anyway. All you know about its operation is the bill for the annual servicing. On a cooker or oven though, it sounds as though this will make a big difference to users. I remember all the kerfuffle when cookers had to be converted to North Sea gas.

That is an excellent description of it, in just one paragraph! My first job on leaving school was with the Norvic Shoe Co on St Georges Plain, so I walked over Fye bridge every morning from the bus stop and there was Maidie, stored on the bank at the back of Geoff Priest's motor cycle shop. She was badly hogged and had garboard seams that you could stick your fingers into. In the 60s I remember her being owned by John Abbot but mostly in the 70s when she was owned and raced by Reg Parsons, who now owns the Nelson Head at Horsey. She was still badly hogged and this made her sailing qualities almost exactly the same as Evening Flight and Ladybird. We were all great friends and used to have some great races together. I first knew Mike when he owned the River Cruiser Serenity but by the time he started the re-build I had left the Broads to "seek my fortune elsewhere". We have always stayed in touch though and he gave me an early copy of the book to see if I could add anything or make any corrections. There was nothing. He has told it "like it was"!

Which I think is exactly my point. The Thames has towpaths, which may be part of the recent live-aboard problem in the reaches around Reading and Oxford these days. The Broads is unique in that there are no locks and very few bridges, so commercial traffic was sailing keels and wherries. The existence of a towpath means that there is a strip of land owned by the navigation authority, where you can always stop. On the Broads all the river banks are owned by someone or other. So it eventually entered into law that a wherry had the right to moor for the turn of one tide. I also understand that there was only the right to "go ashore" in order to tend the mooring lines.

I have a copy of Mike's book. It is a wonderful story and a great credit to Mike himself. If you ever wondered what some mean when they say they are "custodians" of classic wooden boats, this book says it all!

There are no mosquitos on the Norfolk Broads.

Wussername is quite right about this but you do, of course, have to be in a pure sailing vessel with no engine. The wherryman had to work the tides and if the wind dropped off to nothing as night fell and the tide turned, it was either moor on the bank or start going steadily backwards. The Broads are the only inland waterway I know where there are no tow paths, as commercial transport was by sail. So no "horse power"!

Without looking it all up again (it's all here on the forum somewhere) we must remember that the best way around Norfolk in the old days was by water. Navigations were dug out, largely by hand and we are, in fact, using only about one third today, of all the navigations which existed in the days of the keels and wherries. There were no railways and roads were only rough tracks made unsafe by robbers. I remember there is a difference between a private staithe, for the produce of a local farmer, and a public staithe, which is usually in a village and serves the community in general. A staithe is not the same as the common land of a village green, used for grazing of livestock. It is usually, as CC says, a place where cargo is transferred from road to water. Navigations had to be maintained to a staithe and a good example is Tunstall Dyke, which is still there and runs under a low bridge on the Acle Straight, just between Acle and Stracey. Hard to believe when you drive over it now, that it was once navigated by two wherries, owned by farmers in Tunstall. They must have been pretty small ones, I imagine! Another good one is Barton Turf, which looks today much as it did hundreds of years ago.

Thank you very much for that Q. I can add one simple example on the north rivers : Thurne dyke is open, as it leads to a staithe. Oby dyke is private, as it doesn't.

They can be exchanged, through Nanni, but we found that, although they can be rebuilt and we tried a few, it is not economical in cost of parts, or labour hours. Sometimes, a new injector pump makes a great deal of difference.

I have been thinking about this and it may not be quite as I thought! I have a 1966 Blakes catalogue where my father has made notes about price changes to all the boats that were sold to Jenners and would be in their fleet the next year. Trouble is, Moores were not in the catalogue, so I can't tell for sure! David Millbank gave me the job of delivering all these boats to Thorpe that autumn, with all my friends, at weekends. We had some memorable times! I could have sworn we had some Moores boats in Jenners' fleet but now I'm not so sure. Maybe Old Wussername might remember? There int a wholly lot many on us left, yer know . . . It does seem more logical that David Moore came into the business at that time (after leaving school) and ran the hire fleet for a few more years until selling it to Leslie Trafford. He then later sold the premises on Daisy Broad and moved his racing dinghy and half decker building business up to a new shed just on the other side of the road from the station. Hard to believe it was 55 years ago, now.

Thanks for that. The Mr Moore you refer to would be David, son of Ralph. Funnily enough, I went to school with him, along with Peter Jeckells! The history of yards in Wroxham is complicated and sometimes very confusing. I don't claim to be an expert!

As a matter of interest I have just come across a paper from Nanni whilst sorting out old stuff after our move. In 2000, We needed to know the exact shaft horsepower (SHP) before sending boats to Italy, where engine size is limited on hire boats. According to them there is a difference on the Nanni 4220, between a PRM gearbox on 2:1 reduction and a Dowty hydraulic drive, of 7,5 HP, which is 15% of the gross HP. These figures are quoted at 2800 RPM but the difference will be a lot less at normal Broads speeds below 2000RPM. When you consider that fitting a second alternator to power the inverter batteries for a microwave, will take 5 HP off the engine, I don't think that's too bad. Incidentally the power rating for the PRM version was 29.44 kilowatts. An electric powered cabin cruiser would need a motor of that sort of power, the batteries to run it for at least 4 hours per day and the means of putting back that amount of charge overnight, every night. In reply to Griff, I am afraid I have to say that whenever customers hire a group of boats together, they will always, always, complain that one of them used more fuel than the others! It's par for the course in our business. Seriously though, although one of them may have been swinging a different size prop, a difference of 50% consumption cannot be put down to hydraulic drive alone. It would sound to me as though one of the boats had not been full of diesel before departure. These things can sometimes happen and I imagine you complained about it at the time?

By the way, this is one of the reasons why I keep banging on about the right of navigation to a staithe.

Sorry, I am afraid I don't know much about the history of Aston Boats. Leslie Trafford was an entrepreneur - perhaps a Len Funnel of his day? - who was not the same family as the Trafford estate, which owns Wroxham Broad. His daughter Sue married John Williams, who ran Jack Powles yard and did the modernising of the hire fleet with all the new designs around Rip Martins' Bourne hulls, for which Broad Ambition was one of the prototypes. In those days a GRP mould tool was made by taking a real wooden boat as the "plug". Moore and Co was an offshoot, run by Lesie's son Anthony in those days.

I think Marshman could answer the second question better than I. When Black Horse Broad was re-opened (forcibly) by Herbert Woods and Co, because it is tidal, the rule was that you could cruise around it but not moor anywhere or drop a mud weight. Even though there is an old staithe, which leads up to where the Black Horse pub was. Wroxham Broad is private because in those days it was not tidal. It is leased from the Trafford estate by the NBYC, who allow access and mooring by mud weight but used to charge for it. I have heard they normally don't bother any more. Cockshoot dyke and broad were leased by Blakes, until it was closed for a very successful mud pumping experiment but unfortunately never re-opened. Malthouse Broad also was leased by Blakes. Ranworth Inner Broad should technically be open as it is tidal, but who is going to enforce it? Herbert Woods and Co are no longer with us. I think what it boils down to is that all these ancient rights have had to be fought for, at some time in the past. Maybe this means we should continue to fight for them now?

If this is true it is very bad news and also sad to see that cruising on the northern Broads is being continually affected by profiteering. Some might call it "killing the golden goose". Both Salhouse and Malthouse Broads are on private land but they are tidal; so the landowner owns the bottom of the broad but not the water in it. So you are allowed to cruise over the broad but if you drop a mud weight, you are on the landowner's land! In the old days the lease on Malthouse Broad and the staithe was held by Blakes, so no problem. The lease on the staithe is now with the BA but I don't know if they also lease the broad. Presumably not, by the sound of it!

This is from Blakes catalogue of 1978. The fleet of R. Moore and Sons was sold to Jenners in 1968, but Moore and Co was an offshoot of the new Jack Powles, then owned by Leslie Trafford. I assume this is the one you mean? Earlier Moores boats are difficult to find in catalogues as Ralph Moore had a bit of an "on off" relationship with Blakes. He used to reckon his standards were higher than theirs. Maybe he was right?