narrowboatworld

WHILST it is my intention this week to comment on various issues I'd like to begin with two articles in narrowboatworld that I feel may ‘fit' with what I have to say.

The first article is David Collins ‘Linear moorings not reduced' with the second article Allan Richards ‘BW senior directors should go'. This regardless of whether I ruffle any feathers!

Natural wastage—the way forward

I begin therefore with the opening words of David Collins article, and I quote: Who says online moorings are reduced by 10% of the spaces provided in marinas? With David going on to mention what he obviously sees as a never diminishing number of online moored boats in the Braunston area, I have to ask with so many boats already in brokerage just how many more boats our waterways can afford to lose?

I do appreciate that many boaters see the online moored as an irritating hazard to navigation. That it was as a result of numerous complaints to this effect that British Waterways decided on its previous plan to move one in ten of the online moored as new marinas came online.

Sadly a good many of those complaints no doubt came from hire boaters and those ‘new' private boaters whose boats are now in brokerage, those here today and gone tomorrow, whilst having created quite a wake in their passing! However, in the actuality had British Waterways certainly at that time continued to act upon those complaints, with many of those online moored boats being cruisers and older narrowboats many of those boats would have been left with nowhere to go.

The law of unintended consequences in action

The sad fact of the matter David raises is that the probable majority of those in the ‘one in ten' given many of those boats were cruisers would under British Waterways removal plan have been left literally drifting.

If therefore criticism is due for the failure to rapidly remove the online moored it should be correctly levelled not at British Waterways but at those marinas that were too ‘precious' to accept less than ‘posh' boats, that also claimed to be unsuitable to accommodate cruisers, regardless of whether their owners were in a position to pay. I say this advisedly having taken it on myself to speak to a good number of those marinas. In all fairness best I think to lay the blame where the blame lies?

Perhaps best to be selective?

This leads me on to Allan Richards' article, ‘BW senior directors should go'. Having now clarified the reason for British Waterways ‘turn around' with regard to the ‘one in ten', given Allan's' comments I think it could be time for boaters to make up their own minds as to which members of British Waterways hierarchy they would wish to go, and whom they would wish to stay.

I have never made any secret of the concerns I have with regard to Tony Hales' and Robin Evans' management. My concerns relate to the selling of the ‘family silver' to raise cash and then later taking on such a risky investment as with the pubs and the bollards fiasco. That Tony Hales in the face of the storm of protest those expensively unnecessary bollards provoked, appeared to find those bollards to be a matter of amusement, and furthermore then continued with the programme regardless of boater's criticism, means I've been the first to criticise, and the first to wish both he and Robin Evans gone.

However, when it comes to such a wide sweep as ‘BW's senior directors should go' I do have reservations. Had it not been for the ‘listening ear' I spoke to on behalf of the online moored facing ‘removal', there would have been no turn-a-round and considerably more than the initial 66 licence paid boaters that have the same right to be on the waterways as those marina moored for reason of either acceptability or affordability would certainly have been destined to be driven from them, to the further detriment of British Waterways coffers, and very probably our pockets.

British Waterways does provide some very good people we would do well not to lose. Better the devil we know, my grandfather would have said, than the unknown quantity of the perhaps also ‘high street thinking new brooms' devils we don't, and from my point of view experience has to count here if the Trust is to get off the ground, never mind survive.