When we went back to Chertsey for the first time since the long winter's absence, I had the usual ceremony to perform of replacing the licence 'discs'. Ever snce we first had Bakewell and brought the renewal dates into line, Chertsey's licence has fallen due in December. This year though I didn't have two full size, full colour licence plates to insert into the holders, just a measly corner of monochrome A4. Up until then I had just inserted each year's licence in front of the previous one, but this year I abstracted all the old ones, which will be kept as souvenirs forever. We shall not see their like again. These are all the licences since I first licenced Chertsey - and prior to that she hadn't been licenced since the early eighties. It was a bit of a palaver to get her old registration number re-issued, but I persevered until I found a nice soul at BW who was willing and able to sort it out. You will note that I have had two BW licences, and so far, four (five counting the current one) CRT ones. The first two show Chertsey's home mooring as being on the Trent and Mersey, and the next four the Shropshire Union. The current one has the Coventry. What, though, is the number in the bottom lect hand corner? They are sequential, and though at first glance they appear to change annually, this isn't actually true of 2014-15. Are they simply sequential numbers of all licences issued? The differences between that seem a bit high for that - it would suggest for example that 56,312 licences were issued in 2015 and 78,833 in 2016 - far more than the total number of boats on CRT's waterways. I feel I ought to know, but I'm mystified. Can anyone enlighten me?
I suspect they are sequential numbers. We often buy two licences per year, one six month and one three month as the boat often spends three months ashore so no point it being licenced for that period.
ReplyDeleteI suspect there are others that buy shorter term licences and it will also include visitor licences as well.