Burning your boats, Euroferries Bonanza Express update and a bit of a ramble with more pictures of Ramsgate.

Bonanza Express seems be travelling back and fourth between Santa Cruz and Agaete, there is a bit of an internet toy that you can use for tracking vessels in this area see http://www.localizatodo.com/mapa/ it is quite a toy really.

If you get addicted to playing with this a better one for UK waters can be found at http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/ now I have stopped you getting any work done in the office today, playing with internet toys, perhaps I should offer some appologies to the bosses.

The Euroferries website has had a considerable update since yesterday, all mention of Bonanza express has gone see http://www.euroferries.co.uk/ but they still appear to be hoping to start their service from March the first.

I very much hope this happens and would like to offer them any support that I can, I certainly still wonder how much of the delays have been caused by our own dear council.
I am publishing up yesterdays pictures of Ramsgate on the internet at the moment and will add the link to them and some notes about them to this post later this morning.

The picture above is a bit of a sad one, this wooden cruiser is being broken up and burnt on the slipway in Ramsgate.

Also on the slipway for repairs in Silver Sturgeon see http://www.silverfleet.co.uk/fleet/silver-sturgeon/ she is steel hulled an I would imagine this involves a survey, replacing any steel plates that need it, painting the hull and fitting new anodes.

Click on the link for the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts110/id7.htm as you see despite yesterdays forecast for a dull and foggy day, here in Ramsgate our microclimate meant the weather was much more spring like.

Back to the burning of boats, why, well in this case the hull has rotted beyond repair, there is a little story here for anyone interested, about rotten hulls.

The last boat I had of any size was a river cruiser on the Great Ouse and there was a pretty astute marina owner there who was about to break up and burn a large and luxuriously fitted river cruiser that had a hull as rotten as a pear.

A local builder came along and offered to buy it for repair and as the marina owner figured that the fees he would get for the boat on hard standing while all of the planks were replaced would be considerable, he allowed the builder to knock the price down to £100 although he engines alone were probably worth about £1.000.

She was 50 feet long so the fees for a year hard standing would have been about £2,000, this wasn’t a cheap marina.

Well on the Monday a truck from the builder’s firm turned up loaded with chiken wire and three men got to work with electric staple guns and a generator.

On the Tuesday a gang of plasterers and a concrete mixer turned up and ferro coated the boat, nothing happened on Wednesday and Thursday while the concrete dried.

Friday and Saturday the painters turned up on Monday the boat was in the water and the builder on holiday, on the boat.

Reading through the planning applications that I have just put on http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ I notice Mr Hilton of Bleak House has applied to for planning permission to turn what was a jewellers shop in Ramsgate High Street into a pie and mash shop.

It occurred to me that there could be a lesson for other retailers like myself here, by that I mean you can’t buy it on the internet, even if you got it from Westwood Cross your pie and mash would probably be cold by the time you got it back to Ramsgate.