The Steamboating Forum

Hi Ron

artemis wrote:Yep. But looks like you need someone(s) to demonstrate building a fire with "Prestologs". Ask anyone from the US Pacific Northwest.

Yes please! If any of you on the Pacific NW would like to write us a guide that would be great. The Prestolog style briquette is now becoming much more widely available in the UK. I was astonished to see the packets of "Blazer" logs, as used by SL Gondola, on offer at our local petshop. So there will be folk who will want to use them as they are clean to handle, but are not sure the way it should be done in a small launch boiler.

Regards

Pete

Just to prove that the sun does shine in the Uk's Lake district, here is another picture from Greg:



Apparently, the recent dry weather means that the lake level has gone down even further. We are debating whether to fit wheels to the bilge keels so that we can get her out of the boathouse. Of course it might rain again and re-fill the lake!

Regards

Pete

Greg has many talents, one is: he is an expert with Photoshop

Ken

What a beautiful launch Pete. All of your trials, tribulations, and indecision has paid off!

Thanks Ken, straight off my phone thankyou very much.

To be fair it's really quite difficult to take a bad photo of Frances Anne with the Coniston fells and a sunset as backdrop.

Greg

It is very beautiful country, the addition of the sun and a steamboat makes it even much more so.

We happened to be there during one of the wettest summers on record and were starting to think that the sun didn't exist in that part of the globe. Even without the sun hiding behind the clouds the countryside is pretty spectacular in a moody, brooding kind of way. When we visited we were asked how we had happened to choose to come to the Lake District. Apparently many Americans don't make it outside of London. It's a shame, the time we spent outside of London was the highlight of our trip and made even better by the hospitality of our steamboat friends on Coniston and in Abingdon. The Lake District is not to be missed.

Ken

Hi Ken and Friends

Yes, I would agree that the Lake District is not to be missed. I would choose that over London any time.

We have just had another brief visit riding on the tails of Hurricane Bertha, so that our expectations were fairly low. However, the weather turned better than expected and so the prospects for steamboating looked better. After a morning of work on the boat (why is there still so much to do???), we lit the boiler and soon had some steam. Greg acted as boatmaster and so we then settled into a very English class system situation, the 'Owner' and his wife in the cabin and the technical chaps out in the rain!

Herewith a very rough video of the event (with some more footage added later):

http://youtu.be/MFYK1wJJalc

Just in case that fails, here are a few stills:

A pensive Greg, having just helped the Owner's wife disembark.


Messing about with the whistle.


Slipping back into the boathouse.


I hope at some point to do a photo tour of the first class knobs and buttons that Greg has made and installed. However, we have not quite finished getting all the controls to the steering station just yet, so that is for posting another day.

Regards

Pete

Hi Folks

Thought you might like to see that Frances Ann now has some company in the boathouse. At water level she has been joined by the Frolic 21, Bruin. Somwhat higher up she has some new feathered friends who are wonderful to watch, but do have a tendency to lack care in their toilet habits... You will not need to ask whose boat is underneath!





Happily there is no shortage of wash up water in the Lake.

Regards

Pete

A piece of ply screwed to the beam underneath will retain a large amount of that. The only trouble is that they will nest on it next year, so it needs to be removed through the spring and early summer nest building stage. Wouldn't want to put them off completely would we?

One item I have used in years gone by to keep birds from using any boat I owned as a loo is to mount a fairly accurate (color, size, etc) three dimensional image of an owl somewhere on/near the boat. Doesn't always work, but might be better than nothing.