Can't take the heat...

Published: Thursday, 21 July 2022

AWE didums, so the spoilt little snowflakes can't take the heat can they?

Getting a bit warm on their boats so they're thinking of selling up. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind! Well goodbye, and for some of you, good riddance, writes John Coxon.

Secured a proper mooring

Some people did a little research, bought their boat and secured a proper paid for mooring, but many didn't. They bought a continuous cruiser licence and then complain that CaRT won't let them freeload a mooring long term wherever they choose to tie up with lame excuses like we need to be here for work, hospitals, schools etc.

Now it appears, they're complaining en mass, that no one told them a metal tube would get hot in the sun! It doesn't need to be a very hot sun like we have had this week as a moderate sunny day will heat up a boat to over 40°C quite easily as any established boater would tell them.

Many of these people just went out and bought a boat to live on without doing any effective research into what it means or the conditions, rules and laws that pertain to inland boat dwelling. Just reading a few leaflets or social media posts telling them they can moor anywhere and how cheap it is does not constitute proper research.

Live on the cheap

Their sole reason for buying a boat was to live on the cheap and many were totally blinded by this one aspect! Well now the sun's out and they can't ignore the fact that it's somewhat warm and a bit uncomfortable so they're running away.

A friend of mine, who lives in a house, sent me a photo of his thermometer on Tuesday, 39.1°C. My boat managed 34.3°C, so what are they running away to?

Talking about boats heating up in the sunshine, how many boaters are leaving their various pets in their boats all day whilst they go to work? I've seen it many times.

A delay with equipment

In a notice from CaRT this week we are told 'Please be advised there is currently a delay with the contractors supplying the equipment for the works to commence'. Does this mean CaRT no longer have the tools or basic equipment to do small jobs? Do they now have get (hire) tools from a contractor to do their work?

Am I to assume, as most people surely will, that money is being wasted because all the tools that CaRT/BW accumulated over a period of decades have been disposed of and they now have to rehire them from a contractor? You just couldn't make it up could you? If you wrote this into a tv sitcom you would get a laugh because it's just so unbelievable, but there it is for real, in black and white!

Visitors

About having a laugh, as Victor mentioned. We have the number 4.500,000,000. That's 10 digits. Four and a half billion is a big number in anyone's book. CaRT reckon that's the amount of visitors they've had to their waterways over the last ten years as regular readers would have seen.

So they say that on average 616 people and 137 dogs use every mile of the network every day do they. Well all I can say is they must be on a different network to the rest of us. I'm on a popular canal at the moment, in the midlands, and in the six or so weeks I've travelled it so far I would be reluctant to say that the equivalent of one days' average have passed me in that time, in total!

Shortage of water

Water.... gasp, water ...cough...I need some water! Keeping hydrated in hot weather's one thing, keeping boats afloat in the same weather is something else!

So how come we have such a shortage of water to fill the canals? Not enough rain say CaRT! It has been said before, dry summers were the norm years ago, and I'm not talking hundreds of years I'm talking only a few decades.

Being a 70 year old teenager I can remember the 60s when every year we would have eight or even ten weeks of dry sunny weather broken only by the odd thunderstorm! It was normal.

School clothes put away, shorts and T-shirts put on and our summer school holidays playing outside building dens and mud pies....bliss?

Didn't screech to a halt

The point I'm making is that the country didn't screech to halt, work didn't stop, schools didn't close, little mummies boys and girls didn't whinge that no one told them that sunny days get hot?

But most importantly the canals kept going! If they had closed the working canals one or even two hundred years ago on the same scale that CaRT are doing so this year there would have been riots! The boaters in those days could not have just sat about for six months without working, there were no benefit payments in those days so no work no pay, no pay no food!

It just goes to show that the canal managers in those days knew their stuff, they were competent managers. Not like the inept shower we have now?

No difference

As an example, a pound on the Atherstone flight is notorious for emptying itself over night, if memory serves me right it's between locks 8 and 9.

Last year CaRT closed the flight mid-season to reline the gates on lock 9 to stop the leakage and, consequently, the very short pound emptying. Well I've got news for them, it hasn't made any difference as it still leaks like a sieve and empties the pound overnight as usual.