This was our third time boating with Herbert Woods and without doubt the worst.
This is a video of the flies that were breeding in the forward bathroom toilet waste tank on Shining Light. As you can see from the video the toilet is unused and on opening the toilet valve numerus files, fly out into the bathroom not to mention the awful smell! What makes it worse is knowing where the flies have been living as the bathroom door opens directly onto the kitchen so very nasty. The video was recorded at 10am before the weather started getting hot. By the afternoon the flies got really bad.
Flies were not the only issues we had during our time on Shining Light as on Monday while cruising through Horning the engine cut out mid-river and would not start. Bearing in mind the engine is used for slowing down while mooring this is a very dangerous thing to happen mid-river. Fortunately, we were able to get help from another boat before we crashed in to anything, but we did drift someway before someone helped us. The other boat towed us to the bank where the Herbert Woods engineer could make repairs which turned out to be a loose wire on the engine stop solenoid. While the engineer worked on the engine he found a fuel which explains why the bedroom had a strong smell of diesel.
Before the engineer left we showed him the flies in the forward bathroom and said he would report it as soon as he returned to the office and we would get a call.
By Tuesday morning Herbert Woods hadn’t done anything about the flies so the forward bathroom was still unusable. Because of this, the aft bathroom was going to need a pump-out sooner than planned and as we were moored at Wroxham we asked the nice people at Barns Brinkcraft to take a look. They soon had the flies under control and smelling sweet again.
The next evening, we were moored a short distance from Ludam Bridge cooking our evening meal when we noticed the oven had gone out. It didn’t take long to realize the gas bottle was empty in fact BOTH gas bottles were empty! Obviously not been checked before handover.
Herbert Woods were sorry to hear of the problems and has offered us 10% off the next holiday. I think we will pass and hire from Barns Brinkcraft instead!
