News

November 2009

One Year On...

It has been a year since we launched Considerate Boater and we are very pleased with the reception we have had. Thank you to all of you. There are now over 70 corporate supporters including waterway organisations and hundreds of private supporters on the waterways.

The corporate supporters include most of the major players in the UK inland waterways and most now have direct links to Considerate Boater from their web pages and/or give our contact to their customers. The private supporters list includes Doctors, Professors and even a Reverend. Some are continuous cruisers, liveaboards, weekenders and many newcomers to boating.

The site content has been very well received but we welcome supporter input and have made some additions thanks to comments received. We are planning more updates for 2010.

On the whole, we are very pleased with the progress CB has made and hope we may have made a difference no matter how small. Thank you for your continued support.

New Supporters

We are extremely pleased to be able to announce that the Inland Waterways association has joined the list of corporate supporters of Considerate Boater.

You might wonder why it has taken so long for the IWA to take an interest. It wasn't because they didn't think it was a good cause, it was simply because they didn't know about us. Now, thanks to the attention of Peter Scott who is the Chairman of the IWA North East & Yorkshire Region we can now announce the support of at least part of the IWA.

QUOTE
Our (national 'Navigation') committee was unanimously enthusiastic about the CB advice: I think it hit a particular nerve of our 'traditional boating values' which we all feel are important to the Waterways, and if politeness and consideration are declining (difficult to measure), it is for want of familiarity by new users rather than any intentional deficit in good manners. We have attempted in the past to write our own advice that is wider in scope; it's your idea of concentrating on etiquette rather than the whole gamut of boating technique that gives this straightforward, digestible, and good-looking document. Thanks.
UNQUOTE

Thank you to Peter for bringing this to the attention of the IWA.

Other new supporters who have joined us since the last newsletter are:

BCBM Boat Share manage boat shares on the inland waterways and abroad. Click on the logo to visit their website and have a look at their newsletter at: http://www.boat-share.net/Newsletters/JULY-NewsletterV4.pdf but please make sure you are connected via broadband as it is a big pdf file. There are some very interesting articles and they were kind enough to include one on Considerate Boater. Thank you.

Many of us are thinking “greener” these days and Tia are helping with supply of environmentally friendly products in environmentally responsible ways. They operate from their narrowboat and anyone who cruises the South Midlands would have seen them, including my wife and I. My wife was so pleased with the performance of the Ecover washing up liquid on the boat that we now use it at home. I promise that was not a mutual product plug. My wife really prefers it to Fairy liquid!

We are also pleased to welcome The Cheese Boat to our corporate supporter list. Once again, we have encountered their narrowboat on the midland’s canals and have bought from them and can recommend their wares. I believe they are planning Cheese Boat 2 for 2010.

Both Tia and The Cheese Boat have “Where are we now?” sections on their website if you want to locate them.

Our most recent addition to the corporate supporter list is Crest Narrowboats who operate out of Chirk. At the time of writing this newsletter their new website had not gone live. They did however let me have a sneak preview and I have to say it looks very attractive. If their boats look anything like the look of their website then their guests are in for a nice holiday.

Corporate Supporter Logos

If you have a company logo and wish to have it displayed on the Links page instead of text then please send a JPEG or GIF of the logo as an attachment to steve@considerateboater.com. Ideally it needs to be at least 150 pixels in width. We will re-size it to suit our page and promise to keep up the quality to at least that of your own website. If you don't have a logo then let me know and we will match the lettering to that of your website.

Holiday on the Southern Oxford

We managed a two week trip on the Oxford canal and Thames this summer and had the usual good and not-so-good experiences but I am pleased to say more of the former than the latter.

We were party to an incident at Aynho weir lock where a boater was slightly less considerate to another boater ahead of him who was cruising slower than he wanted. We were directly behind the slower boat and the complaining boater did have a point. However, it wasn't what he said but the way he said it. If he had approached the slower boater in a nicer way then they might well have pulled over to let him past. As it was, we went through the lock with the slow boater, (for the strangers to the Oxford Canal, Aynho being diamond shaped it will allow two boats in at a time), and they pulled over a short time after and let us go through.

Thanks by the way to Oxfordshire Narrowboats for their excellent customer service on both the visits we made to them and especially for managing a pump out and refuel in the monsoon rain. The operator was absolutely drenched but he still gave the very best service and not a single drop of rain went into the fuel tank.

Finally

Thank you again for your continued interest in Considerate Boater.

Regards

 

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