Good afternoon everybody, hope youâre all ok.
I treated myself to a new iPhone. It was really easy to transfer all the data, took maybe twenty minutes including watching a âhow toâ video on YouTube. But itâs taken nearly two hours to set up online banking afresh. aaaargh!
Itâs going to be a couple more months before I can buy the boat. Hopefully the crazy prices that are being asked (and achieved) may have fallen a bit by then too.
That doesnât stop me looking though. I like this boat which came to the market yesterday ....already âunder offerâ...
Theyâre mostly funded by licence fees. These are charged based on the length of your boat. A typical 57-60 foot boat pays around ÂŁ1k a year...there are around 40k boats. They have some additional earnings from museums and other commercial interests.
Of course boaters begrudge the money being...
CaRT have (with some justification) been criticised in recent times for neglecting the maintenance of the infrastructure at the expense of improving the tow paths for use by walkers and cyclists.
Of course the canal system is very old and requires constant repairs. They have moved to reacting...
Hi Gary, yes there are rules/regulations to know about and follow but theyâre mostly common sense and for the good of the community. The Canal and River Trust (CaRT) which is a government, not for profit, quango is responsible for running/maintaining/regulating the canals and they get criticism...
I donât know for certain but it seems unlikely youâll find a US plastic bumper here.
The Mopar steel bumper needs a separate winch plate to mount a winch so presumably the copy is the same. That might also be difficult to find in the U.K.
Like this...
So I bought a reasonably priced car.
Itâs 13 years old but immaculate. 2 owners, 117000 miles. It has the 3 litre straight six petrol engine and the very rare manual gearbox. Itâs much nicer than I expected to get for not much money. :)
The potential buyer pays for the crane, typically ÂŁ250 and the survey, around ÂŁ500. You donât want to be doing them unless you really like the boat. Hopefully the survey only throws up some minor issues and the buyer negotiates the price down to cover them. If the boat is structurally unsound...
If they spend a lot of time in a marina plugged in to âshore powerâ they commonly suffer from galvanic corrosion. Most boats have 10mm steel under the water line but the pitting/corrosion can go straight through that. Thatâs why a survey is sensible.
To be sensible the boat gets craned out of the water and you get a professional survey done. Thatâs principally about the integrity of the steel hull. Overplating is common but costs around ÂŁ250 per foot... so a seventy foot boat needing a complete overplate would cost ÂŁ17500!
I can find faults with it, the interiorâs a bit dull and I donât like the square windows....portholes are better for the aesthetics. Plus itâs only 53 feet long, a bit small for me.