Wow, look at those beautiful lines...

... oh, you thought I was talking about boats? Nope, I'm talking about graphs! But they are graphs about boats! Sort of.

It's been nearly a year now since I joined the waiting list for a Cambridge Residential Mooring, and I've been plotting my progress on a graph. By extrapolating this data, I hope to get a better idea of when I might be offered a licence. Now, going by the data collected so far, and applying a little common sense, it's not unreasonable to assume that this graph will be subject to exponential decay (don't worry, I think there's a spray for it!) meaning the closer to the top of the list you get, the slower your progress will be. This is due to the fact that:

1. an increasing proportion of all 'drop-outs' (for want of a better expression!) are now behind you, and no longer affect/improve your position.
2. the people ahead of you are less likely to drop out, having already remained on the list for this long (possibly 2-4 years!)

The dotted lines on the graph represent the two events that could have a big impact on the positions each year. The first one, in red, is the council audit to ensure that everyone currently on the list wishes to remain on it (I'm assuming this is yearly - there's currently no mention of it on the council website). The second, in green, is the renewal of existing mooring licences. All renewal forms must be in by the first week in March, so I'll be asking for another update on my position in early-to-mid April, when hopefully all the dust has settled! Fingers crossed, progress will be made. I'm currently 24th on the list, so even if my position remains unchanged I really can't complain after only 10 months of waiting!

This graph predicts my progress up to October, assuming that the current trend of data continues. Part of me, of course, wants the graph to be wrong and for me to have a meteoric rise to the top, but another part wants the data to support the graceful curve predicted by my graph!

Time will tell.

I guess this will only be of interest to people considering a residential mooring in Cambridge (and perhaps not even them!), so apologies if I've just bored the socks off you. I do that sometimes. :-)