Life afloat a canal boat

Are you interested in owning a canal boat?

Life afloat a canal boat, romantic, peaceful, picturesque? It can be all those things, and then some, but for every positive like most things in life there is a negative. I’d like to share with you what I know if you are interested, the good, the bad and the ugly.

This comes from someone with over 20 years of boating experience and I’m fully aware that my experiences are personal to me, as are my thoughts and feelings on the matter. I am no expert and what I write is what I believe to be true at the time of writing. Stay with me whilst I take you on my journey, my dealings, my ups and downs with boating, I do hope you are sitting comfortably with a cuppa.

Firstly, don’t for one minute think boating is a ‘cheap’ option, to say a house. A boat is like most vehicles; they can be a money pit and no matter how grand the boat, they do not make money, not in the sense that a house can. More like a brand-new car, once out of the showroom, they depreciate.

There are two options when boating:

One is continuous cruising – this is where a boat is always on the move and making “reasonable progress” between successive moorings, meaning you cannot simply go from one stretch of the canal/river to another and back. The ‘CRT’, Canal and River Trust will find you! Temporary moorings are a length of canal or riverbank that’s been set aside for mooring periods of less than 14 days. They tend to be at popular locations and time limits are designed to allow as many different boaters as possible to enjoy the use of the mooring during a cruise.

The second option is to have a ‘mooring’, like renting a space in a marina or at the canal side. These can be run privately or by the CRT. Prices vary dramatically between locations and there is often a ‘bidding’ war. When we were looking to moor our latest boat, a wide beam, moorings where so difficult to find in this area when we found a private mooring we were paying in full for 3 years before we even had a boat! Afterall, there is no point having a boat if you can’t keep it somewhere safe! As a rule, you can expect to pay between £20 and £70 per foot of boat per year, but like I said, depending on the location and where the bids end up you could pay an awful lot more. If you use a boat of 57 foot, that is a yearly cost of up to £3,990 per annum, or £332.50 per calendar month, if you are a wide beam boat you can expect to pay a further 10% on top of that. In addition, you have the price of your boat if you have it on finance, your ‘river licence’ which has many variables but ours is over £1200 a year, then insurance, boat safety certificate (every four years) and don’t get me started on maintenance!

Go on then, get me started on maintenance! Engine – they need regular oil changes, filter changes, just like any other engine. You need batteries, a starter battery and a bank of domestic batteries, in 9 years we have spent a fortune on them, some batteries you must maintain by topping them up with deionised water, others, more expensive, are sealed and don’t require the same level of looking after. The good batteries cost £1300 EACH and we have 5 in total.

Other things to look out for are water leaks, they are a nightmare on a boat, we have had to rip out 3 full rooms in the nine years we have had a boat due to leaks, from windows not being properly tightened, water pump leaks and even the inlet for the water wasn’t sealed and leaked over time to cause damp everywhere! Always have anything water related fully accessible!

Other financial considerations, how do you get power to your boat? Some moorings offer electricity, like with a caravan you plug into the system and pay for the use, I’m not aware of the prices for electricity as we generate our own. How do we do that you might ask? We have four solar panels, they feed the batteries then our inverter converts the 12V into 240V so we can run things like a washing machine etc. The bigger (and more expensive) the inverter, the higher the wattage of appliances you can have, but if like me, when we first bought a new shiny, all singing all dancing narrowboat – back in the days where we (my hubby and I) where earning good money, I wanted to fill the boat with equally all singing and all dancing kitchen appliances – let me introduce you to my beautiful, transparent, light up kettle! It WAS a sight to behold, changing colour as the water came to the boil – but so too did the inverter! It blew every single fuse in a £2,500 inverter!! I now have a £8 gas hob kettle!!! And a new inverter lol.

With the electric – unless you are ‘plugged’ into the mains on a site, generating your own really makes you conserve it, so no hairdryers, tongs or straighteners as they drain the power (and can blow up a smaller inverter!). The same goes for water, because you must regularly fill up (and find somewhere to do that), you think more about leaving taps running taking a shower versus a bath etc. In addition to this you need to consider the environmental impact of the products you use in your daily cleansing routine as the wastewater goes directly out into the water! Once again, environmentally friendly products are more expensive often than regular items.

As part of the maintenance, you will need to have your boat out of water regularly for ‘blacking’ to prevent the steel from degrading. Depending on the product, the size of the boat and if you do it yourself or not can cost anything upwards of £10,000. Again, depending on product this will need to be done every 3 or 10 years.

Furthermore, not for those with delicate stomachs, a major consideration when looking to buy a boat is the toilet facilities, with such an array to choose from, chemical toilet cassettes, composting, pump-out. Each have their merit, and it is personal choice. We went for cassettes, we have 3 cassettes to one porcelain toilet, so we can take out the cassettes and empty them in a ‘Elsen’ at designated sites. If you go for a pump-out, you have a large tank somewhere on your boat and you carry around your excrement for months – the smell can be overpowering but you can at least have a flushable toilet as you would get at home. The trouble with pump out toilets is that there aren’t that many sites to empty and there is a cost to it! However, a friend of mine once hired a boat to experience before they buy, his first task was to empty the full tank (full of someone else’s excrement) sadly for him he hadn’t connected it correctly and ended up getting showered in it!!

A further expense that boaters and caravaners alike will appreciate is that the smaller the item, the more it costs. So, anything you need for your boat, because it’s best to have 12V are way more expensive than household items. An example for me would be our fridge/freezer, it’s a standard tall regular integrated kitchen size but they cost at least £1800 and I’m on my 3^rd in 9 years.

Of course, if we didn’t like the lifestyle we wouldn’t put up with all that! The upside of owning a boat is your garden can be anywhere you want it, if you don’t like the neighbours, move! The scenery when you are travelling is, or can be, spectacular, even through cities such as Leeds, and it’s surprising how well you think you know somewhere but from the boat you have no idea where you are.

Canal boating isn’t for the adrenaline junkies either, at a maximum speed of 6 MPH, and that’s on tidal rivers, you can’t rush things. The speed on the canal is 4 MPH but at least you get to see the wildlife, Kingfishers, Heron, mink, sadly I’ve never seen an otter in the wilderness, yet! In addition to all that there are the more common scenes like farm animals and deer and not forgetting fish! Just being in and around nature is good for us.

Navigating the boat itself I find easy with a tiller arm – the long stick at the back – but I’m totally hopeless with boats with a steering wheel! There are countless lochs, from the manual ones which are so hard to open the gates and require a ‘windlass’ to operate them (I get my husband to do these whilst I move the boat!), to the electric ones which are operated using a key and often involves a series of pressing buttons, but the sequence and instructions are written on the site. Also, there are bridges, swing, lift, guillotine and various others, again some are manual, and some are electric using a key.

You cannot be in a rush to get anywhere by canal boat; often there are stoppages, for maintenance or the rivers are in flood or in drought, or you are in a queue to get up a series of lochs like at Bingley Five Rise. To get from Leeds Armouries to Rodley can take us all day, which is a 13 mile stretch of canal, the added time is due to the number of lochs!

Like with the roads there are books you can buy that are a map of the canals. They tell you what’s available at different places; pub stops, shops and amenities as well as where the lochs and bridges are. They also have key information and telephone numbers. Those of you that prefer modern technology you can also download apps that give you the same information.

Some of our navigable rivers are tidal, you must plan these in advance; rivers such as the Ooze and the Trent. A loch keeper will let you in and out of these at prebooked times. The tidal rivers move way faster than the 6MPH permitted and the vastness of them can be very daunting. You must wear a life vest too.

To conclude, in general other boaters are very helpful and the Canal and River Trust is a phone call away if you get stuck anywhere. The calmness and the closeness to nature cannot be underestimated, that is fabulous!  It can be physically challenging, not only in maintenance, getting the coal/wood in, filling up with diesel and water. Carrying your shopping, often a long way down the towpath. Walking the gunnels to get the ropes, holding your boat!

A word of advice, do not take your boat out in the wind, no matter what the boat and what gadget you have (bow thruster) your boat acts as a sail and will take you where you don’t want to go!

Lots of considerations, but for a holiday, they offer a brilliant experience! It’s not for everyone, but it is for me, and I wouldn’t change it.