Water management, maintenance and safety inspections

NABO council member and West Midlands representative Peter Braybrook comments on some more topical issues.

BY THE time you read this article the boating season will almost be over and we are entering the autumnal phase. This is always a lovely time to boat; the days are shortening and the leaves begin to turn and fall.

But fallen leaves bring their own drawbacks. The autumn towpath ‘edge to hedge’ cutting will start and some of the long stems of the summer’s growth will undoubtedly end up in the canal. Propellers get clogged and then the chopped mulch decays to build up a new level of sludge and silt on the bottom. It is an annual cycle.

The dry summer has highlighted that the ‘bottom is too near the top’ in very many places. If the canals have been dredged to profile the loss of half a foot of water it is not as significant as when the canal bed is already half a foot higher than design. Dredging is needed on many canals to prevent the grounding of boats in times of water shortage.

At NABO we believe a realistic dredging budget and programme is essential to combat the situation we find ourselves in. Dredging is a maintenance function and should not be left as an emergency measure. When boats with a reasonable draft are getting grounded there is a serious problem. Working boats used to operate drawing up to four feet. That would be impossible today except on the largest commercial waterways.

Hopefully we will be past the horrors of summer 2022 with its driest July since 1934 and 10% of the system closed because of water shortages. We had a couple of weekends when we were down on silt on our home mooring. Getting off was okay but returning we had to leave the boat with its stern hanging out, the level of the pound in which we moor being about six inches down on its normal level.

That was due to water management measures; that six-inch level drop on our pound was the result of the imaginative measure of reducing the level in our pound and introducing a diversion to feed pounds three miles further down the canal via a river course that was also running extremely low. In 20 years in this area this is the first year that this measure has had to be used.

Again we talk of maintenance. Maintenance is a preventative measure designed to ensure smooth operation of plant and equipment. Obviously any mechanical item can fail. Normal wear and tear is always going to take place. But maintenance and overhaul are intended to prevent breakages. Pinion gears and racks should be replaced before they break or seize. However and it is nothing to do with climate change or a heatwave, we have had several forced stoppages from double paddle failures on locks. A programme of planned maintenance should be in place to prevent this happening with less disruption to cruising.

Too hot to talk

I want to thank Canal & River Trust front line staff for the effort and skill that they have put into managing what water they have had in the system. The trust says that it reviews reservoir levels and water-saving measures on a daily basis and I can quite believe that this is true. It is hot! And it has been too hot to sit around in a room talking about boating, canals and heritage.

It was also too hot for Parliament to sit around and listen to Richard Parry, the trust’s CEO, talking about the funding gap and the necessity of government support after 2025. Not only has the Defra review been put back to the autumn but the All Parliamentary Group for the Waterways meeting to inform all parties of the need was postponed to September because it was too hot in London. After encouraging NABO members to write to MPs and encourage them to attend this function it was very disappointing that it was postponed at very short notice.

The evidence that the funding is needed is out there in the crumbling infrastructure and leaking lock gates. We have found time to sit around talking about safety, particularly the Boat Safety Scheme and NABO continues to put the boat owners’ point of view. We all want to be safe and responsible. Our boats need to protect others us as well as ourselves. Therefore we are happy to promote and encourage inspections that do that.

Smoke alarms will soon become mandatory. However we are against the intrusion of a more frequent inspection frequency without the evidence that it will increase safety. It has been suggested that increasing frequency will provide a better business model for inspectors and encourage more to join the scheme.

This argument does not wash with us. Better to have a smaller team of dedicated, interested and reliable inspectors than a large team who are in it solely for the moneymaking opportunity. I would not deny somebody that needs to make a living but job creation is not the role of the Boat Safety Scheme. It does get hot sitting at a computer in front of an open patio door listening to hot air over Zoom. It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it.