Narrowboat

In May I posted a couple of videos comprising of my 10 hour cruise in a day from Cuckoo Wharf to the Engine Branch Canal going via Tame Valley, Walsall, Wednesbury Old, and Main Line canals. Whilst my old set up using a Ricoh R6 digital camera meant the videos translated as 1 hour cruise equals 1 minute timelapse video, the Canon camera didn’t have the 5 second intervalometer limit as it was implemented by an add-on script. The settings I used meant a 1 hour cruise became 100 seconds of video, so the day was split to comply with Youtube’s 10 minute maximum duration. Whilst the videos looked smoother I was aware that some of the long straight sections of the TVC can be less interesting, so I have had another go, but rather than removing elements (I like the “whole cruise” element) I played with time warping taking parts up to 300% faster. I also had another change in the maps by orientating it around the current location to keep the direction headed to the top, so more SatNav like. The result is a single video for the whole 10 hours. Have a look …

Silhouette owners held our first AGM at the weekend, well first AGM post-Ownerships. Very well attended with 11 of the 12 shares represented, and as a group it looks like we are all set up for carrying on going forward. Many boats have now had their meetings, whether self organised or now under the umbrella of another management company. For many the future is bright, though not for all it seems. There are one or two boats that I know of that have divisions on the way forward with the likelihood that the boats will be sold and those owners wanting to continue looking for shares in other boats.
There are also some boats where the future is still uncertain. These are boats where Ownerships owned some shares, bought via the buy-back scheme. As Ownerships goes into the hands of the receivers, one job will be to see what debts they can recoup and if the shares are seen as assets they will want to get money for these. No one seems to know what this really means, will boats be forced to be sold off or could the shares be bought by existing owners (if they are in a position to, which is another matter) which may be okay if only one-share, but with cases of 3 or 4 shares on some boats you are talking about a third of the boats total (so could be well over £10K). Without this clarification, it could be difficult to really plan for the future. The manager at one of the bases where fifteen boats were based posted on a forum that four of them had buy-back shares on and extrapolating this to the whole fleet could mean as many as 26 boats are affected.

In past years this time of year has been the start of the boat AGM’s for those owners on Ownerships managed boats. With its demise earlier owners will now be facing a new future. After it came to light Allen Matthews had died and taken everyone’s money, the boats went into self-management. For some self-management lasted only until they could appoint an alternative management company, for others the liberation meant they could pursue managing their own boat free from any restrictions of management companies (Ownerships seemed different to what you expected from a management company, and the relationship was more akin to that of a brewer and tenant than a management co. and boat owner), for the rest self-management was initially current-season temporary fix. The idea of the temporary fix to enable everyone to take their booked holidays this year until the long term future can be decided upon.

The onset of boat-AGM season could well be the first time each the owners in a boat have got together face-to-face, though some had EGM after the collapse, to discuss things. For some it will be under a new management company already, but for others the decision of whether they want to be managed again has only been delayed from the spring..

Yesterday we reached the Ponty on the Llangollen. The weather has been atrocious and on top of that the power adapter for my camera failed – they are not designed for 8 hour a day shoots for a week at a time

So there will be no video of this cruise, still I’m sure I’ll do the Llangollen next year, possibly not in August.

I’m posting this from my Netbook, that is using my mobile as a modem using a free app from the OVI store. The 3G signal for most of the canal has been bad, but next to the aqueduct the signal is very strong – is that because its a world heritage site? Although we planned on doing he Monty too, we may put that off to next time as there isn’t much sightseeing when its raining.