25 stoppages not 19 Victor

I'm sorry but Victor is wrong, writes Allan Richards.

Whilst Boaters Update (6th June 2025 ) shows 19 stoppages under 'Maintenance, repair and restoration work this weekend' the actual figure is somewhat higher.

Boaters' Update

Published bi-weekly on a Friday, Boaters Update provides a list of stoppages for the upcoming weekend. Quite why Canal & River Trust think that boaters only cruise on alternate weekends is not known!

A decision was taken some years ago to cease giving links to individual stoppages. Instead CRT now provides links to waterways that have one or more stoppages on them. In practice this means that a count of the number of items on the Boaters Update list will almost certainly be lower than the actual number of stoppages.

Searching CRT's stoppage database for 'Navigation Closure' and 'Navigation and Towpath Closure' on Friday 6th June gives no less than 30 stoppages.

Finish on Friday

Victor may be wrong about the number of stoppages but he does seem to be right about dragging out repairs such that they finish on a Friday!

The number of closures dropped from 30 on Friday to 25 on Saturday ...

List of 30 stoppages for Friday 6th June.  List of 25 stoppages for Saturday 7th June.

For comparison, the number of stoppages for the same days in 2012 was about eight.

[This was of course under British Waterways, two years before Canal & River Trust took over 'to improve the waterways'—Editor.]