Boating – a hole in the water…
… into which to chuck your money
I have owned a narrowboat for more than 20 years… in fact, I have owned two. The arrival of the first one in 1994 coincided exactly with my first outbreak of serious poverty – which has gone on ever since!
Boats are not cheap. You are going to be looking at around £30,000 minimum, for the purchase of a half-decent, quite old, secondhand boat. Pay less and you will just buy bills.
After that, you can add a grand in waterways licensing and another two for moorings (mandatory, if you are not going to live on it, and keep moving)… so, three grand more before you have put a drop of diesel in it and started the engine.
The worst of boats are – canal engineers! Finding a good one is a tad more difficult than happening upon a Mongolian unicorn’s noseflute!
The best ones tend to do a bodge that costs a fortune and either breaks down or causes something else to break down later.
The worst will utterly wreck your craft – whilst pouring out haycart-loads of steaming BS about how their predecessors have let you down.
The sort of service you get from boat engineers would have an auto garage shut down within a week. But they thrive in the knowledge that without them, you will be left up a muddy creek without a paddle.
On the other hand, when the boat does work, it is simply sublime (he said, after recently returning from a lovely trip down the River Weaver, where nothing broke down and the weather was wonderful!).
Above is a little video of the trip down the Anderton Boat Lift, which drops your boat in its own ‘bathtub’, exactly 50ft 4in from the Trent & Mersey Canal, into the river… working on the counter-balance principle, with one filled bathtub coming up as you go down, to minimise the effort needed. The lift itself is pictured above, right.
