Boat life 1: baptism of fire

In 2013 my husband started his journey in medical school. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. Hubby, Craig, is sight impaired. He scored highly in his biomed degree, saved lives volunteering for an ambulance service, and had to perform extra exams to enter the specific school to show he was capable of performing procedures with the proper tools despite his sight. The university (which will not be named here) wasn’t able to adjust a few things such as have lectures online before the lecture started so he could follow on his ipad, or print handouts off in large print. Long story short we managed to sue the university for discrimination and got a decent settlement out of it. The money sat in our account for a couple years while we tried to figure out what to do with it.

We looked into buying a house. We really liked where we lived in South London, but we couldn’t afford anything we wanted to grow into. Craig found a site that showed different ways of alternative living including living in a van, a converted shipping container, an RV, and a boat. He sent it to me as a joke. Curious, I did some research to see what these type of lives were actually like. I mostly looked at RVs and boats. Boats won. The more I found out about them the more it sounded like us.

We did a ton of research to find moorings in or near London (we weren’t ready to jump from a house straight into continuous cruising). We priced a ton of boats all over the country and looked at marine mortgages. You’d be surprised how much boats actually cost if you want one that is purpose-built to live in and gives you enough space to home 2 dogs and has a potential for children. Harder than finding a boat we liked was finding marine mortgages. All the banks that used to offer them no longer did. At long last we did find one (that has now gone under in the pandemic). We were lucky enough to get on a 15-year mortgage for the perfect boat for us.

We found Great Escape on a website specifically for buying or renting boats. She was up in Yorkshire. We used the Easter holidays to cruise (not sail) her down. If only it was that simple. We left 2 weeks available. After much calling around and pricing we discovered that our boat was too wide at 12.5ft to cruise from Yorkshire down to London area. There’s a point around Nottingham where it gets too narrow for anything wider than narrow boats. Meaning we’d have to cruise our boat somewhere to use a crane to lift her out, hire a separate service to use a lorry to drive her South, then another location’s crane to lower her back into the water. I had to call around because these companies don’t communicate with each other. And the charges were hugely varied. Gillingham marina charged about £400 for a crane use where as Reading charged about £1000.

Original Plan:

Cruise GE to Hull - lorry from Hull to Gillingham - Cruise from Gillingham to marina in Gravesend

Day 1 problems:

- lots of bumping walls but no boats

- nearly hit boats at a lock where we learned never to let strangers untie you from your mooring

got stuck on a sandbar for 2 hours until a kind narrow boater pulled us off with his engine and a rope

Day 2

engine started smoking and stopped working in the middle of a river. I desperately grabbed onto a tree branch to anchor until help arrived in the form of a small tugboat by pure luck

Tugboat pulled us to next lock 40 min. away to get back on canal system. There we used ropes to pull us safely to land.

Signed up for RCR: River Canal Rescue (like AA for boats)

Day 3

Engineer found problem with raw water filter and engine cooling system

cruised for 3 hours before oil spurted everywhere in the engine room and forced us to moor up and call RCR again

Day 4

Car mechanic was sent to fix our boat engine and had to use his phone to show his superiors what it looked like because he had no idea what he was looking at. Only thing he did was drive Craig to a local shop to buy oil. We called up the first engineer who wonderfully came to help us. We continued on to Goole.

Day 5

- 1st engineer met us in Goole to give us a part that we needed that he fashioned out of raw materials

Unfortunately the lock gate broke in Hull before we got there so after some frantic calling around we found the crane in Newark financially reasonable and North of the narrow part of the canals. Also unfortunately it would take much longer to cruise the boat down to Newark than we had left time for. I left Craig with the boat to drive back to London to pack up our rented house that we had to vacate in 3 weeks.

We wouldn’t have managed without friends. A friend of ours had just returned from Japan and wasn’t working yet so he agreed to help Craig cruise to Newark. We paid his transport and probably food as well. Meanwhile some very good friends helped me take multiple belongings to a storage unit to stay until we could move them to the boat. We had to downsize massively from a 3 bedroom house to a 2 bed boat. The only piece of furniture we could take was the bed. Everything else had to go. It was too late to wait around for things to sell. I managed to sell a few items before, but I couldn’t wait anymore. Some things I gave away for free, but I made many trips to the local recycling unit. A few items the employees there kept for themselves. While Craig was cruising I had to clean the house out, paint over any smudges that had happened in 5 years of living there, and fill in all the holes from whatever we hung. It was so incredibly stressful. Our stuff (including our 2 dogs) was at 4 different locations between the storage unit, 2 different friends’ houses, and my boss’ house.

On a weekend I went to collect Craig from Newark (friend had taken a train back home once they’d finished cruising) and go to Gillingham. Now we just had to cruise from Gillingham up the River Medway touching the ocean and into the River Thames to Gravesend. Gillingham marina wasn’t built for boats our size and it was pretty full. It wasn’t very good weather for going out onto a tidal river. It was “wind across tide” at a force 5. The next day looked better, but we weren’t allowed to put it off by a day because the marina needed the space.

Out we went into the river. I was terrified when those giant lock gates opened. But once we got going it was smooth and beautiful. We saw a deserted island that had a dilapidated fort from WW2, but was just used for a radio tower now. Of course we hit trouble. The tributary is where the Medway, meets the ocean (English Channel), and meets the Thames. The water was crashing into each other and rocked our boat quite a bit. I learned quickly to point into the oncoming waves so we didn’t rock sideways. We made it past the worst of the waves when our engine died. We couldn’t start it back up even after various checks of what Craig had learned thus far about the engine. We were adrift in the ocean not far from the shipping lane where actual ships that could demolish our tiny new home traveled. We put the anchor down and radioed for help.

After waiting for maybe a couple of hours an RNLI boat from the island of Sheppey came to rescue us. We were equidistant from our marina and their base. Rather than haul us the rest of the way to our marina they hauled us back to Sheppey. There was a small dock there that charged visiting boats £30 a day to moor. Our savings account was getting smaller and smaller as we hoped to solve the problem soon. I took a train to Gillingham to retrieve my car and drive it over to the boat. The weekend over I left Craig on the boat and went to stay at a friend’s house with our dogs to start the work week. Each day nothing happened to help our poor boat. No one could figure out what the problem was. We managed to get the engine running only for it to die again after 5 min. A local sailboat pulled us back then demanded we owed him £20 for the fuel. Sheppey was quickly becoming one of my least favorite places. A tugboat offered to pull us, for a price of course, but after 10 min of cruising was advised he legally wasn’t allowed to tug us that far, so back to the dock we went. The people finally took pity on us and charged us a reduced rate since we were trying so desperately to leave. In the end we had to fork out a few hundred pounds to an official tugboat to tug our boat into Gravesend marina where I swore I wanted to stay for the foreseeable future. Thus we had our baptism of fire into boat life.