How Wide ?

[Alan de Enfield]

I see that some builders are now advertising 13 foot (and even up to 14 foot beam) 'fat-boats'.

These boats must surely not be suitable for much of the CANAL network - we are a 'boat-shaped' 14 foot beam and know the only place for us is on the Rivers.

 

Photo below is not our boat - to my eyes it looks like an old 'night-soil barge' with a lid on it - no aesthetics that would lead one to call it a boat.

[Murflynn]

To my eyes it looks like a floating tin apartment, and I can't imagine much joy when trying to cruise with it.  Mind you, a parallel sided fat boat will be easier to handle in wide locks that a boat shaped vessel, it just needs space to line it up to get it in in the first place. 

[frangar]

Surely if it fits through a lock it's suitable for the navigation....I thought everyone knew that.......

always amusing when they meet themselves coming the other way....

[rusty69]

It won't be long before they are square with an engine at each end, so no need to turn around 

[Bee]

I think that part of the whole boating thing is owning something with some sort of beauty, a pretty gaff cutter, an old Riley RM, something with a bit of art in it, something that makes you want to sit in the pub garden and admire it after a days boating. You need something that you are proud of to give you a bit of a thrill when you are working on it or planning a voyage. That thing in the picture is just depressing.

[Sea Dog]

9 minutes ago, rusty69 said:

It won't be long before they are square with an engine at each end, so no need to turn around 

Or no engine at either end.

[rusty69]

21 minutes ago, Bee said:

I think that part of the whole boating thing is owning something with some sort of beauty, a pretty gaff cutter, an old Riley RM, something with a bit of art in it, something that makes you want to sit in the pub garden and admire it after a days boating. You need something that you are proud of to give you a bit of a thrill when you are working on it or planning a voyage. That thing in the picture is just depressing.

I agree, but you don't get many inland boats (perhaps with the exception of some Dutch Tjalks) that fit that description,just welded metal boxes or plastic Tupperware boats. 

18 minutes ago, Sea Dog said:

Or no engine at either end.

Or a circular one, that just goes round and round. 

Edited April 24, 2017 by rusty69

[OldGoat]

3 minutes ago, Bee said:

I think that part of the whole boating thing is owning something with some sort of beauty, a pretty gaff cutter, an old Riley RM, something with a bit of art in it, something that makes you want to sit in the pub garden and admire it after a days boating. You need something that you are proud of to give you a bit of a thrill when you are working on it or planning a voyage. That thing in the picture is just depressing.

I wonder why an RM came to mind (spent my youth in marshalling at Riley club trials). The 1.5 was a bit squat - the 2l (or was it 2.5) fitted the body better. Still a lovely car, designed as were all the smaller manufacturers, to look good rather than purely functional.

Feeling sad as I've just seen a car (Alvis SP25) that I once owned offered for sale at 2,000 times what I sold it for...

That's the difference, when I started boating NBs were crafted by small firms who knew how to make a tin box look good and 'drive' well. Nowadays its a matter of function over form. The buyers just want a caravan on the water with 2.6Kw electric ovens inside....

Back to the car analogy, look at a stretched Hummer - ugly even more so than the original which was pretty awful anyway. Both designed to do a job and little else.

 

[peterboat]

Mine is 12 x 57 but has a wheelhouse and curves Jonny wanted it to look right and it does. In my waters its an easy thing to get around in the locks are big, and will fit 5 of us at once so its no hassle. I have seen 4 of us at Doncaster breasted up and still plenty of room to get past us, horses for courses is it?

[peterboat]

5 minutes ago, OldGoat said:

I wonder why an RM came to mind (spent my youth in marshalling at Riley club trials). The 1.5 was a bit squat - the 2l (or was it 2.5) fitted the body better. Still a lovely car, designed as were all the smaller manufacturers, to look good rather than purely functional.

Feeling sad as I've just seen a car (Alvis SP25) that I once owned offered for sale at 2,000 times what I sold it for...

That's the difference, when I started boating NBs were crafted by small firms who knew how to make a tin box look good and 'drive' well. Nowadays its a matter of function over form. The buyers just want a caravan on the water with 2.6Kw electric ovens inside....

Back to the car analogy, look at a stretched Hummer - ugly even more so than the original which was pretty awful anyway. Both designed to do a job and little else.

 

I like Hummers and the stretch is very strong, and when we had the 3 foot of snow up here took my lady friend and neighbors to the shops when nothing else could move. As a standard car the H2 will go places that landrovers etc cant, mind I liked that russian thing on Top gear last night just so much fun......................

As for canal boats looking good whilst a lot did from the 70s, 80s a lot were very ugly

[Sea Dog]

8 minutes ago, peterboat said:

Mine is 12 x 57 but has a wheelhouse and curves Jonny wanted it to look right and it does. In my waters its an easy thing to get around in the locks are big, and will fit 5 of us at once so its no hassle. I have seen 4 of us at Doncaster breasted up and still plenty of room to get past us, horses for courses is it?

Nail on the head I think Peter! What's perfect in one place might be a damned nuisance somewhere else.

[peterboat]

It would I did the narrow canals in my narrowboat and it was great fun but I wouldnt like to take this beastie down the grand union.............

[dmr]

Once a fat boat is over 12 foot does it become a morbidly obese boat?

There is an ever increasing number of these things on the K&A. Had another "incident" only last week where the owner, with limited boat handling skills, just kept going forward in a straight line just hoping everybody else would get out of his way which is just not possibly with a deep narrowboat. The Wessex Rose hotel boat is the biggest and even though they have really good boat handling skills it can still be tricky to get past them in a narrowboat, no chance of two of these fat things passing in many sections of the K&A.

..................Dave

[BWM]

I spoke to the skipper of our local coal boats and he said that two wide boats had been unable to pass on the tring summit, low water levels may have been a factor.

 One issue I have noticed is the trend to maximise interior cabin space, with the bow end cabin sides appearing cone shaped. These are chopping lumps of masonry out of bridge arches, the worst example I can think of being adjacent to the blue lias at Stockton.

[Giant]

1 hour ago, Alan de Enfield said:

It's funny, to me that's starting to look like a proper boat... just raise the decks/gunwales a bit!

Sooner or later someone's going to just build a new keel.

[Pluto]

2 hours ago, Alan de Enfield said:

I see that some builders are now advertising 13 foot (and even up to 14 foot beam) 'fat-boats'.

These boats must surely not be suitable for much of the CANAL network - we are a 'boat-shaped' 14 foot beam and know the only place for us is on the Rivers.

There are around 3500 miles of navigable waterway in the UK, and only 1200 of those are narrow. You may feel confined to rivers in the south, but there are plenty of wide canals in the north, where canal engineers and promoters had a better idea of what they were doing. I wouldn't want one of those slab-sided wide narrow boats though, whose constructors seem to have little idea about how to build a shapely easy-moving boat, as built historically in the north.

[mrsmelly]

1 hour ago, peterboat said:

It would I did the narrow canals in my narrowboat and it was great fun but I wouldnt like to take this beastie down the grand union.............

Thats the trouble isnt it. Truth is the silly sized boats are narrowboats not widebeams. Narrowboats look silly and are a stupid internal size, so called fat boats are immeasurably better to handle and for comfort. The problem we all have is that too many widebeam owners take them on tiny canals such as K and A and Grand union to mention but two. The so called widebeams that everyone thinks are big are actualy small boats when seen in context on decent sized waterways such as the Trent below Nottingham and the Aire and Calder to mention just two. I have found many narrowboaters dont seem to accept the fact that narrowboats are the weird sized craft that we are stuck with in the UK just because of our silly seven feet wide locks.

[MtB]

I think we should call them "Broad beans". Because that's what they are looking more and more like these days. The one in the photo is even the colour of a broad bean too.

[Robbo]

3 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

I think we should call them "Broad beans". Because that's what they are looking more and more like these days. The one in the photo is even the colour of a broad bean too.

I think we should just call them fat narrowboats as they have have used all the bad boaty things a narrowboat is confined to have whilst not nessasary on a wider boat.  Gunnels is the main one.

[Boat&Bikes]

1 hour ago, BWM said:

I spoke to the skipper of our local coal boats and he said that two wide boats had been unable to pass on the tring summit, low water levels may have been a factor.

 One issue I have noticed is the trend to maximise interior cabin space, with the bow end cabin sides appearing cone shaped. These are chopping lumps of masonry out of bridge arches, the worst example I can think of being adjacent to the blue lias at Stockton.

To be fair there are plenty of bridges that have been the victim of a NB. The Leicester line is a prime example.

Ian.

[mrsmelly]

26 minutes ago, ianali said:

To be fair there are plenty of bridges that have been the victim of a NB. The Leicester line is a prime example.

Ian.

There are plenty of lumps knocked out the bridges on the Oxford canal and I have never seen a widebeam on here.

[Mike Todd]

4 hours ago, frangar said:

Surely if it fits through a lock it's suitable for the navigation....I thought everyone knew that.......

always amusing when they meet themselves coming the other way....

It is a matter for debate and sometimes history as to whether a particular canal was ever designed for wide boats, even with wide locks. In the case of the GU, general opinion seems to suggest that the widening of the locks (perhaps save for the run up to the Port of Berkhampstead) was to allow both motor and butty through in one operation. Hence between locks only narrow boats had to pass each other, or through bridges and round bends etc.

[cuthound]

4 hours ago, Sea Dog said:

Or no engine at either end.

Sounds like you are describing a shipping container 

[peterboat]

3 hours ago, Robbo said:

I think we should just call them fat narrowboats as they have have used all the bad boaty things a narrowboat is confined to have whilst not nessasary on a wider boat.  Gunnels is the main one.

They arnt all the same I have good size gunwales on my boat Yes Liverpool/collingwood do produce strange looking widebeams which are just straight and square but thats because they are relatively cheap, as Jonny says curves cost money which is why a Brigantine is lot more expensive than a sheffield size boat.

[BWM]

49 minutes ago, Mike Todd said:

It is a matter for debate and sometimes history as to whether a particular canal was ever designed for wide boats, even with wide locks. In the case of the GU, general opinion seems to suggest that the widening of the locks (perhaps save for the run up to the Port of Berkhampstead) was to allow both motor and butty through in one operation. Hence between locks only narrow boats had to pass each other, or through bridges and round bends etc.

The grand union canal company trialled wide boats in the thirties and quickly gave up the experiment as unworkable.