marshman

Hemsby Pie - you are now communicating with a privileged few!! BA bashing and the support of unsupportable fishes is seemingly the province of a few specialists, whilst others support the unsupportable to help balance the scales a bit!! Your post is absolutely correct - but I guarantee the detractors will not see it that way!!! The sinking on Barton, if that is what Pete refers to, hardly turned out to be a navigation issue, especially as most could see the sail!! I wonder how many so called emergency navigation issues cannot wait, on average half an hour!!! Let me guess....?? There is probably a little history over the whole BA issue, especially on here, which you can only speculate about!! Or not!! Whatever the issues are, I promise you they are not especially illuminating - well not all of the time!!!

Hmmm - you really think thats likely???? Not sure I would be quite as optimistic as you and even if i were, I am not sure some of those advocates of change would be able to manage without stirring the locals up even more!!!!

Something new then - hardly worth a story in the EDP!! Same old,same old....!!

No no Bobdog - surely it must be the jurisdiction of the BA despite everything written down. After all, those instructions are in a BA publication - that would say that!!!

I have heard that Humber (Bridlington) coastguard are just as helpful as the old Great Yarmouth ones. They will be delighted to help in an emergency.

And Vaughan - didn't want you to miss out!!!!!

oops - meant Haddiscoe!!! Slipped a bit north!!!

Poppy - did you not read the response fro Alone1?? Lunch breaks are not advisable but compulsory in all public bodies - including councils! Do you really think it warrants an extra salary and expense? Surely a call back in less than an hour would achieve the same result? After all they were hardly going to call the swat teams out were they? What it was going to achieve was a call to a Ranger or yard and that could easily have been dealt with even after a 45/50 minute delay!! And Vaughan, how long did it take to get a Ranger to respond in your day - bet it was not measured in minutes and hours!!! A 45 minute deal is hardly the end of the world!!!!

Have they closed that gap onto Halvergate then?? What is truly a nonsense though is the continued drainage and use of old marshland for arable farming - Heigham Holmes for example. That whole area is surrounded by marshland and it was a real real shame that farmers actually got rewarded for ploughing up marshes and water meadows. Surely the object of the old water meadows/marshes WAS to provide an overflow for the high tides. Totally ridiculous to put it down to wheat/barley and potatoes - it should have been left as summer grazing like it traditionally was and we would not then have the problem of deep cut dykes drying out the peat based soils - never too late to reverse this and that is slowly being done. Thank goodness! Looking at Horsey/ Hickling, half the problem remains drainage off the Brograve Levels - it is slow reversing trends like that. I am sure you are right Poppy - well you must be!! - but the advantages of BFAP cannot yet be assessed. You clearly have weighed up the advantages of having water pouring through the old "banks" straight into the IDB drains only to be pumped back into the flooding river and is the flooding really worse in Horning?? Not sure I am aware of that! But surge tides are a problem - is that not in part due to land sinking and tides rising or did I imagine that? Certainly they are encroaching , slowly, upstream. Perhaps having more marshes would help?

Hi Timbo - why dont you ask them? My guess is that it has absolutely nothing to do as you suggest but the change to wetter marsh just as they have done on the other side of the river at Candle Dyke. That process can be seen now if you walk down to the Eel Sett and you will see that raising the water level has made a much wetter marsh!! Over the years the deepening of ditches by farmers had led to a general lowering of the water levels so the marshes were below river level. The exactly same issue has been addressed throughout Upton Marshes and South Walsham Marshes.

Hi Vaughan - whilst I applaud your statement on staithes and agree quite a lot of what you say, my bet is that few of us have pockets deep enough to pursue this through the courts! Keith Bacon is a bit of an expert on staithes and I am not sure he would quite agree with you!! However the situation is appalling and a classic example is at Ludham which has an old staithe down Staithe Road which seems now part of someones garden!! There were many staithes, some private, some public and which were which, are frequently lost in the mists of time!! But who is to fund these test of English law, and I promise you it is fiendishly complicated, and not quite that straightforward. Neither I guess is pursuing the purported navigation rights. There are many long lost staithes all over and all record is sadly disappearing.

You can say the same about Theresa May then - bet you would get nowhere arguing the toss with her either!!!!

Then there must have been plenty of dykes not accessible to the 6' draught wherries!!

So whats new - both private and public sector employees are frequently bound by this restriction and in my past, even in the private sector, such clauses in contracts are not at all unusual. This has all been aired time and time again - anything new or different here??? In some of the biggest Corporations you talk to the Press unofficially and the security guard appears next to your desk with a box!!

JM - you are being ingenuous again!! Are you saying the 25' wherries servicing the marl pit at Little Switzerland drew 6'? You know as well as I that there were wherries of differing sizes and so you choose the deepest draught wherries to make your point? Why not the shallowest ones?? And I think that that map shows the opposite - what a large area is still open water and available to sail in! There are of course 100's of yachts competing for that space - not! There is still a very large area showing a depth over the plants of 1.25m or 4' in my money and that varies according to the weather!! Is that not better than the narrow channel kept open in the 60's - now weed was bad then!! And JA - for what its worth I think your prophesy about access above Potter is just scaremongering. You cannot have cleaner water and no weed - one leads to the other! And you will not need telling that there are many factors affecting weed growth and the type of weed "underfoot" varies enormously from year to year. And Poppy you know as well as I that the water temperature drops well below 8c in the winter - they managed last year to complete the dredging towards the Pleasure Boat with that restriction - why not this?? This is not at all in defence of the BA but many of you are flying kites in this thread!! However I am sure you will all now proceed to beat me up for my comments but in reality all I am trying is to just trying to balance the thread a little!!!

To all those who want to increase signage, there is no limit to the stupidity of people and their inability to follow signs - how many more stories about sat navs do we have to read to realise that? What these people are missing are brains!!! Even if you joined all the posts together with chains, I guarantee that people would still manage to get stuck - thats the nature of it i am afraid and under no account should the BA spend even more money on more signs!!

Really?

Oh I am sure thats right - but is anyone else going to take on a new lease???

Sadly I have no real inside knowledge BUT I keep my ear close to the ground and rumblings are afoot!!

I think we may hear more on this topic sooner rather than later. Not sure about Percys Island but I think the one opposite the Ferry will remain open, but under different ownership. Nuff said....!

Oh don't worry Hemsby Pie - they all think that SOB should respond to everything from picking up a dropped icecream to full salvage!! If it is an open half decker, I dont think Maffetts will be needed - just a pump and a lunatic with a bucket!!! They probably just caught the mainsheet on a channel marker and that would normally be enough to slip her under

Although i know its not peak until the end of the week, you could have got on Ranworth today and about half 12, there was just 1 boat on Ranworth Island moorings - not that hectic then!!

VetChugger - merely comment on the Hemsby Lifeboats blog!! Not sure where the speculation is - they supplied the petrol to get him going, took him back to his car and then by chance met him in McDonalds. Quite what have PW and I speculated on??

No - SoB is a patrol boat like any other BA patrol boat which is more suited to the estuary like conditions that you can face on Breydon occasionally - it has , and does often patrol for a greater length of time away from facilities ( like bushes!! ) and with a number of the aux rangers often of a different gender, the on board facilities are a help - like teapots!! Please don't turn this into yet another thread as to the suitability of SoB !!!!!!!!