Boat Transport by Road...

Now I know following on from my solar panel posting the other day, the natural progression would be to investigate Solar Chargers…

I’ve every intention of doing so in a future posting but I’d rather leave that until the weekend, when hopefully it will be sunny so I can demonstrate in photographic form, the difference in charging current obtainable with  pwm and mppt  charge controllers.  We seem to have one of each in the garage from my "camping experiments".

Until then however, I've had a good conversation today with a haulage firm in regards, getting the boat from Lymm to Wakefield by road -I had emailed a couple of other  folk a while back to ask but no one got back to me...

http://www.cpltrans.com/index.php

IT turns out it’s not so expensive after all – the quote for the transport alone, is £720 inc vat.  I'm quite surprised at what good value it is – especially given that it allows 2 hours loading and unloading time EACH side of the journey.

Now I need to get a price for the cranes either end of the journey.

 There IS a permanent one at Wakefield Warf on the river Calder just before the weir near the Hepworth gallery …

I'm struggling to find a contact telephone number for them though - all I can find is dissolved companies  on Companies House website...  I think a walk to "find a bloke" is in order.

This will probably be the easiest option – assuming they’re happy to lift the boat off the back of  a lorry on a blind bend on a busy road…  the thing that scares me about this though is that onec  on the water, I’lll be taking my first run on our new boat 50 yards away from a weir!  Now ok, the engine is new and should work perfectly but what  it It conks out or something before I reach the safety of the flood lock a little while upstream?

Being “plonked” straight on to the river, would also force us get an anchor on board immediately.  I’m not too sure HOW big an anchor we need  but we  WILL need one anyway so that decision will need making and the said piece of equipment purchasing  AND attaching to a secure point on the bow BEFORE the boat is even lifted!

I’m sure in time  I won’t think twice about such a journey… for now, as you can probably imagein, I’m quite apprehensive about it.  Perhaps it might be a better idea to see if we can get the boat craned in, nearer the mooring… to give us chance to test things out properly on the safety of a canal.  With that in mind, I’ve emailed Stanley Ferry Marina to see if they have a crane or can recommend someone /a company locally who can do it.

Until next time…