Aussie Boater

With the economic climate pinching at all levels, one of my mates has taken it upon himself to make his very own biodiesel. The blend still uses diesel fuel but at significantly reduced quantities.  The ingredients for his unique blend consist of the following:   He takes used vegetable "chippy" oil, combines it with engine oil (which also includes products like gear box oil, transmission oil etc) and filters it down to 3.5microns using Hoover vacuum cleaning bags.  Then he adds diesel, a proportion of petrol, white spirit and cetane. The end result is a lovely mix of biofuel, which not only uses 75% less diesel but also uses products that would otherwise be discarded and possibly not recycled.  With a 180L fuel tank, it costs me anywhere between £150 and £200 to fill my tank. With my mates biofuel, my costs would be reduced by 75%. So once the warranty is up on my rebuilt engine, I plan to try out his biofuel.  He said he already uses his biofuel in his ca...

As many of you know, my partner Duncan is moving to London at the end of the month. Over the course of the next couple of years, I’ll be renovating NB Elementary from the inside out. I’ve been given a stipend of just £500 a month to run the boat AND to spend on renovations. That means I have to now start watching what I spend.  Unlike the majority of bloat vloggers, I don’t make money from my channel. But it’s costing nearly £400/year to keep the website going and that money can frankly be better spent on the renovation. I mean that’s almost an entire months budget. Inflation in the UK is currently at about 9% with some predicting a rise of up to 13%, so the cost of living is going up. Boaters are not shielded from this hike in costs. Our licence fees go up by 8% this year. A bag of Excel smokeless coal has risen from £13.50 to £19 for a 25kg bag. And don’t forget the price of diesel. Even red diesel is up around the £1.50 mark. So, as I’ve become a budget boater again, I too have ...

July 2020 Having now lived on the boat for over a year and survived all four seasons, I have concluded that I don’t need most of the clothes I brought on board with me initially and that got me thinking about another article to write about. What exactly do I wear living on a boat in England? The clothes I recycled included a couple of pairs of dress jeans, suit pants and smart-casual business type shirts, none of which I’ve worn since moving onto the boat. Living on the canals is one of the most casual of anywhere you’ll find in the country. I dare say the same applies to boating communities in most other parts of the world. People wear what they like…it’s all very casual and not formal in any way.  Summer Over the summer, I’ll wear a pair of shorts and t-shirt or vest (singlet) but sometimes on cooler or wet days, I’ll often put on a pair of lightweight trousers and a pair of hiking boots with cotton socks. That’s it for summer…all fairly easy. Winter Winter is quite complicated i...

The name Bletchley Park is synonymous with code-breaking glory by the British during World War II. Located about 30 minutes walk from the Grand Union canal in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire is a piece of modern war history that many overlook. It’s here that genius mathematician Alan Turing and his team broke the code of the Nazis which helped win the war.   Inside this vast estate you will find a mansion that was built circa 1883. With a staggering 28 bedrooms plus the various outbuildings called Huts, there was enough accommodation to house the eventual 9000 personnel who worked here at the peak of the war, 75% of whom were women. There’s been a mansion on this site since the late 18th century but the original was demolished to make way for this new one. It was sold in 1938 and almost became a housing estate but was bought by the most unlikely character, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair using his own money to buy the entire site because...

  Since the installation of my new 12v system, I’ve tried out a few battery chargers. Here’s my review of all 3 devices.  Photonic Universe Fully Automatic “Domestic” Charger £99 Firstly, I started with a Photonic Universe 7 stage fully automatic charger rated at 20 amps. The issue with this style of charger is it’s designed for domestic use and really needs to be left on overnight so it’s not really suitable for off-grid marine applications. It spent a lot of time “massaging” the batteries @ 10 Amps, instead of giving them a good thumping high output charge @ 20 Amps from the outset. It didn’t work too well with my solar controller so I had to ensure it was switched off prior to switching on the charger.  One annoying design flaw of this unit is that the output charge connectors are located at the top of the unit. A power switch turns the unit on/off.  Not delivering the charge/rate I was expecting I purchased another with a higher amperage output rating.  No B...

In the 4 years I’ve lived in the UK, one of the things I love most about boating life is the sense of community. When we moved to Stockport, south of Manchester, one of the first tasks I did was to go around to each of my neighbours with a jar of my home cooked jam to introduce myself. Since then, only one of neighbours bothered to befriend us. Now I’m not saying I expect everyone to become my best overnight but at least it would have been nice to get to know my neighbours.  One of them, a lovely old lady called Peggy actually went out of her way to get to know us, invited us round for tea and looked after our cats when we went away. She was the only one in the entire 2 years we lived there. Most never bothered to give us the time of day, let alone anything else.   With boating, there is always an opportunity of getting to know your neighbours. Again, I don’t expect everyone to become my best friend but in the year I’ve been cruising I can honestly say I’ve developed more...