Vaughan

In the throes of moving house, I came across this. Ladbrokes bought Hearts Cruisers from the Caister Group when Jenners closed down. They remained members of Blakes but this must have been a private brochure for their own marketing, showing a small selection of their fleet. They were running about 75 boats at Hearts, using the extended quay heading which had been built by Jenners. The old Hearts boats in the main photo are the Queen on the right, with Heart-throb, both looking a bit strange in their new blue waterlines. Behind Heart-throb is an old Wards boat, possibly Sea Rover.

I can count myself one of the few to have capsized in a Norfolk Dinghy. Said to be impossible but I managed it right in front of the committee wherry at the start of a race in Barton Regatta. I am told there was a loud round of applause but I was under the sail at the time, trying to find my way out of it. Strangely enough, if had been wearing a lifejacket I might not have been able to go down and "get out from under". When Norfolks capsize, they sink. A bit embarrassing, on Barton Broad!

I see the swear filter has censored my last post. For its information, K N O B is a proper term for use in engineering.

FFDs don't very often fail. They are actually a very small electromagnet, which is held in place owing to the micro current made when the bi-metallic probe is heated by the flame. So they will not work if there is bad contact. Try removing the metal wire from the back of the valve and cleaning both contacts inside. Then make sure the nut is done up tight when you put it back. Also make sure the control **** is going in and out easily against its spring. If not, take the front plate off the valve and lubricate it with gas tap grease. Also make sure that the head of the probe is well positioned in the blue part of the flame or it will not get hot enough. I didn't tell you this of course, as it is "work" that should be done by a gas safe fitter.

I loved the comment in one of the papers when the ship was arriving in Felixtowe - Your garden furniture is nearly here!

Bizarre. I suppose the BA will now classify this as a "drowning near-miss"!

This is a classic procedure! People used to think that Hoseasons' boats were not welcome on Blakes yards, and vice versa - not true! Anyone could moor up and if you made them welcome and got chatting, you could show them round one of your own boats, if you had one in and hey presto! - a new customer for next year, and without paying the full agency commission. Traditionally we have always felt, on the Broads, that we are not in competition with each other. Our completion is other forms of holiday, such as foreign packages. Once you can get them onto the Broads they will probably stay as regulars. After that, the individual boatyard offerings, will surely sell themselves!

A report in todays EDP says that two people were rescued from a capsized boat in the Oulton Broad (sic) at 3PM yesterday. It seems no less than 4 fire appliances attended but were stood down when the people were rescued by the Broads Authority. It seems strange that a capsize on Oulton Broad on a Saturday afternoon should attract such a turnout, when the WOBYC would have been racing, and have their own rescue boats for capsizes, which are frequent and common. Or was this not a sailing dinghy? What a pity Jenny Morgan has decided to leave us, as he would be bound to know. He always used to keep us up to date with the local news.

In fact there have been one or two adverse comments on the forum in the last few years, which I have always seen as unfortunate. The problem here is that one naturally expects "personal" service from a small family boatyard, that one might not find from the big hire fleets turning out up to a hundred boats in an afternoon. In reality, and from my experience of running both, there is no actual difference. A big yard like Ricko's is run in sections, where the team all know their own boats, they have serviced them themselves and they have enough time in the afternoon to receive their customers and look after them. I suggest that, on average, you won't get better or more personal service than from Ricko's. On the small yard, you are dealing with the owners, often a husband and wife team and in many cases there may only be one or two other members of staff. They have done all the servicing and cleaning themselves, they have repaired the damage done to their property by the clods who hired them last week and they are very proud of the product that they are offering. Of course they are falling over themselves to offer a personal and family welcome but adverse comment can so easily be taken personally. Above all the small yards depend very much on regular customers, so they would certainly not wish to put anyone off. If anyone feels that their reception when hiring from a small yard has been abrupt or below par in some way, just reflect for a moment on what your own attitude might have done to wind them up.

The north bank of the Bure upstream of Wroxham, where there is a cattle swim.

Sorry, I meant "think" not "thank" but looking at the sentence again, it may have been a Freudian Slip, since we thank our lucky stars for all our new customers!

You should be in the hire boat business Charlie. We have to thank that, around 20 or 30 times a week, each time we let our "fledglings fly the nest"!

That is very true. In the old RCT (Royal Corps of Transport) now the RLC, all drivers will have a class 4 HGV - for a rigid 4 wheel lorry. Some will have HGV 2 - for a rigid 6 wheeler on 3 axles. The Army only trains up HGV 1 drivers for specialist units such as tank transporters. Some infantry regiment soldiers will have HGV 4 but not all that many.

The official driver's hours are only the start of it. When I was driving, my working day would normally start around 0400 and including driving, clearing customs, loading and unloading, would never be less than 12 hours and often more than that. I was quite well paid but I was on a bonus system based on how much the lorry earned. Much more like running a business.

The problem with building to RCD is the first boat in the class, which will have to have buoyancy and stability tests and all the rest of it. From then on, you have a certificate of conformity and can build as many as you like of the same class. Fine for Brooms, or Crown Cruisers in the day, but not for a family business that wants to modernise a fleet of 10 boats by adding a new one. It should not be a problem when "fitting out" an AF hull and superstructure, providing the inside layout and equipment are the same as for an existing boat on the same moulds. But as Andy says, the big thing is cost. When I ran my small yard, most of my boats were wood and two of them were pre-war! I kept them well maintained but I knew there was no way I would ever be able to afford to add a new one even though I had the facilities on the yard and the skill of an excellent boatbuilder (Mike Fuller). It was one of the other reasons that made me decide to sell the yard.

I would not have thought you would find that sort of boat suitable for the Broads, for several reasons. Rather enclosed in hot weather, difficult to get on and off when mooring, especially with those handrails down the sides. Possibly not very stable on deck owing to the deep vee hull design. As others have said, also difficult to handle a twin engine, short length boat in small spaces. Especially with out-drives. They are not meant for it! As for petrol engines, I have grown up with them, in hire fleets and even in the 60s, at least half of Jenners' boats still had petrol engines. I saw a lot of explosions and I put out a lot of fires. I can assure you that a petrol explosion and fire on a boat is 5 times worse than one from butane gas. I might also mention that the majority of petrol fires on boats these days come from accidents when re-fuelling by hand from cans. The Americans love petrol engines in boats like this as they give much more power and acceleration for bombing about offshore, than a diesel of equivalent size. But their moorings are just bow on in a "slip" in a marina and they don't "do" narrow waterways. They also have petrol available at the pump in all marinas and it is very cheap. It is a question of "horses for courses". I think you would enjoy the rivers and broads very much more (and more easily) in a boat designed and built for the job. Sorry to put a damper on things, but welcome to the forum!

Well worth listening to Andy on this subject, as like me, he has been there and got the T-shirt. Unless you have seen all that you have striven for and invested in for several years, come to nothing for reasons beyond your control, I very much doubt if you can imagine what a trauma it really is. Paul N is also right with his scenario of the figures, but only up to a point! So what happened to the small yards, is the question. Many different reasons and all going back into history. To understand, I think we have to start at the beginning of World War 11. Broads holidays were still advertised but the Broads themselves were effectively closed : some businesses (viz : Woods and Percivals) had gone over to the building of gunboats and small craft for the Navy; others had closed when their owners and staff were called up; others were moved to work in shipyards on the south coast. The boats themselves were either moored on broads as a deterrent for enemy seaplanes, or were simply laid up ashore and left to rot for 6 years. So the whole thing had to be re-started and built back, in the late 40s, sometimes by the same family businesses and sometimes by people coming home from the War and wanting to start up on the Broads. My father, at Hearts Cruisers and Miles Simpson of Stalham yacht station (also ex Navy) were typical and there were many others. Leslie Landamore had been a Spitfire pilot in the War! You can imagine that there was great pride and very healthy competition between the yards, but there were a lot of problems as well. There was still rationing, right up to the end of the Suez Crisis and marketing holidays was not easy. The 50s were a real high time, when the Broads were probably at their very best, in my opinion. But by the early 60s, the first big recession had set in. Over the years it has been possible to recognise a 10 year "wave" in the fortunes of the boat business. For 5 years, business goes down and recession sets in. But for the next 5 years it all comes back again. This has been true right up to the late 80s but after that I'm not so sure. I think from then on, it has been downhill all the way! The reason for the 60s recession was bad press publicity, owing to pollution and overcrowding of the north rivers. The two main agencies fought back with films such as "The wind in the reeds" and by organising the installation of pumpout toilets. At this point, the first big and small yards started to get out of the boat business by selling their hire fleets to Jenners and doing other things, such as building private boats, renting moorings or building holiday cottages. At this point we lost some famous yards, such as Landamores, Moores, Windboats, Dawncraft and many other small ones. Bizarrely, the failure of Jenners a few years later flooded the market with second hand hire boats and allowed many small businesses to buy them, and start up a new hire fleet. I was one of them, so were Sabena Marine and there were almost countless other small family concerns. Until we get to the mid 70s and it all goes wrong again! This time it was partly the rise of foreign package holidays but we can't blame Freddie Laker for all of it! There was an awful nationwide recession which meant people couldn't afford holidays and businesses were hit by raging inflation and sky-high interest rates. Inflation was about 11%, the bank base rate was 13% and for 2 years I was paying 22% interest on a business bank loan. It actually became cheaper to pay it off and then pay less interest on the resulting overdraft! But I think what really killed it off, in my experience, was what became known as "investigative journalism". In other words gratuitous muck-raking, with no regard to the personal consequences of any victims of this Crusade for the Truth at all costs. Every time there was a new pollution scare, or a drowning, we lost another season's bookings as a result. Remember the drought of 1976, which dried out a lot of mud in the marshes and infected a lot of duck with botulism? The press decided it was possible for humans to catch it and said so in banner headlines. Totally untrue, but that was the end of the bookings for that year. Remember the Eleni V disaster? A small oil tanker ran aground off the east coast and started leaking oil into the North Sea. The press announced that the oil was "encroaching on the Broads" and would cover everyone's little children with a deadly oil slick. In fact this never happened, due to a boom across the river at Yarmouth Haven but the press didn't bother to follow up with that news - never mentioned it. Not sensational enough. So bang goes another season's bookings. The final straw for me was one day in the early 80s when I read the papers and there was a two page spread in the centre pages of the Sunday Express with a banner headline right across the top of both pages, saying : JUST THE PLACE FOR A FILTHY HOLIDAY. The article was full of the usual doom watch revelations about dead fish and overflowing bins and I realised that for me, this was the final straw. At that stage, my hire prices had been the same for the last 4 years and the next year they were due to go down by 10%. With inflation at 15%. I realised I was just working for the bank and not myself and put the yard up for sale. ROSALIE HORNER. I shall never forget that benighted woman's name, who wrote that rubbish and finally put me and so many of my good friends, out of business.

On a trial run, customers will sometimes ask "has it got a bow thruster?" I always say yes, and hold up the boat-hook!

I wouldn't think that was what thrusters are meant for, especially at the end of a shallow dyke where there would be weeds and Goodness knows what else, in the water.

Another reason could be that the burner of the pilot light is dirty, so the light is burning with a yellow flame, which does not produce enough heat to engage the flame failure device. This is also dangerous as a yellow flame is giving off CO. Do not attempt to clean the burner yourself. Have it done by a gas fitter.

The two main reasons are : 1/. The head of the flame failure device has been bent out of position and is no longer in the flame of the pilot light. 2/. the connection between the metal cable of the flame failure, and the housing of the push button assembly is loose or dirty and is not making contact. Undo the connection, clean the inside of both parts and tighten when re-fitting.

To give an idea, I always used to fuse cigar lighter sockets on 15amps DC. A TV (depending on type ) would use about 5 amps and the aerial (at a guess) less than 1 amp.

I don't know about Sterling but I certainly agree with the rest of your post. It is easy to buy a 12 volt charging lead for a mobile phone or other appliances - they are available in motorway service stations. Much easier and the phone usually charges a lot quicker. You can count on around 10% loss every time you convert current from one thing to another.

Just to explain, charge splitters have blocking diodes (or something similar) to separate the batteries and prevent them from remaining connected in parallel when they are not on charge. Otherwise there would be no point in splitting the charge, or having separate battery banks. You don't need an electronic "intelligent" splitter just to separate the charge, it can be done very effectively with a simple relay, such as a Lucas 33RA.

I think that would be going in the opposite direction. Imagine how the alternator is wired and the solar panels, which are also providing a charge, would be wired the same way. Except. . . . There is only a small amount of current, around 5 or 7 amps, so not worth splitting. It is normal to wire the panels, and also the 220v shore power charger, to the domestic batteries only, on the basis that the starter battery is fully charged at all times. The only things wired to the starter battery are those, such as wipers, that you are only using when the engine is running.