So asks boater Frank Auffret, who writes:
While we were cruising in the south and midlands this summer we heard lots of boaters complaining about the closures, some even considering selling their boats. 'Two years running….' was the general theme.
Two years? Up here in Yorkshire we have had issues since 2021. Over the past six years we and many other Yorkshire based boaters have been unable to plan. It’s been like Russian Roulette with five bullets in the gun.
Out of those six years we have been able to return by our preferred route only once, and it’s getting worse! The Rochdale Canal and Huddersfield Narrow Canal (HNC) are all but closed. Those two canals can be discounted as reliable routes over the Pennines with over a hundred and thirty notices issued between June and August this year alone.
This year so far very few boats managed a complete transit of the HNC and probably none have managed to get across the Rochdale. The once reliable Leeds & Liverpool canal is regularly closed somewhere, with low water from August onwards and then there’s the increase in swing bridge failures.
Escape and return via the Trent used to be fairly reliable. Alas no longer. Network Rail’s stringent policy of operating the Vazons Railway Bridge at Keadby has ruined many proposed summer cruises over the past two years. It’s no fun being stuck in the middle of nowhere, waiting for the bridge to cool down to sixteen degrees in summer. What happened to the sprinkler system they used in the past in hot weather? Keadby lock issues made it even worse this year.
‘Try the Trent’ and ‘The Boating Association’ have done a lot of good work to encourage boaters to travel around Trent Falls. The problem there lies with the weather and tides. Strong winds can put plans back for weeks if not months. Planned passages around Trent Falls out and back this year had to be aborted both times when the XC weather app predicted winds of force 4 and above at Blacktoft.
There’s no doubt C&RT have been a disaster for boating generally, but we can’t blame them for the weather. To be fair things have picked up under the new CEO, Cameron Robb. Failures seem to have been responded to faster. The water levels on the L&L this year have been managed well and C&RT deserve credit for that.
Unfortunately, infrastructure problems on Wigan Flight, the Ashton Canal, Marple and Bosley locks, along with the Bridgewater breach make it difficult, if not impossible, to return from the midland waterways to Yorkshire via any of the three Pennine canals. C&RT just don’t have the resources needed to return us to the good old days’ of the early part of this century when choosing which of the three Pennine routes to take was the hardest part.
One positive from the problems we boaters face is the amount of publicity and BBC coverage given to the waterways since the Whitchurch breach. That can only be good especially if some organisation keeps feeding stories through to the media. Maybe there’s another Barbara Castle or a Michael Portillo lurking somewhere in Westminster.
Experienced boaters probably have more knowledge and understanding of some of the issues than many of those C&RT managers recruited from outside the organisation. There are many examples that show decisions have been made more on the side of caution rather than joining the dots. That’s inexperience and lack of understanding.
Maybe we need an ‘escape committee’, a Yorkshire Boater’s Association campaign group. Such an organisation would need to work with C&RT not against them. I’m far too old for that, but if the younger generation of Yorkshire boaters don’t do something there won’t be any Yorkshire waterways to boat on.