oldgregg

I can't think of a hireboat with a 24V system. They'll be 12V, often with just three 120Ah domestic and one engine battery charged through an argofet to handle demand. A lot of boats have a single alternator, but if they have an inverter there may be another and another couple of batteries on a separate bank. I tend to look under the hatches on everything I hire, but I know most don't.

I think Len owns them all now. The 35ft Entrepeneurs were at WRC and yes they're lovely boats. They came North and were being sold as seen above.

I do think that given the amount of running people do, fitting a bigger engine with two monstrous alternators is mostly going to be the answer? You can fit a million different battery monitors, tell people to do lots of running, always use shore power when they can etc etc but they ultimately think it's not all that important and just do what they want to do. You've seen it in hire and I've seen it in syndicate. I remember discussing this same problem with the electrician who rewired Thunder and he was convinced a single alternator was sufficient. It wasn't, as I said at the time. I think the solution is to remove the problem from the end user - Make sure the boat is as power efficient as possible (all LED lighting etc), have decent batteries and ensure there is more than enough charging capacity so that even three hours running will give them a reasonable charge, but still insist on 4 hours minimum in handovers. Then ensure people cannot plug in electric heaters, kettles and toasters on the inverter etc by using non-standard plugs and sockets on the TV, microwave and whatever else requires it. Give them USB ports for charging phones and laptops, and fit shore power with a ring and tell them they need to plug in if they want 240V (which also just happens to run the mains battery charger). The boat will use more fuel in a week, but the yards sell fuel so that's not going to be a biggie for them and people will get used to the extra (we're probably only talking 30%?) cost. Not having to replace batteries at the quayside so frequently will also bring down the operating cost anyway. We've all seen the boatyard vans in the summer with an engineer wheeling a sackbarrow loaded up with lead-acid lumps along the rhond.

Yeah, that's my understanding of it. There are quite a lot of places on the Broads where some pontoons would solve issues with a lack of moorings. That, and an appetite to create a northern WRC-style facility at Thurne Mouth / Bureside Holiday Park.

Warm air heating will always be diesel on a hire boat, but obviously it does require electrical power to run the fuel pump and fan. On full chat, you're looking at up to 80 watts for a 5KW Eberspacher. It'll also use quite a bit more at startup to power the glowplug, but once running it drops considerably. A healthy and well-charged battery will run a diesel heater for many hours. A flat one will not even get it started. Where the issues with temperature can arise is when the boat is large and there is a single heater which is not located particularly centrally. A 40ft run of ducting is brilliant at cooling the air down....

I think location doesn't help. WRC is a great place to stop at on a boat, and is pretty much my defacto destination on a North to South run. You have a pub, showers, swimming pool etc and a decent number of moorings with electric etc. But there is just something about the Southern Rivers that people don't like, I really can't figure it out myself as I love it down there but I accept that your average boater does not want to do the sort of cruising hours that I generally do. Having been on a syndicate recently and observed the engine hours that the boat was doing over a season, it was only around 600. That's a 48 week boat, so in theory just 12.5 hours a week. If you assume that in reality perhaps just 35 weeks are being used, that's still only 17.14 hours a week - Just 2 and three quarter engine hours per day. You average boater does seem happier cruising sedately around from one location to the next, and is not bothered about how much ground they cover. The southern rivers don't really fit with that model so perhaps explains why they're more popular with seasoned boaters who are more interested in doing six or more hours at the helm. It also explains why we have such problems with batteries on boats...

Absolutely. If the product is free then you are the product, as the old adage goes.

Google Drive is great and cheap, and yeah having stuff across several devices and in the cloud means you're unlikely to lose photos.

Yeah I don't think it is terribly surprising, they will let much better from Wroxham. It's a shame but the draw of the North is indisputable.

I think there's been a fair bit of that. Plenty of people that would normally have gone abroad and not considered the Broads have ended up coming here. Long term, that's got to be a good thing as in normal times the Broads would just not attract those people as first-timers.

If there's enough genuine demand the yards are going to do it, and who can blame them.

The numbers are on here. https://www.richardsonsboatingholidays.co.uk/first-timers/norfolk-broads-bridges/ With the weather we've been having, it might be worth giving him a bell before you set off to make sure your boat will go through. Tides are all over the place so clearance hasn't been all that much.

Yeah in the summer you'll do well to get on one. Ranworth Staithe has quite a few posts, but most other places on the North don't have that many and the spaces near them are often occupied by boats without shore power.... Unless you have a very long lead it can be problematic. The last time I was at Coltishall I had to turn the boat round so that I was close enough to the one post in order to get plugged in.

Most definitely. I've never hired number 1, I hear she's a bit more original inside? I've had Major 2 at least three times, and yeah I think for the money you just can't go wrong. My wife is a bit fussy about what she likes and when we were on Major 2 last month she did comment that the heads could have been a bit bigger and maybe a few things could have been better (tiny TV, only 12V electrics etc). Thinking that here was my chance to book something a bit swankier next time I showed her some of the boats we could have and how much they cost (Fair Prince, Swan Renown etc). When I pointed out they were two to three times the price and that we could just have the cheaper boat and eat out every night for less than half the cost she fairly quickly changed her mind and I reckon we'll be on a Major Gem again next time...

Fingers crossed. Because of the seasonal peaks and troughs in demand I think a lot of Broadland pubs would work better as a community-led affair. It does require a few people to have a bit of business sense though, and that's not always the case with such setups.

One of these bad boys https://www.richardsonsboatingholidays.co.uk/boats/major-gem/ Built from the early seventies to early eighties...

It can be a problem, but a lot of the boats with issues have shockingly bad layup anyway. There are plenty of 70's boats about that are doing just fine.

It is indeed Black Prince I was thinking of, but ABC do the same thing. I don't know what the average fleet age is (and yes they definitely do have older stuff), but this was a smaller 4+2 berth and the guy we got chatting to at the yard mentioned that our boat and others in the fleet were 4 years old and were leaving as they'd been sold. We looked online as obviously we were curious, and several similar boats were for sale at circa £42K. But yes, I've looked at the list of boats for sale at Richardson's each year and it's typically around ten boats leaving with only three being added to the fleet each year. With the new build programme having recently ceased, I do wonder what happens next. The model used to be to do major refurbs of the older boats and that's not really happened during the newbuild programme, so perhaps they will shift back towards that? Look at boats like Barbados, Escapade, Capri and Viscount. Older boats but all had a total refit around ten years ago and feel much newer inside. Few other yards have the resources (or space and staff) to do such things. I remember being in the Ponderosa in the winter of 2008/9 and in those days all of the Acle fleet were in there, along with several boats having a total 'windows out' refit.

Yes, just as there are old Broads cruisers, there are old narrowboats. You know what I meant, though, and I was talking about hire boats which in general don't last so long and need more than a coat of paint to keep them afloat. I'd have a 1975 Aquafibre centre cockpit, but few people would want a 1975 canal hireboat. Some systems (such as the Llangollen) damage the underside of the boats considerably as there's very little depth and a rocky bottom so overplating is eventually required. In general they go to the scrap merchant in the sky as it's not worth the hassle.

In the same glass?

I have no idea what the margins are on canals, but it's a very different business model to the Broads for sure. For anyone not having done canals, the fleet ages might surprise. The big operators run boats for four years before selling them on. The spec is acceptable but relatively simple, with hulls in standard lengths to accommodate the number of modular cabins required. Each cabin's fitout is from a standard kit, so a double cabin on all boats has a standard set of factory-made parts, as does a galley, a saloon etc. For more berths you simply buy the next size hull up which is designed to fit the extra set of parts for a double cabin, bunks, washroom or whatever it might be. A 4+2 berth goes for about £42K once it has done its four years. Obviously, the interiors are very much IKEA quality and won't last forever but at that sort of price for a fairly new boat you can't really expect them to. I would imagine the shells are probably not built to the usual spec either. Canal boats have a much shorter life than Broads cruisers because obviously steel rusts and aluminium, stainless etc don't particularly suit the use. You can over-plate but it's expensive and old narrowboats don't fetch a lot of money.

It's certainly that. I can remember paying £1200 for a short break in September on the canals a couple of years ago, and paying around £400 for pretty much the same dates this year on the Broads. The canal boat was much newer (although nothing particularly posh), and the Broads boat was an AF38 out of Ricko's classic fleet - but that's still an enormous cost difference.

I think there's a fair few people on here who have tried lots of different waterways. The Broads is beautiful and it's a fairly unique system but I think trying other cruising areas broadens your horizons somewhat. People often say to me that they wouldn't want to do a waterway with locks, and yet I've spoken to canal boaters who think that the Broads sounds scary because "it's tidal". Funny, isn't it.

Many higher end boats do, but don't go bringing fan heaters etc... It's for charging laptops, cameras etc (although most of those now charge over USB, so will be fine on a cigarette lighter adapter) and perhaps a few minutes with a lower-powered hairdryer. Shore power of course gives you 3KW max, inverters usually around half that (and they will flatten the batteries in a couple of hours at max load). A generator will of course give you continuous power, but then you shouldn't run an engine between 8pm and 8am unless you want to annoy your neighbours.

So yeah, antifreeze doesn't go on the raw water side of the heat exchanger. The river water that comes in (and exits with the exhaust) is used to cool the closed loop on the engine, and it's that you'd add antifreeze to.