Caversham (two weeks of English lockdown already)

We started this blog so we could record our travels around the waterways and have seen its focus change as we have progressed through different styles of boating.  Before owning a narrowboat, we used to take canal boat holidays where we would hire a narrowboat for a long weekend or a week or two at a time, usually with many of our children with us.  When we bought our first narrowboat in 2010, we were both still working and moored it at marina on a small island in Newbury on the Kennet & Avon canal.  The boat was called Kennet Lock and was a 25-year-old, 70’, ex-hire boat that we slowly fitted out to suit our needs opposed to meeting those of short-term users. 

Kennet Lock at the end of 2010 in Newbury

It wasn’t long before we found that we had become ‘weekend dumpers’ where we would drive to the boat on a Friday evening, cruise somewhere new over the weekend, cycle back along the towpath to fetch the car and then drive home on Sunday evening.  Being an old hire boat, the paintwork was in a terrible state and for some weeks the dumping ground was under the A34 outside Newbury while a couple of boater friends repainted it.

Chalkhill Blue in Paddington basin after the paint job

Cruising as weekend dumpers wasn’t economically efficient because we were paying marina fees without using the facilities, so we became ‘continuous cruisers’ where a different licence is required as we no longer had a home mooring.  As we were enjoying boating so much, I gave up work in 2014 and Karen took a year off so we could live full time on the water cruising around England and Wales; there is no waterway link with the Scottish system. We were so happy living on the boat that we decided to continue when Karen’s year out was over, and she returned to work.  We rented out our house in Kent, bought a flat overlooking the canal basin in Aylesbury so the children or us could have a base if one was needed on dry land, and started a new phase of our life.

Each morning Karen would drive to work in Warwick while Buddy and I would do all the domestic stuff. The rules of being a continuous cruiser mean you have to move at least once every two weeks, so I became a single hander moving the boat whilst Karen was at work. In reality we moved more often than every 14 days as, with so many canals and rivers in commuting distance of Warwick, we were able to carry on visiting new places even though Karen was working.  It did mean that on moving day Karen wouldn’t know where to come home to, so I used to send her a text of the postcode of the nearest bridge for her to park at.  Of course, the best commute for her was when we were moored within walking distance of Warwick which really meant anywhere from the bottom of the Hatton flight of the Grand Union along to Radford Semele.  We still have wonderful memories of those times that are always evoked when we are in the Midlands.

During Karen’s year out we realised that we wanted to continue our new way of life and decided to design our own boat and have it built up in Aintree near Liverpool.  One of the drawbacks in having a 70’ boat was that some parts of the system couldn't be reached because the locks were too short.  Ironically this included the Leeds & Liverpool canal.  I say ironic because my parents lived on its northernmost point in Gargrave, North Yorkshire and it meant we couldn’t visit them by boat so an essential part of our design was that the new one would be shorter, at 57’.

While we were having the boat built, my Dad sometimes caught a train to meet us at the builders so he could see the build process at first hand.  After the shell was built it was transported by lorry to Lostock Gralam near Northwich on the Trent & Mersey canal where the fit out would be completed. My father continued to visit but, unfortunately, had an incapacitating stroke just before the boat was launched so he has never seen it in the water. 

We entered another phase of our boating life during this period as we needed to be based up north to oversee the build.  Karen became a weekend commuter, staying in B&Bs, whilst Buddy and I would move the boat during the week until we reached Northwich.  We had a week where the two boats were moored alongside each other as we moved our belongings across, and snagging works were completed. Buddy was really confused; he would spend as much time as possible sitting on the back deck of the old boat and only venture into the new one when it was his bedtime (five o’clock, which it has been all his life and still is!).

Chalkhill Blue 2 at Bank Newton on the Leeds & Liverpool

We moved the new boat down to the Midlands as Karen was still working but, as we now had a shorter boat, we were able to visit those waterways that were out of our previous range.  The draw of the north, where most of the canals with shorter looks are, was too much and Karen stopped working.  We headed first for Liverpool and then spent the summer of 2018 on the Leeds & Liverpool canal.

During 2014 we had first met Mike & Aileen, who were also living on their narrowboat and travelling the waterways.  They were full of their plans to move to France and this planted a seed in our minds that slowly grew over the next couple of years and we decided in 2018 that we would do the same. March 2019 saw our own plans come to fruition and we were dropped into the water in Burgundy.  What a new way of life started then; we couldn’t believe how different cruising and living in France was compared with the UK.

Travelling through Paris on the Seine

We were back in the UK during winter 2019 to spend time with the family and lived in Airbnbs for a while followed by a couple of months on a narrowboat that we borrowed from Ken and Annie.  We did find this way of life a bit stressful, continuously moving our belongings from one place to another so decided to look for a flat in Reading that we could use as a base.  I know we had one in Aylesbury, but we had let that out soon after buying it as we realised it was in the wrong place to be used as a base and wouldn’t be used by us or the children. Reading, on the other hand, is ideal as four of our children live in or around the town and it’s easy to get to by the others if they need a bolthole.

We returned to France at the end of February this year to get ready for another year of travelling there.  This was a week before their lockdown started and we ended up spending three months in Châlons en Champagne.  In retrospect, we were more fortunate than most during the lockdown as we were living on a boat which is a much simpler way of life than being in bricks and mortar.  During lockdown we went ahead with the purchase of a flat in Caversham which, coincidentally, is close to Pam & Charles who also spent several years cruising on their widebeam in France before returning to dry land.

At the beginning of June, we travelled back to England to move into the flat before continuing our adventures around France.  We haven’t yet firmed up on our plans for the future but will return to France to continue cruising and probably bring the boat back to the UK at the end of next year.  At least with a home in Reading we can return every couple of months or so to be with family which, of course, now includes grandchildren 😊   

During our boating life we have met many wonderful boaters and it would be unfair to start listing names as I’m bound to miss some out. They have all helped us in many ways from advice on how to live as continuous cruisers to having a day away from their own boats by lending a hand through a lock flight or two or being our family during the lockdown. Of course, the blog has followed all these changes but, like other boaters’ blogs during lockdown, has had fewer updates as travelling has been banned across Europe.  We particularly like the approach Charles has adopted by publishing, each month, a retrospective of that month over his and Pam’s boating life.

Thanks for reading this far and we hope you continue to dip in and out as we resume our wonderful and fortunate life afloat.   Details of all our adventures can be found by clicking on the relevant waterway to the left or the dates on the right of the page.

To finish here is a picture of us with our nine amazing children taken a good few years ago at one of our traditional annual New Year curries complete with orange tee-shirts, the origin of the tee-shirts is another story in itself!