Monday, April 20, 2015

Another reason dredging is expensive

We arrived by car at Crick late last night only to find the access road to our part of the marina closed.  We found out why when we awoke this morning.

Had we driven in, we certainly wouldn’t have got back out until this little lot had moved away.

crane2

crane

They were craning out the boats used by Land and Water for the dredging operations recently carried out down our stretch of the Leicester Arm.  They have been entertaining us with their dredging and bank reinforcing operations for a while now and of course these big flat barges and the dredger itself were widebeam boats- too wide to get through the locks at either end of the arm.  I don’t fancy meeting one in Crick tunnel either come to think of it.  Notice that on the lower photo, they have two boats stacked on one lorry!

Lifting and transporting big boats, as we boaters know, is not a cheap operation.  There’s probably quite a few licence fees spent right there.

We were only at the marina overnight, en route home from a family do in St Neots.  I wanted to collect Herbie’s roof box which is need of a bit of TLC at home.  The odd repair and a lick of paint should restore it to its former glory.  One bit of the plywood edge had started to delaminate, so as I write it is pumped full of waterproof glue and clamped up.  Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t.  The repainting wont be quick ‘cos it has a diamond pattern in red, white, cream and blue with a grey border.  I’m a masochist.

The fore and aft decks I painted last week are looking OK now.

cant  bow

At least when you finish a painting job you get some feeling of satisfaction.

1 comment:

Moominpapa said...

When I looked at the JCB sitting on the flat, it looked like the flat was actually in two narrow-beam halves, bolted together, and I assumed that the JCB would be driven off and the two halves disconnected and boated away. Clever! I thought, but clearly not clever enough. You can see the two halves stacked on the lorry in the back of your photo. Maybe it's cheaper to truck them to the next job than pay a crew and a tug to take them by water?