RS2021

MBGA?

Craig's lists all of them as 'Thames fleets', but the names given are all from the Richardsons era on the Thames and I know they did a lot of swapping about with the fleets they bought.

I've often wondered if the Melody's started out life as the Benson Bountys. Does anyone know?

Lazy reporting. It talks about a protest in London, but the main picture is Birmingham! Might be a picture of a protest for something else entirely.

The original concept of continuous cruising on the canals was for people with no home mooring who wanted to cruise the whole system to do so. Whilst some do do this many, especially round places like London and Bath have been dubbed 'continuous moorers' and only move the bare minimum to qualify as a 'continuous cruiser'. In some cases rotas are arranged to swap mooring spots on agreed dates. Imagine the Broads with the 24 hour moorings fully occupied by boaters who swap each day leaving no space for leisure boaters. Liveaboards on the canals used to be boaters who wanted that lifestyle and accepted living 'under the radar'. Now a large proportion just see it as cheap housing and perhaps the real issue in many places is lack of affordable housing.

I've seen tread drift before, but his one's really gone down the pan

Stupid question, but if the BAs ringfenced budget is only for navigation only what does the toll actually pay for? There are no locks to maintain, no old tunnels and aqueducts. No ancient reservoirs nearly collapsing potentially destroying whole towns. The banks are largely 'natural'. Since the recent debate on flooding, we discover that dredging is the responsibility of the EA. OK there are a few free mooring spots which the BA has to maintain, but as we know they are starting to charge for these. Have I missed anything? Maybe we should encourage the BA to charge for the remaining free 24 hour mooring and then reduce the toll to zero.

But if all you have to do is download the app, think of all the pennies that are saved in printing costs... I'm happy to embrace new technologies, but there is something special about a paper map. I can waste many hours looking at them.

Next move. BA takes over the mooring complete with up an running payment platform which it can roll out across other sites...

NBDs Fair Viscount 1 &2 are up for sale on NYA.

The third one - run by Miles comes up second in an Internet search now Richard's is down. Miles did take his down sometime ago and announced he was re-launching as a blog. But its still branded as a 'forum'.

I usually find the best place to see information like this is the documents page on BAs planning portal https://planning.broads-authority.gov.uk/PublicAccessDocs/planningdocs.aspx?appType=Development Control&appNumber=BA/2021/0456/FUL

Another comparison would be Bannau Brycheiniog - like the Lake District a proper National Park. In 2016 Beacon Park Boats built a new boathouse and basin as a new base for their hire fleet on a greenfield site in the National Park. So boating businesses and National Parks are not necessarily incompatable.

I see Horning Pleasurecraft have got their planning consent to extend the marina.

Great to see some major investment in the current economic times. I'm not sure how long they plan to take to do it, but the work at Stalham looks very significant. New lodges, masses of new moorings (new basins and basins extended - visitor moorings on the main river), canopies over the hire fleet hand over area for wet days, visitor centre (I wonder if Richardson's or the BA will run that?) etc etc. I don't know how to post it directly here, but this link will take you to the master plan on the BA's planning area https://planning.broads-authority.gov.uk/PublicAccessDocs/planningDocs.aspx?doc=/sites/planning/2023/Documents/Development Control/BA20230443FUL/7762-p03g proposed master plan-compressed.pdf