oldgregg

Yeah that's true.

Yeah, that would be pretty horrendous (and dangerous) Slack is at around 6 so perhaps there is an expectation the river will reopen later and give time for crews to reach Stracey?

A sad incident. Unfortunately at 2pm I think the Bure will have had quite a flow on it.

Stracey arms seems like a good place to head for. That's my preferred stop on an evening crossing.

@C.Ricko I think I know who will know.....

Yeah I'm with you on that. You don't get the centre cockpit draughts in the edged of the season, but in the summer there's nothing like cruising along with the roof off.

Yeah they're mostly late seventies to early eighties. It's a fantastic design when you look at it, space well used and nicely proportioned between accommodation, living space and that protected cockpit.

Actually she's a Bounty Traveller, technically....

The yacht station is more secure than it used to be, but yeah I'd avoid Friday and Saturday nights for sure. Norwich is a beautiful city and always worth a visit, but I wouldn't overnight at the yacht station personally. As for chucking the mudweight in, I'd do that almost anywhere nowadays. Sure, people don't get untied that often but do you really want the hassle given how little effort it is to lob the Broadland handbrake at the drink?

You'll be thinking of Andrew Wolstenholme? I think the newer stuff was designed by John Moxham, who also did the recent Richardson's boats and has worked with Ferry Marina (and many more of course).

I think they're popular with stag / hen parties so might be in hire a while yet. https://www.barnesbrinkcraft.co.uk/our-boats/detail/brinks-emperor-class/ I actually really like the old Aquafibre centre cockpits, they handle really well, are shaft drive and are spacious inside so I'd love one of the 48-footers refitted to lose a couple of cabins and have a nice open plan saloon / galley like on Carousel.

Yeah, they have some stretched Aquafibre 42's. Because of grandfather rights (they were registered before 1992) they are I think now the largest Broads boats in hire that do not have a restricted cruising area.

Yeah, they do. The Highliner 44 has been around for quite a while now but when fitted out well there is quite a lot of space in them because of the high sheer line and bathtub hull. I've always thought the 35ft version looked better-proportioned but internally always seemed to be missing a couple of feet of space in the saloon so hopefully that also gets a stretch to around 37ft.

Sold, sadly. One of the Gardenias was in better condition than the other - The cheaper one had discolouration to the laminates from moisture etc and would have needed more work.

I think that's to be expected at this time of year. When everything is out, the engineers will be out, for a variety of reasons. One of the most common reasons for a callout is still flat batteries because people don't run the engine for long enough each day.

It's a common opinion I think. Ferry tried to sell a private version of Garnet for years and didn't manage it. Haines took the mould, stuck a conventional canopy on and called it the Haines 26. They've sold a fair few.

If you're getting DNS lookup issues, that's not the forum....

I think one of the main reasons is that hirers had a tendency to open the tank clearly marked 'Water' and put the fuel dipstick in there to see how much fuel they had left..... Cue a nice problem for someone to sort out. On a lot of boats, if it's full then you can see diesel in the hose as soon as you remove the filler cap.

The trouble with that is you never know how many engine hours she did the previous week. I think like me you tend to do a fair few miles in a week so don't tend to have battery issues, but it's always good to make sure. I have had an issue (not on the Broads) with a boat that clearly hadn't done enough running the week before and it took a good couple of days of cruising to stop the fridge shutting off every night.

I'd say Clive's being realistic. A boat built to go under Potter is fantastically flexible in terms of where you can go, but in terms of hire very few people go up there any more (and that will only reduce) and so you're compromising the design of the boat in terms of headroom and interior space. Having been a syndicate owner on a Diamond 43, that is a clever bit of design in some ways but equally it suffers from its low airdraft in that for its size there's not actually as much interior space as you'd think. Compare the way that the original Alpha 35 centre cockpit is packaged, there's an enormous amount of space for the size and they'll still pass under Wroxham Bridge. The other comparison for the Diamond 43 is the Aquafibre Crystal 37 - Considerably shorter but a dual steer with 8ft air draft and there is a lot less wasted space and actually not that much of a difference in terms of room inside. I think one of the key things here is that 80's designs were very spacious but still looked decent. A nicely-fitted Alpha 35 still looks classy, and a Crystal 37 is still an impressive-looking boat although I don't think they got the rear end quite right visually - Stick an integrated bathing platform (with steps) on the back and make it 40 feet and you have a much better proposition, though.

I think the problem that we always have with them is that they could have been made to look better. I totally get that boxy boats have lots of interior space, like we used to have back in the 80's. They don't need to be ugly, though, that's just laziness and is why the world and his dog aren't asking for a set of mouldings like they are with the RC45. Even the reworked version that Haines did was a big improvement.

Actually, it's an Aquafibre Sapphire 32 and is specifically NOT a Broom 32. That is a Broom build, but it's still a Sapphire 32. The Broom 32 is the production Broom model which had the seagoing hull, and had a different fitout. Great boats, though, yeah. We seem to have lost the art of packaging that we had in the 80's. Look how much accommodation we used to be able to fit into 32 feet....

He did say 'nice' pub though

That's one way of putting it! I remember hiring Magnifique for the day (yes, really) back in the mid 90's and I've not seen an interior quite like it.

Yeah, I think she'll reappear on the website later in the year. A lot of work was done and while obviously it would have made no sense to complete her and put into the fleet for this year, I assume she'll be ready for the start of next season.