Last month I tested the new BW Mooring Auction system for the first time and as a result Zulu will soon have a new mooring at Uxbridge Lock, Grand Union Canal.  Even though the Middlewich mooring is much cheaper, the cost of getting there is quite prohibitive, and we have had our fun after over a year in Cheshire, so its time to move on, with the added bonus of now having a West London mooring.

Winter stoppages, including one at Middlewich Big Lock itself mean we can’t start the journey south until 18th December, so Christmas and New Year is going to be a crazy mixture of family visits and boating.  I hope to get past Braunston before the January stoppages commence, otherwise we will be stuck there until the end of March.

Check the closing time!

The auction system itself is certainly an improvement on the old tenders trial, where you only got one chance to guess a price, but I was almost caught out by the new system.  At 13:00 hrs I was the high bidder and assumed that this meant I had won the auction.  To my horror another bid was accepted after the deadline, and I had to log in and bid again.  In fact I thought there had been a mistake, as I had scrutinised the Terms and Conditions document which clearly states that the auction ends at the closing time.

What it doesn’t mention is that the closing time is extended beyond the original deadline until no bidding activity has taken place for 5 minutes, as an anti-sniping measure.  Whist this is an excellent feature I was very annoyed to end up losing the auction on a technicality, which is not even mentioned in the Terms and Conditions for Bidding but according to BW the website FAQ section must be considered part of the T&C, and it is here that the anti sniping is mentioned.  So be warned - if you are bidding make sure that you watch for an extended closing time in case anyone tries to jump in at the last moment.

Fate was on my side though, as 2 weeks later the original bidder had not met their obligation and so I was offered the vacancy, as the next highest bidder.  I have paid more than I intended, but I have a superb mooring to look forward to in one of my favourite locations on the canal network.   Zulu was actually based in Uxbridge in the 1980s when she was one of the Royal Navy’s own hire boats, and when I bought her she had been moored for years in Batchworth, so to all intents and purposes, Zulu will be coming home.

Only 182 miles and 163 locks to go!

Today (12th December) the BW Mooring Tenders website listed four mooring tenders to be completed at 13:00.  Three of them closed without any bids at all, despite in my opinion, there being a lot worse places to moor than Whaley Bridge (22m towpath mooring with no bids) or the immensely popular moorings at Claverton on the K&A where a 15m berth suitable for a widebeam has also been ignored.  I don’t think I can recall another day where so many moorings were returned with no bids.  In fact this week out of 13 tenders, only 8 had any bids at all and most of those were more or less equal to the guide price, apart from one very low below the reserve and one exceptionally high, more of which in a second.  Even more unusual this week is that out of 13 vacancies, no less than 3 were for residential moorings and out of the 10 leisure moorings 6 are still vacant.

To keep things in the balance, however, there is another first on the mooring tenders site this week.  The first mooring bid over £9,000 pounds per annum (excluding Poplar Marina on the tidal Thames) was tendered this week, for a residential berth in the Engineers Wharf moorings on the Paddington Arm at Northolt.  This location is in itself very unusual as it is a new development of waterside flats, Grand Union Village, incorporating 23 moorings which much to the amazement of everyone concerned were all granted residential status by the local council earlier this year.  So this month has set a very dangerous precedent in valuing the moorings in this area – with the recommended guide price of £5,250 now being dwarfed by a successful tender this week of £9,250 per annum, beating the previous record bid for a mooring where another berth in the same location reached £8,250 on December 1st.

Is this the most expensive rented mooring on the canal system? A new two bed flat here in the Grand Union Village overlooking this mooring is available for rent of £11,400 per annum – just £2,150 more than a pair of mooring rings!

So is this system really a fair platform for mooring allocation?  I have no objection to an auction based system but this is no fair auction.   BW do plan to amend the system to become a true auction where bidders will be permitted to compete with each other instead of blindly throwing money away and such a system should finally allow a balanced picture of the true value of moorings to emerge, but no date has yet been set so how much more craziness can we expect in the meantime?