Sunday 26 April 2009

Beer festival new a breed of boater

There seems to be new breed of boater out there with the so called credit crunch (don't you just hate Americanisms) in full flow. There seems to be a lot of boats moored and unoccupied along the canals. Continuous cruising implies that the boats are occupied. Boats owned by these seem to be moored by their owners who appear every two weeks and move them on to another mooring thereby adhering to the terms of their licence. There have always been these boat owners but it seems to me that there are now more of them.

Did these boat owners have a marina mooring in the past and have had to reduce cost and are now bought continuous cruising licences (I know there's not such thing but in essence that is what they are)? Is there something morally wrong with this activity and should they really be in the same category as boats occupied by people who constantly cruise? I don't know. I'm asking you. We need to think of a new name for these boaters so we can hate them.

We have inadvertently stumbled upon the The Greyhound bi-annual beer festival. I promise it was totally unplanned and we were proposing to move to Hawksbury Junction this weekend anyway. We were here last year as well. Oh well all we could do was to partake in some beer.

There were several smaller groups in the beer festival. One such group found our fancy. It was either the linux user group, the local autistic society, social science PhD students or the local CAMRA. But those of us in the know always spot the difference and this was definitely the local Linux user group. They were probably celebrating their successful download of the latest release of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope . Strangely I have downloaded the latest version as well.

There was a distinct lack of a bearded presence and CAMERA were not in much evidence. It was more like a hen party than a beer festival. We were entertained by a pianist. He was actually a very good entertainer and kept a relatively drunk crowd very happy. But he did say that it was a very weird night. I think he does weddings mostly these days and the afternoons and not evenings. I managed to drink nearly all the beers present just missing out on two. Most of them were very good...I think.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Pete,
Is it not about time you took a new photo of Pickles No2 and planted it at the top of your blog, or are you now incognito?

Pete said...

Yes you are absolutely right. I'll correct this week. Very sorry.

Carl said...

More photos generally would be good. Us blog readers want to live the life, you know!

Beer sounds good, especially mixed with narrowboats. Any chance of a bed for the night?

Martin said...

I think the phrase you're looking for is "continuous moorers" ??
That's CAMRA, by the way.

Pete said...

No it's not Martin. Continuous moorers (if there is such a thing) moor in the same place for more than the alloted time, usually 48 hours, 7 days or 14 days. This other breed move within the time frame and therefore are not continuous moorers (if there is such a thing) and are legal as far as BW are concerned.

Unfortunately the term continuous moorers is a misnomer and means absolutely nothing, like most things invented by Narrowboatworld. We all moor continuously until we move.

I'm never wrong. I was referring to the Coventry Amateur Mechanics, Engineers and Repairers Association.

Anonymous said...

Aw, please don't hate us - we're just trying to make the best of the canals while we're still young enough to get round. Of course, that means we're also too young to retire and do it full time :-)
Sue

Pete said...

We couldn't possibly hate you all; well not unless we can come up with a half decent name to describe you, pidgin hole you and therefore, hate you. Then it might be a different story. If we can only get that name together.