marshman

Ferry is independent too and well recommended - it remains to be seen if the new owners can continue the good work!

Griff - not wanting to rain on your parade, but at this stage I don't think it will include up the dyke itself. Still the channel is better than nothing! And Pete - what company goes around asking other people what to do before making decisions? Why should the BA be any different? Does Griff put out to consultation how to tile a shower? They may have lost some people who you would suggest were irreplaceable, but going back over my time at work and in a very specialised job, no one was ever irreplaceable!! IMHO you are merely perpetuating a myth that is not really very relevant.

The spoil from the Yare upstream bits has to be put into special lined pits - you can see these from the bypass. It's not so much the TBT but other squit that came out of the old May and Baker factory! There are two aspects to the current Hickling dredging I believe - the outer circle is a sediment curtain to stop silt going all over the Broad and the dredgings at the moment are being into large textile bags to form the edges of the lagoon which will be filled in over the next couple of years. Part of this project is being funded by the EU under the CANAPES project and I think the Dutch have been lending assistance and advice. Its NOT the area surrounded by the extensive curtain but closer inshore - infilling one of the very shallow bays on the North shore. Incidentally you will see that currently they are dredging the Catfield channel.

Pete - perhaps you could persuade a few farmers around Hickling to read that then - methinks there could lie a major issue. A limited trial last year has not been continued and possibly was not as successful as had been hoped? P.S. Not sure what the total cost of Clearwater was, but you can be sure that the supply of money from Europe for such projects looks like it might dry up in the future! P.P.S. I would hope Riverman could expand a little on his last sentence to enable others to understand more fully!!

Did none of you read Robin's excellent post yesterday on another thread? Whats the point in living in a dream world by talking about 3m depths? Of course at Hickling they are dredging " the channel" - do you really think that dredging Hickling generally is even dreamt about given the huge cost even if it could be done. I doubt you could even get the channel to that depth - lets be realistic!! And Griff - a m3 of mud might not be a lot but stuff that inside your van and it would seem bigger I guess! And 50000 of those a year would make a large pile of cr*p methinks - and of course the only people who could pay for the extra dredging on top of the existing programme are the boat owners themselves in larger tolls! Not especially popular I guess. P.S. If you did NOT read Robin's post, then I strongly recommend you do - its under the low tide thread. Someone reproduce it here for an old git please!!

There is a bogeyman beyond every door , every comment and (almost! ) everyone associated with or at, Yare House. What more would you expect Andrew?

Just a quick response to Islander about idle kit - the stuff at Thorpe is not necessarily dredging kit these days. You will have spotted that they mostly use the nice yellow diggers with the long arms for dredging these days and at least two, plus two wherries plus other assorted kit are currently working on Hickling. This link is the December briefing which may, or may not work!! https://mailchi.mp/6da961e22660/broads-briefing-december?e=b9e683c9ea Not sure where the other team(s) is currently working

No Vaughan, they do not have a constitutional responsibility to maintain navigation, but they seem to have the ability to be able to dictate to the BA when and where!!! They are the Governments environmental adviser and as the Government still pay some funding, my guess is you don't bite the hand that feeds you!!! DEFRA is all powerful in everything, rightly or wrongly and to be fair, the inability to dredge against private land you cannot access, is hardly hindering navigation. I understand your comments about Marina Quays and do not dispute any of them but was merely enquiring whether as it has no lease to the BA attached whether it should be classed as a 24 hr mooring and maintained as such? GYBC are always spouting how they much they have done for Yarmouth - perhaps they would like to renovate and dredge it to save the Nav Acc funds and get the benefits from opening up the area again? Some hopes methinks....!

And thats just the dredging on the Lower Bure point out, and not elsewhere - which is omitted from those figures. They have a programme to remove something like 50/60000 m3 per annum and generally get around there - as has been said so many times all this has to get Natural England's approval and that of landowners to dump the spoil. Is that not classed as a regular programme?? They did dredge the channel at Marina Quays but not the edge - is this their responsibility when facilites are available further downstream? After all its not a 24 hr mooring and never has been Oh and I regularly get through Wroxham with 6'9" ! ( Must not say more - I might incur Griff's wrath further!!!! )

Griff - I agree the Tide Tables and clearances and indeed the website are imprecise . No argument there. Unlike others then, I guess you are pretty unimpressed the water did run out quite adequately this weekend? To me it suggests that there are many factors at play at any one time and that there is no guarantee that dredging would have the impact some suggest. As I said earlier, I would fear the unforeseen circumstances that may occur and I would suggest that even if the BA DID ask for permission, that approval from Natural England would not be forthcoming for that very reason. I might well be wrong! I also think that climate change IS having an impact on sea levels generally, but like the silt issue, the impact is just impossible to assess accurately, either North or South, simply because of too many other factors involved. However the next time this dredging topic is raised, you will not be surprised that I will certainly recall what did happen Saturday night and probably either myself, and perhaps others , will remind the dredging advocates of just this fact!!!

Vaughan - Ace of Hearts? I was in someones house the other day and lo and behold, there was a black and white photo of Ace of Hearts stuck on his wall - used to belong to the blokes brother!! Look at this thread and there she is!!! Again - within a week or so . What a coincidence!!

Nothing goes out that way now though - its actually physically cut off from the system! Or rather there is a locked gate/sluice and beyond it a dead end. That marsh just there is one of the better reed beds and closely maintained accordingly

So Griff - can you back up your claim that the GYPHC actually took away more silt than the BA are currently removing? Methinks not so lets not, with respect, keep on banging on about it - that was over 30 yrs ago and in todays world is pretty meaningless. The BA has been down there over the last few years taking away the inside of some of the bends - in my early days in cruisers in the late 60's there were plenty of bends where the inside was shallow, as it is now at certain stages of the tides. But what we do now know thanks to Deidre and to the North Sea temporarily b*ggering of for a bit, is that the theory about the Lower Bure is rather dented - nothing certain but a little bit less believable! And yes Hickling is well down today - probably by at least a foot or so still from this time last week and if you look at the following link you will see that it is today actually well off the bottom it reached Sat night, yet is still well down. It would appear that not even Potter Bridge proved to be the impediment some believed it actually is - another theory busted to some extent by dear old Deidre perhaps?? https://flood-warning-information.service.gov.uk/station/6210

MM - I think the following post to yours answers the question very well. I am not actually against dredging per se at all, merely that I am somewhat sceptical to say the least, that more dredging lower down the Bure would have any impact at Potter, and indeed could have the opposite effect and allow more saline incursion. Perhaps what I would say is that the BA has been dredging the Lower Bure for several winters and I have not been able to see any real difference. The evidence of last weekend however would appear to suggest that when it wants to go , it can, so what would be the point of further dredging, more especially if there would seem to be little evidence that it would change anything? I admit I am not a hydrologist so I don't really know, but equally the same applies to those many proponents of more dredging in that area. What I do believe however is that you cannot do these things without being certain of the consequences, as usually doing one thing impacts another - better the devil you know than introducing a whole new element no one envisaged at all.

The tide did go out on the N Rivers too Griff!!

Controlled flooding upstream seems to be the name of the game, as in some cases it prevents damage downstream - we are quite lucky around here as we generally have lazy rivers often with marshes to spill over into even if a few senseless farmers still try and pretend otherwise!!

Who wants to see 8' draught boats at Geldeston? If you regularly go aground on a normal tide then dredging is an issue but at £45 a grab load, even doubling the dredging programme would decimate the navigation budget!! And all to achieve no extra benefit other than messing up the natural flow - alter the flow excessively and you could well have other downsides with no extra benefit! Not an option IMHO - for what its worth!!

Griff - that may be an issue if it were to sit on rock and it was bouncing up and down on it for some time, but you have to remember that the rivers in particular generally consist of MUD or at best boggy marsh!! Remember when they put in Lens new shed they went down about 70' with the piles and still did not hit anything much!!

My guess is that it will get back to normal pretty quickly. https://www.ntslf.org/data/realtime?port=Lowestoft

No no - it cannot be running out of the Bure, as its not been dredged enough has it?

Certainly was - all water sucked out of the North Sea by Deidre!!

But just for one minute going back to the cars ,and especially the hybrid ones, there is plenty of evidence that many just drive around on the petrol bit, especially company car drivers who do not have to pay for the car or the fuel. Quite a few are being returned with the lead in the plastic bag - unopened!

All sounds about right! At this moment in time, I am much more concerned about the non eco batteries, i.e. how they are made and of what, and how you dispose of them!! No wonder they are so slow in taking off - I am not sure we have got any further than the good old milk float! In the meantime I will drive around in my diesel car, allegedly killing scores of people whilst hiding from the fact that the switch back to petrol cars is already reversing the trend of reducing CO2 emissions. And finally I will go on holiday by plane, thereby emitting in one journey, on my behalf , far more CO2 per mile per passenger than a car BUT if the government has told me so, I will consider an electric car next time! Or perhaps not.......! As for boats, there is no hope yet and methinks I will be long gone!!!

My OS map shows some dykes but not many and none in Sutton Marsh!! It does however say Big Bog and Little Bog which I understand is pretty apt! That point about constant maintenance has been well made by Vaughan in an earlier post - sadly that is something the BA now struggle to do as effectively as it has been able to do in the past. It will be a shame to see the marshland gradually get overrun again which I fear could happen although both the NWT and the RSPB do take it all very seriously. Vaughan also mentions Norfolk Reed and he is correct in all the things he says - as is often the case! But more marsh needs to be opened up and used but it is an extraordinary hard life for a poor return, made harder when the summer season brings with it the job of cutting sedge! Now that is hard and again not very rewarding - not a job youngsters want to do and because of the nature of most marshes, difficult to mechanise successfully to any degree.

Kingfisher - believe me, Sutton Fen is supposedly very special! Almost no one is allowed on large swathes of it and then only rarely! I know very little about birds and less about plants and buggy things, but nonetheless they are all part of the food chain and like it or not , important. The £1.5 m did include the farm as well which presumably is now let to provide an income, and ensuring that it is managed for the benefit of the Reserve. When the land was first purchased there was high hopes that it would be used to build a visitor centre and provide access to boardwalks etc to the parts of the fen, but all that fell through for one reason or another - it may have been issues about access. For what its worth, together with the Butterfly Trusts adjacent Catfield Fen, they are internationally recognised as exceptionally important freshwater fens!!