Living Afloat Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be

We were boating, and then we weren’t, and now we are again, this time, we hope, for the rest of the year.

Last week we began our cruise under difficult circumstances. Cynthia, for the first time in many years, visited a conventional general practitioner in Leiden to try to resolve an ongoing and painful infection.

The solution was to put her on a course of antibiotics. Cynthia’s body reacted instantly and violently to the unaccustomed medicine. Within hours, an unsightly rash covered her entire body, every bone ached, and she felt physically sick.

Abandoning our cruising plans, we raced 20km back to Leiden in Julisa, swapped boat for motorhome, and then drove 130km south east to Eindhoven close to the Belgian border. The clinic, Essaidi, was recommended by the cancer clinic in Germany where Cynthia spend a month in April.

On Tuesday, she had an hour’s treatment of aqua tilis. It’s a revolutionary treatment done nowhere else in the world. We booked her on for four more sessions later in the week, returned to Leiden to swap some essential stuff from the boat to the Hymer to allow us to stay away for a few days, then returned to Eindhoven.

With the thermometer hitting thirty four degrees centigrade, we were lucky to find a parking spot on the clinic grounds in a grove of lofty cedar. The downside was that, with the Hymer’s solar panel completely hidden from the sun, we had to conserve our electricity on one of the best electricity generation days of the year.

Hiding from the sun near the Belgian border

Cynthia felt a little better after the treatment, but she has been warned that the allergy may take three weeks to disappear. Aching bones combined with the rigours of having to move our belongings back from the Hymer to the boat again yesterday has just about finished her off.

Moored on our own private island

She can’t help being bed ridden, but her absence yesterday caused a few logistical problems.

I still haven’t mastered single handed boating in a cruiser with an immaculately painted white hull. In a

A network of lakes for us to explore

narrowboat, it’s simple. You step off your rear deck, centre line in hand, and pull your steel tube towards the towpath. Even though the centre line is attached to the middle of the boat, either the bow or the stern usually reaches the bank first but, if you’re like most narrowboat owners, you don’t care. Your black painted hull is bomb proof. The thick steel is further strengthened by raised rubbing strakes. You’re not going to do any damage, but even if you do, a scuff doesn’t stand out against the black.

As I’ve now learned, a cruiser with its canopy acting like a sail, pushing the boat ahead of it thanks to a following wind, is an unwieldy beast.

Mooring on my own is further complicated by the door we had fitted for the dogs on the boat’s port side. Because that’s the only side the dogs can get off, we have to moor port side to the bank regardless of what either the current or the wind is doing.

This is a very long winded way of saying that I’m now mourning the loss of my once pristine paintwork. I’m sure that there will be plenty more scrapes and scuffs before the season ends, but the first cut is the deepest.

The saving grace is our location.

We’re moored on the Oude Kooi, the Old Cage, an island on a network of lakes 7km north east of our Leiden base. I think the island belongs to an exclusive Dutch boating club, but as the signs on the island’s manicured moorings are all written in an incomprehensible language, I’m not entirely sure.

We arrived last night. It’s delightfully peaceful after the Leiden city centre location we’ve become accustomed to over the last month or so. A pair of buzzards breed on the island, there are kingfishers galore, but very few mosquitoes thanks to a large colony of bats introduced to keep the bugs away.

That’s just about it for this week because I’ve been working on other narrowboat content. As I mentioned last week, I’m in the process of developing an interactive and very comprehensive course for aspiring narrowboat owners.

There’s now a huge amount of information on this site. Perhaps too much for anyone new to boating. Where do they start? How do they work through content without missing important information? How do they make sure that they remember important information in posts they’ve read?

The new course will be a mix of written articles, audio and video files, and interactive quizzes and surveys. One of the course’s first sections takes a look at the possible downside to living afloat.

I published an article on the site in 2012 by live aboard boater Pauline Roberts. Her rant about the lifestyle produced an avalanche of comments from other live aboard boaters. Pauline raised some excellent points. Life afloat isn’t all about sipping wine from an easy chair on a sun drenched canal bank. There are many issues to consider.

Pauline’s original article is here. If you haven’t seen it already, please read it and the comments made by other boaters at the time. My own comments are below, so don’t forget to come back here when you’ve finished with Pauline.

Pauline may well enjoy her life afloat, but she doesn’t really give that impression, does she? To balance her point of view, I’ve addressed the issues she’s raised below. So that you can easily switch between Pauline’s article and my comments, my comments refer to the numbering on Pauline’s paragraphs (If you’re reading this on the web site rather than in the course itself, there aren’t any number on Pauline’s paragraphs, so you’ll just have to count them yourself).

2. Cold Boats While I agree that a narrowboat’s floor can be cold in the winter, I’ve never had to resort to wearing thick leather boots in the boat. The bottom of a narrowboat is anywhere between 5mm and 15mm thick. Steel bearers sit on top of the base plate. Marine ply is fitted on top of the bearers to form the boat’s floor. The floor is usually no more than 10cm above the icy canal beneath. Because heat rises, the heat from your stove moves away from the cold well close to the floor. Unless your narrowboat floor is insulated (most aren’t) this area will be decidedly chilly in the winter months. My very effective solution is to wear Croc shoes as indoor slippers, and to always sit with my feet raised on our bench seating. No cold feet!

The number of clothing layers you need in the winter will depend on how well insulated your boat is. Mine was an old boat built using polystyrene insulation, which is generally considered the poorest of the insulators used on boats. Most narrowboats these days are insulated using spray foam. It’s not unusual to walk along a towpath on a cold winter’s day to see narrowboats with their front doors open to let the heat out. A friend of mine, Russ, used to sit in his boat in the winter with the front doors open wearing just a pair of boxer shorts. It wasn’t a pretty sight!

3. Cold Spots Again, I agree, but the cold spots can be reduced or even eliminated. When I first moved on board, my bedroom at the back of the boat was freezing, literally. As I mentioned in my introduction, my first winter on board, which I think is when Pauline wrote this article, the weather was the coldest on record. On a number of occasions I woke to frost on the bulkhead behind my head. My freezing bedroom was cause not only by the cold weather outside, but by the boat’s poor insulation, and inadequate heating.

My boat had a wooden top, which had perished in a number of places. I over plated the wooden cabin with steel, added more insulation between the old and the new cabins, and added a secondary heating system, a Webasto Thermotop C, to supplement my solid fuel stove at the front of the boat. My first winter was my last cold winter on board.

Draughts around hatches are due to poor fitting. The hatches can be modified to eliminate any draughts.

4. Toilets It’s true that living afloat you have a  much more intimate relationship with the processed remains of last night’s dinner, but it doesn’t have to be a problem. Watching the weather is important when you live afloat, as is making sure that you pick somewhere which can service all your needs if the weather closes in. Cassette toilets, or Porta Pottis, need emptying every two or three days. There are a number of other options open to you, all of which are discussed in detail in the toilets section.

5. Dog Muck You’ll find it everywhere, not just on canal towpaths. The solution is simply to keep your eyes open. I always carry a small coal shovel on board. Regardless of the culprit, when I arrive at a mooring, before I do anything else, I search the area thoroughly for unwanted piles of poo, scoop them up and flick them under the towpath hedge. The whole process takes just a couple of minutes. After that, I can relax on a clean and fragrant mooring without having to worry about unnecessary shoe or boat floor cleaning. It’s common sense really.

6. Water Forward planning Pauline, forward planning! If you need a residential mooring for school or work purposes, choose one which has a water supply. A mooring without a water supply can be a real pain in the backside. I spoke to a live aboard boater Jane Fletcher recently about her ‘idyllic’ farm mooring. The site was wonderful, miles from the nearest busy road, away from airport flight paths or railway lines, and in a very pretty part of rural Leicestershire. The two major problems were that the mooring had neither electricity nor water. Jane had to work for a living. Sometimes after a long day at the office, she had to return to the boat and endure an hour’s cruise to fill her water tank. All well and good on a balmy summer evening, but not so much fun in the dark on a cold winter night.

Pauline claimed that her tank took an hour to fill. She must have had a large tank which she allowed to practically run dry. Little and often is the key, especially if the forecast is for freezing nights and sub zero days. Again, I think that Pauline wrote her article following the awful winter of 2010. While she was melting snow for water, I had a plentiful supply available from a tap close to my boat. Yes, the tap froze solid once or twice, but a kettle or two of boiling water soon sorted that out.

Living afloat isn’t as easy as living in a bricks and mortar home, but it is not as difficult as Pauline would have you believe.

7. Personal Hygiene Poppycock! There’s no need to go without when you live on a boat. My boat’s tank was tiny compared to most. Most narrowboats’ water tanks hold 700-1,000 litres. I had 350 litres to play with. Even so, if I was on my own, I could comfortably make that last a month. That’s an average of just ten litres a day. which was plenty to accommodate all my hygiene needs. I used a seven litre Hozelock portable shower which was wonderful. A very thorough shower would use just five litres. There is absolutely no need to ration yourself to half a kettle for washing yourself. What a ridiculous notion.

Taking of ridiculous, there’s absolutely no need to have discoloured hands. Yes, coal burning stoves produce a little soot. Daily dusting sorts that problem out. Going down the engine ‘ole? (referred by most normal boaters as an engine bay) Wear a pair of disposable gloves and some overalls. Pauline make the operation sound like a full day in a coal mine!

8. Space Living space can be an issue, but surely you don’t move on to a narrowboat if you aren’t comfortable with small spaces? You will have to downsize and dispose of most of your material possessions. So what? You don’t need it.

Making up a folding bed every day simply isn’t necessary unless you have a very small boat. Personally, the last thing I would want to do at the end of the day is mess about making a bed. I had a 4′ wide 6’4″ long small double bed, permanently made up and fixed in place. The more you want on your boat, the longer or, heaven forbid, wider it has to be. Life afloat is all about compromise, but, for me, a fixed bed was a must.

9. Privacy If you moor in busy locations, especially locations popular with tourists, you have to accept a little unwanted attention. If you don’t want it, move or, if you want a really radical solution, close your curtains on the towpath side. That’ll stop them!

10. Postal Address Having your post delivered can be a problem. You can eliminate much of your post by going digital. Opening bank accounts can be a problem, so you can either do as much as you can before you move afloat, or try to persuade friends or family to receive your post for you. Make sure that they are aware that benefits can be affected if someone else appears to be living with them though.

11. Emergency Services Forward planning again. If you’re going to pick a mooring miles from anywhere, for God’s sake, know where you are! Pauline’s talking about boaters on static online moorings, so I assume that the moorers in question have been there for a while. Locations on the canal network are easy to pinpoint by bridge numbers or names. Rather than a vague ‘moored beside a field near a farmhouse close to Fenny Compton’, which isn’t going to help any emergency services operator, something like ‘I’m moored 400m south of bridge 37 on the Grand Union canal in a red boat with a blue roof and the name James No 194 on the side’ is going to be much more helpful. You will of course have checked that you have a phone signal, or an internet signal through which you can make WiFi calls, before you choose your mooring.

12. Signals All true, but not as bad as Pauline would have you believe. I always used a mobile dongle from Three. Using their earlier versions, I had to mount the dongle inside a plastic bag on a four feet long wooden pole fixed to my boat roof. The signal strength was boosted in later models, so all I had to do was use a magnetic clamp fitted with double sided adhesive tape to keep it glued to my ‘office’ window. During thousands of miles of network cruising, the device only failed me twice; one when moored at the Crick Boat Show next to dozens of other boaters who were trying to lock onto the same signal, and once when I moored in a deep cutting on the Shropshire Union canal.

Carrier signal strength varies tremendously on the cut. I had a  phone contact with Three. I terminated my contract after two years of constant frustration. EE’s service was much better, especially as I could make calls via WiFi if I had an internet connection but no phone signal. I made many of my calls via Skype.

As far as television is concerned, reception can be hit and miss, but what’s the problem? I see many boat owners who moor at idyllic locations but only leave the safety of their boats long enough to align their satellite dishes. Forget the telly. You’ve escaped society, so don’t keep tuning into depressing news to remind yourself of it. Pull the plug on the evil eye and go for a walk instead.

13. Vandalism and Antisocial Behaviour I’m sure that you know an area near you which isn’t pretty and where you wouldn’t like to walk alone at night. The canal network is the same. There are rough areas, even a few place which could almost be classed as ‘no go’ but they’re easy enough to find out about and stay away from.

There’s no argument, rural canal towpaths, devoid of street lighting, are often pitch black at night. That’s why you always have a torch or two and spare batteries on board. Are you likely to be attacked as soon as you step outside your boat, or have everything you own stolen if you leave it unattended for a moment? No, of course not. However, the same rules apply on the canals as off them. You do what’s sensible. You take precautions. If an area is renowned for anti social behaviour, stay away. If you have to use the canal to move your boat from A to B, start your journey at the crack of dawn before those with single digit IQs have surfaced from drink and drug induced unconsciousness.

14. Shopping For Christ’s sake Pauline, stop moaning! Tesco is actually very good at delivering to boaters. When you place an order with them online, there’s a comments section to allow you to give the driver instructions. He’s not going to deliver to you unless he can park reasonably close to you, but unless your boat has a broken engine, you can always move to somewhere where he can park his van.

Supermarkets aren’t always close to the canal you’re on, but they’re usually close enough. Try to remain positive. Living afloat can be a very healthy lifestyle. I treated shopping as welcome exercise. My supermarket shopping was usually done with my 70l rucksack, which always included an unhealthy treat as a reward for carrying my weekly shopping home.

If you don’t like to walk, get a bike, a car, or a taxi. It’s not a problem as long as you have a ‘glass half full’ attitude.

15. Towpaths Motorbikes roaring down towpaths is back to anti social behaviour again. Yes, it happens in some urban areas, but not as much as some would have you believe. Find out where the problem areas are and stay away from them, especially if you need to stay on a residential mooring long term.

Towpaths can make boating miserable in the winter months. For me, it has always been one of the most unpleasant aspects of living afloat, especially with dogs on board. Wellington boots are my default winter footwear. I don’t have to worry about wiping them down. It’s just a case of swapping them for my indoor footwear. Dog paws need wiping though, which is a bit of a pain if you need to take them for a middle of the night loo break.

Having a boat with a cratch cover, a waterproof cover over the front deck, is an enormous help. You have somewhere protected from the weather to deal with dog cleaning and footwear swapping. Try as I might though, I struggled to keep my front deck mud free during the winter months.

16. Car Ownership Once again, if you have to have a car for work purposes, make sure you have somewhere safe to park it before you take on a mooring. If you are lucky enough to be able to cruise continuously, you can do without. If you plan ahead, you can usually moor your boat close enough to the places you want to visit, or close enough to public transport. And if you really must have a car for a special occasion, Enterprise is a great company to use. Their rates are reasonable, and  they’ll often come to your boat to collect you.

17. Boat Maintenance and the Weed Hatch UK Canals are shallow, very shallow. Cruising in water just thirty inches deep isn’t unusual. The boat’s flat bottom drags along the canal bottom, then flicks whatever it’s disturbed into the propeller. Debris in urban canals is common. Cruise along an inner city canal, and you can usually expect a few stops to remove the offending articles. You’ll find an in depth explanation of weed hatch procedure later on.

Getting a mooring line wrapped around the propeller is a schoolboy error, an error which I’ve made just once. I was lucky. My punishment was an hour with my right arm up to my shoulder in ice cold water trying to remove several yards of iron bar taut rope from the propeller. I was lucky because a mooring line around the prop can sometimes cause extensive damage to the engine.

Reasonably new batteries not holding a charge are often the result of a poor charging regime, a regime made difficult if the boat doesn’t have a battery monitor. With care, lead acid batteries will still only last about three years. Batteries are a consumable and must be included on your budget.

Weeks of scrounging water because of a broken water pump Pauline? Nearly all boatyards and marinas stock water pumps. You could have had it replaced on the day it broke.

You only run your fridge in warm weather when you are travelling? You clearly don’t have an adequate electrical system (as is indicated by the exhausted battery bank). There is no need to make life so difficult for yourself. A little research is all it takes.

As for the friend who thought that he could do without a weed hatch, I think that’s called natural selection. Cruising without a weed hatch in place is pure stupidity. The weed hatch sits directly above the boat’s propeller. If the weed hatch is removed while the boat is moving, canal water from the spinning propeller is pushed through the weed hatch into the engine bay which, as you’ve just read, sinks the boat.

Damp can be an issue, but you can do an awful lot to reduce and eliminate it by both heating and ventilating the cabin correctly. Even then, storing books in the bilge is just asking for trouble.

18. Wildlife on Board The wildest life I’ve ever had on board was a one tonne bullock trying to climb into my engine room to snack on a basket of flowers I had removed from my front deck. Apart from that, no snakes, rats or mice. Interesting to note that Pauline said she wouldn’t be able to find the snake in all the clutter on board her boat. Keeping a boat clean and in a good state of repair helps keep vermin away. It’s a shame the same tactic doesn’t work with cows.

19. Boating Costs As far as I’m concerned, if you want to live to a reasonable standard, living on a narrowboat costs no less than living in a modest three bedroom semi detached house. The cost of diesel isn’t as big an issue as Pauline suggests. Most narrowboats use between 1.0 and 1.5 litres and hour. In 2015, five years after Pauline wrote her article, I cruised the network extensively. I covered nearly 2,000 miles, including 950 locks. I really cruised too fast and too far. I should have slowed down to appreciate the many wonderful places I flashed by each day. Even so, I only spent £1,138 on diesel, an average of £21.90 a week, which worked out at £1.13 for each hour I stood at the tiller moving my floating home around the system. That’s not a bad price to pay, is it?

You can find out all the actual costs of living afloat here.

20. Falling In Going for an unscheduled dip isn’t the problem, it’s what you hit on the way, and how you manage to get out which counts. I like to think that I’m pretty fit and healthy, but that wouldn’t help me if I injured myself as I fell or, worse, knocked myself unconscious on the way in. I’ve seen both happen.

Even if you don’t damage yourself entering the canal or river you fall in, you have to consider how you would get out. A narrowboat is very difficult to climb back onto without the aid of a crew member and a ladder.

Most slips and falls are caused by carelessness. I’ve fallen in four times in the last six years, but three of them were when I was working at the marina. The only time I fell in out of work was when I foolishly walked along a pier while I read my emails on my phone. It was a silly thing to do, and it cost me the price of a new smartphone.

Steel boats, water, ice and moss and lichen covered locks are a potentially lethal combination. Take care though, and your boating career should be a happy one.

That’s my response to the valid points which Pauline raised. You can subscribe to her point of view, shelve your boating plans and remain in the dubious safety of your bricks and mortar home, or you can use Pauline’s text, my response, and the comments of time served live aboard boaters to educate yourself and ensure that you avoid making many fundamental mistakes.

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Misty Summer Mornings on the Dutch Canals

The solar system comedy of errors continued this week, although most of the errors turned out to be mine, and I didn’t find the comedy very funny at all.

On James, my narrowboat, I had a 3 x 100w solar array fitted by Tim David of Onboard Solar. Tim’s work, and the system he fitted, was first class. The three bracket mounted solar panels produced enough electricity to allow me to stay for days, weeks even, on a mooring during the summer months without ever having to run my engine to charge my bank of four 160ah AGM batteries.

The system was perfect for my live aboard lifestyle.

I didn’t do a power audit before putting my narrowboat electrical system together, so I was lucky that everything worked so well. I had my MacBook plugged in and charging all day and night, watched television for a couple of hours in the evening, used a vacuum cleaner for fifteen minutes a day, a low power twin tub washing machine twice a week, and used a variety of chargers for Kindles, phones and a few other electronic devices. I also had my 12v fridge on all day, every day.

The solar array generated more power than I could reasonably use during the summer months. During the winter months, I had to run my engine for an hour most days, sometimes for two, to keep my battery bank at 100%.

When we considering buying Julisa, we knew that we would want to make alterations and improvements. Julisa’s previous owner, Piet, used Jos van Galen in Leiden for servicing and repairs, so we asked Jos to quote for a number of improvements, including the installation of a solar array.

Jos emailed a quote with a very detailed breakdown. Unfortunately, the quote was in Dutch. I used Google translate to convert it to English, and was delighted to discover that he had quoted for a 400w solar array. Four hundred watts, more powerful than my narrowboat setup), coupled with our new bank of four 130ah AGM batteries, would give us all the power we needed.

Due to Google translate, and my own skewed interpretation of the quote, I cocked up.

The installed array is not more powerful than the one I had on James. In fact, it has a fraction of the capacity I was expecting. There’s a huge difference between the 400W I thought I was being quoted for, and the actual 400WHD on the paperwork.

From the research that I’ve done in the last week after being at a loss to understand why my installed solar panels weren’t working, I now understand a little more about the electrical wizardry.

In a perfect world, a 400W system would produce four hundred useable watts all day long. The world in general, and England’s weather in particular, is far from perfect. The sun doesn’t shine all of the time. Let’s face it, in many parts of England, it rarely shines at all.

Because of the cooler, cloudier climate, which is quite similar to the climate here in the Netherlands, solar panel manufacturers and distributors use a simple formula to calculate a solar system’s realistic output. For summer output, the number of watts is multiplied by six, the average hours of sunshine in an English day. During the winter, formula is based on a very dismal one hour’s sunshine.

A boat is lifted over our Leiden mooring

Using this formula, a four hundred watt system would be expected to produce 400 x 6 = 2,400 watts. The output is sometimes be referred to as 2,400WHD (Watt Hour Day). My system, I can see now, was clearly quoted by Jos as 400WHD, and not 400W as I thought.

The reality is that I have a dismal 67W system compared with the 300W system on James. I have 400WHD compared to my narrowboat’s 1,800WHD.

The system still wasn’t working correctly until the beginning of this week. Jos discovered that the wiring wasn’t quite right. After swapping a couple of wires, the system limped rather than burst into life.

The solar panels aren’t a dead loss. At midday, when the summer sun is blazing from a clear sky, baking the earth and our solar panels beneath, the system can just about keep up with our two fridges. I think the panels could provide adequate power for the boat if we just had a single fridge, but we need two, so there’s no point complaining.

If I knew what I was doing in the first place, could I have done better? I don’t think I could. Julisa is a small and beautiful boat. The solar panels we’ve fitted suit the boat. Larger capacity freestanding panels simply wouldn’t fit. Even if they did, they would look completely out of place.

This is one of the very few occasions I favor form over function.

Fortunately, we’ll only be using the boat during the late spring and summer when the solar panels are most efficient. And we have the engine too.

Thanks to our new Victron battery monitor, I can assess the alternator’s input at different engine speeds. At 1,800rpm, our normal cruising speed, the alternator produces 500W. We think we’ll be cruising an average of two hours a day, so that’s another 1,000 WHD to add to our input. That should keep us fully topped up.

A typical Leiden canal walk – Great for taking my mind off solar panels

The only other outstanding job after the solar array wiring was tweaked, was to fit Cynthia’s new Piraat dinghy to Julisa’s new extended davits. The dinghy matches Julisa very well indeed. The Piraat was all Cynthia’s idea. The only contribution I made to the proceedings was to mutter the occasional “What a waste of money!”, “It’ll never fit on Julisa!”, and “I don’t expect that we’ll ever use it!”. As you can tell, I probably wasn’t as supportive as I should have been.

I think I’m wrong on the first count and, as the photo shows, I was definitely wrong on the second count. I’ll probably be wrong on all three counts if, as I suspect, I use the dinghy regularly and enthusiastically.

Securing the Pirate in place

I dipped my toe in the deep and murky waters of dinghy rowing on a balmy midweek evening after most of the canal’s powerful dayboat owners had returned to suburbia. I’m not very good at rowing. I rowed on small English boating ponds briefly and more years ago than I care to remember. I don’t know how much I learned at the time, but after a couple of minutes quaking in the bottom of the violently rocking and frighteningly unstable Piraat, I realised that I had forgotten everything.

The first painful lesson was not to stand in the tiny boat at all if possible, unless I want to embrace the steel swim ladder again with my teeth. For the rest of the evening I looked like a downmarket version of Mick Jagger, all big lips and wrinkled skin. At least the big lips will subside in time.

The most unnatural rowing style in the world?

Have you rowed before in a tiny boat with oversized oars? A lazy flick of my wrist with an oar anywhere near the water was enough to set the boat spinning like a top, much to the chagrin of the first houseboat I careered into. I couldn’t understand his Dutch, but his sign language indicated that he wasn’t too keen on me rowing through his garden.

I spent half an hour on the canal, most of it dodging moored boats and trying to replace our cheap pine oars in the loose fitting and even cheaper rowlocks. I might possibly have looked a little more professional if I had remembered to take the price tags off the oars before I set off.

Despite my inability to row the boat in anything like a straight line – whoever decided that rowing a boat should be done while facing away from the direction of travel had a real sense of adventure – I enjoyed myself tremendously. I hope to hone my rowing skills considerably over the coming months.

To complete the Piraat installation, we needed a cover to protect the woodwork and prevent the boat from filling with gallons of water in the event of rain. Cynthia, first with the bright ideas as usual, suggested using the now redundant external bike rack cover from the Hymer.

“Don’t be daft,” I told her “the cover is made for 1.5m bikes, not 2.4m boats. It will never fit!”

“But what if it does?” she calmly suggested. How could I argue with that?

Fully expecting to waste half an hour, I rummaged deep in the Hymer’s cavernous garage for the cover, dragged it unceremoniously down to Julisa’s wharfside mooring, and slung it over the dinghy. It appeared to be far too short, until I remembered that the cover had a stretchy elasticated rim.

The cover, much to Cynthia’s delight and my chagrin, fitted perfectly, especially after I used eight plastic clamps from a nearby DIY store to fix the cover securely to the boat.. The clamp purchase was a success, which is more than I could say for the drive to get them.

Jos’s yard is quite congested. The Hymer is parked close to the wharf, half under the crane’s half tonne steel lifting frame. In order to leave the yard, I have to reverse along a narrow alley between rows of boats on winter frames and trailers, past a building site entrance usually blocked by lorries carrying cement and steel framing, and then reverse onto a street before beginning my journey. The first leg, past towering yachts and cruisers, is tightest.

Three of the Hymer’s double skinned plastic windows are hinged at the top and can be locked in place parallel with the ground to allow maximum ventilation on hot days. The day I collected the clamps, the day was very hot.

Cynthia had left a window open on the driver’s side to try to cool the Hymer’s furnace like interior. I shut the window, and then very carefully reversed through the narrow gap between parked boats and cars, congratulating myself on precision maneuvering… Until I heard a sickening crunch followed by the clatter of something hitting the concrete roadway.

That’s how easy it is to rip an expensive bedroom window from a motorhome. Hindsight is a wonderful gift. I now realise that checking both sides of the Hymer for open windows would have been a good idea. The window had been above the wing mirror’s field of view. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

I shudder to think how expensive the window replacement is going to be. I don’t know whether we’ll actually be able to find one for a fourteen year old Hymer. Because sometimes it’s nice not to know about things, I’ve used a roll of duct tape to fix what’s left of the window back in place. I’ll think about organizing the replacement another day.

After eight weeks moored at Jos’s yard, Julisa finally set sail this week, but not until we were able to tend to Cynthia’s medical needs. Cynthia tries very hard to have nothing at all to do with western medicine and drugs with often harmful side effects. This week, she had no choice. Over the last ten days, a simple toe infection steadily worsened to the point where the lymph glands in her groin swelled so much she could hardly walk. The accompanying fever confined her to bed.

We had to find a general practitioner able to prescribe her antibiotics, and then work out how to pay for medical services in a foreign country. The process was as simple as it was inexpensive.

A Google search revealed a number of general practitioners in Leiden. Unfortunately the closest one open for business was also one of the most inaccessible in the Hymer. The building was in the centre of a maze of narrow streets made even more difficult to reach by extensive road works.

After a painful hobble several hundred metres to the practice, a quick examination and a prescription for the despised but necessary drugs, Cynthia held her breath, crossed her fingers and asked how much she owed. The answer delighted her. Twenty seven euros was all she had to pay. She claimed that a similar service in the USA would have cost at least ten times as much.

With a drawer full of drugs, and a boat in full working order, we were ready to begin our summer adventure.

I was nervous. Because of Cynthia’s debilitated condition, I had to handle the boat on my own. I was worried about negotiating the same tight bridges we faced on our voyage a month earlier, and correctly judging the boat’s width without Cynthia’s occasional “Move over to the left. You’re going to crash into that concrete piling!’

The view from our cockpit

The problem is that I’m not used to driving a boat like a car. I found steering a narrowboat much easier, despite standing at the rear with 62’ of boat in front of me. On the narrowboat I was standing outside with the same amount of boat either side of me. I could see over the boat’s roof in front of me, and I could see obstacles either side of the boat.

The marina at dawn

On Julisa, I sit in an enclosed cockpit behind a steering wheel on the boat’s port side. There’s three metres of boat to my right where Cynthia normally sits on her white leather high chair. With Cynthia out of action, I had to rely on my own judgement of the boat’s width which, at the moment, is far from perfect.

Despite one or two close encounters with several concrete bridge supports and, on one occasion, the concrete base of a bright green channel marker as I sped across a lake at very impressive ten kilometres per hour, the first day of our summer cruise was a joy.

The Dutch love their boating and, on a sunny summer Saturday in June, they were out in force. We passed day boats by the score, a steady stream of immaculate motor cruisers, sailing barges and dinghies, rowing boats, and boat which I couldn’t begin to categorise, all of them filled with half naked Dutch crews of all ages. The two and a half hour cruise back to the marina on the Westeinderplassen where we collected Julisa two months ago was a joy, right up to my embarrassing mooring attempt.

I like to think I’m pretty good at boat handling. After all, I taught it on the inland waterways for three years. So why on Earth did all my hard earned knowledge desert me the minute I crossed the English Channel?

Cynthia was still feeling a weak as a kitten, so she wasn’t able to play any part in the proceedings. Still, mooring a 32’ boat on my own should have been simple enough. All I needed to do was cruise slowly and carefully up to the pontoon, step off holding a centre line attached to the middle of the boat, pull Julisa as close to the pontoon as I could, secure the centre line, and then secure both bow and stern moorings.

Dawn before the mist cleared

Common sense deserted me. An elderly Dutch boater walked from his mooring in front of us to help. He waved and smiled engagingly. “Throw me your line!” he commanded, comfortable with all aspects of boating after seventy five years boating experience. He told us this, and a great deal more, half an hour later after he had recovered from the shock of nearly being dragged into the marina by a wild eyed Englishman using his bow thruster far too often in an over enthusiastic attempt to keep his white painted hull away from the pontoon’s rough wooden siding.

The tactic worked, but, apart from rapidly pulling an elderly Dutchman ever close to an early evening bath, the offshore breeze ensured that the stern swung away from the pontoon even more rapidly than the bow.

After a great deal of sign language and the occasional muttered Dutch curse, we had Julisa and her mooring lines in the correct place. Then I had to endure a lengthy but softly spoken reprimand. “You must always secure your centre line before your bow line, especially if you have an offshore breeze” was the gist of it, repeated often and in as many different ways as possible to ensure that a novice boater understood a basic boating lesson. The real problem I had wasn’t being told how to do something new, but being told how to do something which I had done a thousand times before in slightly different circumstances on the English waterways. I felt a complete fool.

That aside, both Cynthia and I are thrilled to be cruising on the waterways again. We’ll be even happier once Cynthia is fighting fit again. The antibiotics appear to be working, but progress is slow, and she appears to be suffering some side effects from the drugs. Those, coupled with the boat’s oven like interior under the midday sun, are getting Cynthia down. I’m praying for both rain and good health. A boat with more living space, air conditioning, and a solar array capable of charging more than a torch battery would be good too.

By the way, Cynthia sends her apologies for not writing to you this week. She doesn’t have the energy to do much more than breathe. She hopes that you understand.

If You Enjoy These Newsletters, Please Help Support This Site

I enjoy writing newsletters which, I am often told, are very useful to anyone considering living an alternative lifestyle either afloat on the English or Dutch waterways, or leading a nomadic life on the road in the tiny living space offered by a motorhome. The downside is that adding content to the site, maintaining it, and answering dozens of emails each week takes a considerable amount of time. I invest up to twenty hours every week on the site and, over the course of the year, many hundreds of pounds. I can’t afford the investment in either time or money without a little help. If you are in the fortunate position to be able to afford a small financial subscription or one off donation to help with the site’s running costs, please click on this link to find out more. If you are one of the generous souls who already support the site, thank you!

Party Boats and Summer Sun

Guess what?

We’re still in Leiden, moored on a narrow canal arm, hemmed in by residential properties and endless lines of boats of all shapes and sizes. We will definitely be setting off on our summer cruise in the next few days but, for now, we’re quite happy moored where we are, relaxing on the water in a thriving waterways community of happy boaters.

We haven’t actually done much this week other than move from one mobile home to another, but we both feel like we’ve put in as much effort as we did when we were working.

When you’re a modern day hobo, minor day to day tasks can feel like major obstacles. Take Cynthia’s tax returns for example. Her accountant couldn’t file her tax returns in the normal manner because she’s living abroad. He uploaded her paperwork to a secure portal for us to download, sign and return by snail mail to both the federal and state authorities in the USA.

Internet connectivity was the first issue we had to contend with. Several months ago, my UK phone provider, EE, cut off my mobile data service for exceeding their sixty-days-out-of-the-country limit. I also had a mobile broadband dongle with another UK provider, Three. They cut me off for the same reason a month earlier. Since then, I had to endure the financial heartache of paying £3 a day for EE’s European 500mb daily allowance.

I unlocked my iPhone and, two weeks ago, switched to a SIM with Vectone, the most cost effective provider for Pay As You Go mobile phone services in the Netherlands. I now pay €15 for a 30 day bundle which gives me a 10GB data allowance, and unlimited national calls and texts.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a warning when the data allowance runs low. Renewing my monthly bundle online costs half the price of renewing through one of the thousands of retail outlets in the Netherlands selling Vectone vouchers so, when I inevitably ran out of data, I couldn’t get online to top up without finding the nearest McDonalds with free WiFi.

Back online, all I needed to do was log into Cynthia’s accountant’s secure portal and download and print the tax statements for Cynthia to sign and post. Printing and posting was our next hurdle. The problem with always being on the move is that we have to constantly relearn all the thousands of details which become subconscious when you live somewhere long term; the location and directions to supermarkets, pharmacies, post offices, restaurants, car parks – always difficult in the Netherlands for motorhome owners – and, in this case a business prepared to print documents for us and another where we could send Cynthia’s important documents via DHL.

We found the businesses we need at about the same time that we discovered that Cynthia’s accountant needed to add another document to our growing pile of things to be printed and posted. It’s a good job we haven’t started cruising yet.

The light of Cynthia’s life

We’ve had a little more work done over the last week; we’ve had a new brass lamp fitted above our cosy dinnette, and the Piraat tender has been fitted with lifting points and rowlocks, and has had the davits extended and painted. The davits will be reattached to Julisa tomorrow, and the dinghy will be fixed in place, ready for sailing on one of the many lakes we’ll pass through on our travels, or to row along canals to narrow or with bridges too low for Julisa.

All we need to do now is have the new solar panel regulator fitted, cross our fingers and hope the solar panels burst into life, and then spring one or two little jobs on Jos, and hope that he can fit them in before we leave, hopefully, on Tuesday.

Julisa’s water tank is tiny compared with most UK narrowboats. My tank on James was considered small at three hundred and fifty litres. Most narrowboat water tanks can hold 700-1,000 litres. Julisa’s tiny tank holds  just two hundred litres, which is why we aren’t particularly happy that our head sink tap is leaking.

Cynthia, ever resourceful, has come up with an interim solution. One of a series of saucepans now constantly nestles in the sink beneath the offending cap, collecting ten litres of precious water each day to use for topping up the dogs’ drinking bowl or for dish washing. It’s not an elegant solution but it works until, we hope, Jos has time to fix the leak.

I know that virtually every red blooded male reading this post will be shaking his head in disgust, thinking to himself, “What a wally. All he needs to do is replace the washer!” I know, I know, but I also know myself too well. I would start off with the best of intentions but, within minutes, I would be fending off a torrent gushing from the rapidly emptying water tank, wondering why I hadn’t called in the professionals in the first place. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s one I’ve come to terms with. I’m better off focussing on the things I’m good at. I just need to work out what they are.

Much as we’ve been frustrated by our lengthy delays, we’ve really enjoyed our time in Leiden on and around the city’s canal network.

The Dutch people are boating mad. There appear to be as many boats on the waterways as there are bicycles on the streets, and there are a staggering number of bikes.

A Leiden city centre canal

The photo above is a typical boat lined Leiden canal. Leiden, voted one of the prettiest of the one hundred and forty six Netherlands cities, has an extensive network of canals running through it. Because of the immovable low bridges on many of the city’s canals, they can only be negotiated using low profile day boats, which are as popular as they are expensive. A price in excess of €100,000 is not unusual for these beautiful craft which, in reality, are little more than glorified rowing boats with powerful inboard engines. Jos told me that the engine alone, unfitted, in one of the premium models costs an eye watering €50,000. Appearance is everything though, as is keeping up with your neighbours. The household with the most expensive boat wins.

There’s no denying that the day boats are as beautiful as they are fun to cruise in. After heavy rain earlier in the week – that reminds me – we have a leak in the aft skylight as well Jos – the weather over the last few days has been wonderful.

Bikes and boats galore

Wonderful weather means a huge surge of boats on the Leiden network. Over the last hour I’ve counted forty five passing Julisa. I know that indicates that I have far too much time on my hands, but I have to do something to keep my mind busy.

Today, the waterways crowd are a gentle bunch; “ladies who lunch” are out in their best clothes, wicker baskets open, crystal glasses filled with white wine; family groups of a dozen or more picnic and chat in perfectly maintained boats helmed by proud patriarchs, young couples enjoy romantic cruises, and the occasional group of teenaged boys misbehave in the typical well behaved Dutch fashion.

Last night’s crowds were very different. Saturday night, especially on a sweltering early summer evening, was party night. Larger groups of youngsters plied the waterways. Groups of twenty or more men laughed and sang and toasted each other with bottles of beer, cheering when they passed boats similarly laden with women.

Although drinking on boats is common in the Netherlands, drunkenness, and the antisocial behavior so commonly associated with drinking alcohol in the UK, is not. The Saturday night revellers were out for fun.

Maybe the Leiden crowds are more sophisticated than most. Leiden’s 35,000 students attend one of the top universities in Europe, a university which has produced thirteen Nobel and Rembrandt who, I believe, did a bit of painting in his time. The university population may have something to do with well mannered revellers, but I doubt it. Everywhere we go in the Netherlands, the Dutch people are a pleasure to mix with.

Navigating the Dutch waterways, especially narrow and busy canals such as the ones which thread their ways through and around Leiden, is something which still intimidates me. One of the more difficult aspects of Dutch boating to come to terms with is not touching other boats or inanimate objects.

Cruising in a narrowboat is often referred to as a contact sport. Narrowboats are built for contact. The bows are fitted with heavy duty rope or rubber fenders and raised rubbing strakes line both bow and sides to protect the boat during inevitable contact with inanimate objects, and the occasional glancing blow off an oncoming boat on a blind bend, at a bridge hole, or a section of canal narrowed by overhanging shrubbery or moored boats. All narrowboats which have cruised more than a handful of miles or negotiated more than a few locks carry battle scars, scrapes and scratches, usually on the hull but, especially on hire boats, also on the cabin sides.

Dutch boats are usually immaculate. Scrapes and scratches are a rarity. Most of the day boats have continuous rope fenders fitted to the top of the hull, but ‘fending off’ is an important part of boating, a job often enthusiastically done by the youngsters on board.

Julisa has three fenders on both the port and the starboard sides which offer some protection, but fending off in a six tonne boat is far more difficult and unwieldy than in a much lighter and smaller day boat. Cruising on these smaller city canals is also made much more difficult by both the boat’s width and its air draught, the height from the waterline to the highest point on the boat.

My WaterKaarten app showing Leiden

Negotiating bridges still confuses me. The image on the left shows a screenshot of a small section of the canal network in Leiden. The arrow indicates our current location. You can see dozens of bridge to the left of the arrow. Below the arrow in red, you can see one bridge marked ‘Wilhelminabrug BB H25 W100’ That tells me that the bridge is twenty five decimetres high, or 2.5 metres. That’s fine. Julisa has an air draught of 2.4 metres so, providing that the bridge measurement is correct, the water level isn’t higher than normal, or we haven’t significantly increased our air draught by removing a heavy load (like when basset Florence steps off) we should be able to pass under the bridge without trouble. However, many of the other bridges confuse me.

There are nearly three dozen bridges marked to the left of the arrow. If I zoom in on them, the heights are displayed. Some are as low as 1.4 metres, so are clearly off limits to Julisa, unless they open for passing craft.

Some bridges have permanent bridge keepers, others have cameras so that they can be opened remotely from keepers on other bridges. A few will only open by appointment for local residents, and yet more necessitate phoning or radioing ahead.

Once the bridge keeper knows you’re waiting, the bridge is not necessarily going to open as quickly as you would like it to. The man in charge has to balance the waterways traffic with the road traffic. Some opening bridges are on motorways. A ten minute bridge opening often results in traffic tailing back for several miles. In this case, the bridge keeper will wait for a lengthy period until he feels that he can justify stopping the road traffic. In the meantime, the unlucky boat owner has to hold station against the wind and the current, ever mindful of the growing number of expensive and immaculate boats building up around him.

Can you understand why I’m a little nervous?

Anyway, that’s enough for now. It’s time for my lunch. After that, I have to go to work. After eight

Back at work for a while

months of doing nothing more strenuous than enjoying the occasional leisurely walk, I spent a few hours strimming yesterday. It’s Cynthia’s fault.

On a day when the Tarmac was melting under the heat of a white hot sun, Jos, our boatyard host, decided to tackle the unsightly bank of three feet high weeds growing through the paving on his wharf. When he stopped for a minute to mop up the rivers of sweat cascading from his brow, Cynthia shouted over to him, ‘Why don’t you let Paul do that? He’s too shy to ask you himself, but he would love to do it, and he needs the exercise!”

So I spent yesterday afternoon in heavy overalls wielding a strimmer, brush and spade. Cynthia was right. I loved it. I miss my work at Calcutt Boats. This was a pleasant reminder. I’ll finish the job after lunch, and then I’ll sit and read and watch a steady stream of happy Dutch boaters cruise slowly by, and hope that I can join them in a day or two.

If You Enjoy These Newsletters, Please Help Support This Site

I enjoy writing newsletters which, I am often told, are very useful to anyone considering living an alternative lifestyle either afloat on the English or Dutch waterways, or leading a nomadic life on the road in the tiny living space offered by a motorhome. The downside is that adding content to the site, maintaining it, and answering dozens of emails each week takes a considerable amount of time. I invest up to twenty hours every week on the site and, over the course of the year, many hundreds of pounds. I can’t afford the investment in either time or money without a little help. If you are in the fortunate position to be able to afford a small financial subscription or one off donation to help with the site’s running costs, please click on this link to find out more. If you are one of the generous souls who already support the site, thank you!

Cynthia says…

Solar Sorrow and a Lofty Loo

We finally managed to move on board Julisa on Wednesday, at least for the night. But before we could enjoy our first night afloat in an awfully long time – eight months for me, thirteen months for Cynthia – we slogged through a long day of testing, fault finding, organising and disposing.

Most of Julisa’s scheduled work was complete, but not everything appeared to be working correctly, especially in the electrical department. Jos fitted a Victron BMV 702 battery monitor for me. I wanted something as simple as the Smartgauge battery monitor I had on my narrowboat. The monitor displayed the battery banks’ voltage and the charge percentage remaining in the domestic bank. Jos wasn’t familiar with Smartgauge, so he installed an all-singing-all-dancing model from Victron. I wasn’t terribly sure that Jos was familiar with Victron battery monitors either. You can get away with just entering the battery bank capacity to begin using the monitor, but, if you really want to fry your brain, there are an additional sixty eight settings available to fine tune the readings, set alarms and monitor the FTSE100 stock market. I may be wrong about stock market monitoring. All I know is that the setup looks horribly complicated.

The monitor keeps track of two battery banks; the starter and the leisure bank. It displays in depth information for the main bank, and a voltage reading for the auxiliary bank. The display showed a reassuring 100% for the main bank when I first looked at it. To assess whether the monitor was working correctly, I turned the fridge up high, turned the inverter on, kept a couple of MacBooks on charge for twenty four hours, ran a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, and anything else I could think of to partially drain the batteries. The following morning, the display still read 100% capacity and 12.62v for the main bank. Surprisingly, the auxiliary bank display had dropped to 12.32v. After questioning Jos, I discovered that he had set the monitor to register the single starter battery as the main bank, rather than the domestic battery information that really interested me.

The Victron battery monitor on its slow countdown to empty

The display also showed a constant 3w input from the solar array day and night. Rather surprising given that the two solar panels total 480w and the daytime temperature peaked at thirty degrees. Something was clearly amiss.

Jos rewired the Victoron monitor to display in depth information for the leisure bank of four 130ah AGM batteries. I could now watch the steadily decreasing charge in the main battery bank, despite a furnace-like sun scorching our two very expensive solar panels all day long. We paid the better part of €2,000 for a powerful and low profile solar array which clearly wasn’t working.

I also tested our new Porta Potti Excellence cassette toilet. The cheap and cheerful plastic loo has replaced the environmentally unfriendly sea toilet in place when we bought Julisa. Our options were limited when we considered a replacement because of the size of Julisa’s head, or ‘bathroom’ as most normal people call it, and the platform it needs to sit on . The oval Excellence Porta Potti was the only toilet we could find to fit the footprint.

Unfortunately it’s quite high, and it has to sit on the raised platform. The end result is a loo which requires extensive mountaineering experience for those brave enough to tackle it. Cynthia and I will have to make do with a painter’s step ladder, which one of us will have to hold while the other climbs towards the rarified atmosphere surrounding the toilet seat.

Once in situ, the desperate toilet user will then have to sit with the head door open and their feet jutting out into the galley. Our new arrangement will make conversation easier, but perhaps make food preparation or consumption just that little bit more challenging. Anyone for a sausage?

Caught in the act

As the evening of our first day back at the boatyard approached, our long awaited fridge arrived at the same time as Cynthia’s new toy, sorry, the last of our essential boat purchases, our new tender.

The Piraat zeilboot sailing dinghy is 2.4m long, and 1.2m wide. The length isn’t a problem, but the dinghy is too wide for Julisa’s davits. We’ve inadvertently delayed our departure by adding another job to Jos’s list. He’s going to have to extend the steel davits for us, install tackle to lift and hold the dinghy in place, and install lifting points on the dinghy. He’s also going to add a pair of rowlocks, or oarlocks as Cynthia and her transatlantic buddies insist on calling them.

I suspect that we’ll use the dinghy for rowing far more often than we will for sailing, so the rowlocks and the oars to go with them are essential additional kit. So is a cover for the dinghy.

Of course, buying a cover isn’t as simple as it should be. We can find an off the peg cover to fit the dinghy, but it fits flush with the gunnels, so we can’t have anything above the gunnels, such as rowlocks, or the four lifting points essential for removing the dinghy from the water and securing it to Julisa’s davits. We can have a cover custom made, providing we don’t mind paying more for the cover than we did for the boat, and providing we don’t mind waiting for up to two months for an overworked Dutch sail maker to fit us in. We’re rather hoping that Jos can come up with a solution, but we’ll spring that one on him after he’s solved the solar problem.

After the end of an exhausting day, or what passes for one these days anyway, we needed to relax. We had a choice. We could sit inside the Hymer, wedged into a corner of the boatyard under a crane’s half tonne steel lifting frame, or we could lounge on the white painted steel front deck of a boat bobbing on the surprisingly clear water of a Leiden city centre canal watching the world go by. No contest then. We sat for a couple of hours watching a steady stream of day boats cruise gently past us, mostly helmed by respectable couples and families taking advantage of the glorious weather to enjoy an al fresco evening meal on the water.

There are always exceptions of course. Inland waterways boat ownership and cruising in England is usually the domain of the middle aged. No such restrictions apply in the Netherlands. We see as wide a cross section of society helming boats on the waterways as we do walking and bicycling down the high street, including an occasional maladjusted youth or two.

As I immersed myself in a book and a bottle of Belgian beer, I heard a single phrase being repeated at great volume in a voice only recently broken. The noise increased as four scruffy young teenagers in a small and tatty boat with a smoking outboard motor chugged slowly past. “Allahu Akbar!” one screamed as he stood on the bow, confusingly, throwing a Nazi salute, staring manically about him for someone to annoy. He picked the wrong country. This is the Netherlands. Everyone ignored him, apart from me. I dropped our weighty anchor through the bottom of his boat as he passed.

Just kidding.

With all the beer and discontented youth gone for the night, the time came to shoehorn ourselves into our tiny new bedroom. It really is very small, so small in fact that the bottom part of the bed is in a coffin like box which forms part of the adjacent cockpit, and a third of the bed’s width is just two feet below the starboard gunnel. The smallest space, the one most difficult side to get out of is, of course, where anyone suffering claustrophobia shouldn’t sleep. I do, and I did, but only because I always insist on sleeping on the right. Self imposed rules are there for the foolish to stick to, so I stuck to this one and enjoyed a night in a coffin-like windowless room with my nose pressed against the steel hull.

Oh happy days!

Despite the space restrictions, we both enjoyed a wonderful night’s sleep. There’s something very comforting about the boat’s soothing rocking and the rhythmic slap of gentle waves against a thin steel hull.

Cynthia proudly displays the classy flyaway she found in a cockpit cupboard

The following morning, I needed to test our new Eberspacher blown air heating system. I didn’t want to take it for a spin the previous day because of the temperature. The heater’s thermostat in the forward cabin showed a sweltering twenty eight degrees. The following morning was slightly cooler, so I turned the Eberspacher on until a candle on the dinette began to melt and the thermostat cried for help. After I turned it off and rehydrated myself, I decided to leave it off until we really need it… probably some time in January if we decide to take the boat up into the Arctic Circle.

Another jigsaw piece fell into place this week; storing either the boat or the Hymer when we aren’t using them. We need somewhere we consider comfortable, secure, affordable, and which has a reasonable range of shops within walking or biking distance. We originally intended to take Julisa from the boatyard here in Leiden to a small marina in Eastermar, close to Drachten where Cynthia stayed in a rented house for two months last year. We were quoted €1,100 for internal winter storage for the boat, and €350 to store the Hymer inside in the summer.

Both prices were far more competitive than others we had been quoted at larger marinas. The only problem was overcoming the logistics of me taking the Hymer from Leiden to Eastermar and then travelling 200km back again on public transport from a remote rural marina. The trip would have involved a 15km bike ride, and then a two hour bus ride followed by half an hour on a train, carrying my 20kg folding bike. It wasn’t a journey I was really looking forward to.

We realised that Eastermar didn’t offer an ideal cruising base either. Eastermar is in Friesland, at the far north of the Netherland’s extensive waterways network. Any cruise from there would involve travelling south on increasingly familiar waterways until we reached virgin territory. Much as we enjoy Friesland’s tranquility, there’s much to be said for a more central base.

We like Jos and his boatyard here in Leiden. He’s a one man band working from a workshop below his house. There are currently fifty four boats crammed into his yard during the winter months, all smaller than Julisa. All waterway visitors to his yard have to pass under a 2.4m high fixed bridge. We scraped through with just a few millimetres of daylight between our delicate canvas cockpit roof cover and the bridge’s steel supports. Nothing larger can reach his wharf unless the owner is a local resident, in which case they have to book a slot to have the bridge raised.

Jos only has enough internal storage space for three boats Julisa’s size, and very little apparent free space outside. Not that we were particularly interested in storing Julisa out on the open and exposing the superstructure’s varnished mahogany to winter rain, snow and ice.

Pretty much as an academic exercise, I asked Jos if he could accommodate us. “I’m sorry, but I need the internal space for the boats I work on over the winter,” he told me.

“Do you have space outside?” I don’t know why I asked. External storage wouldn’t do Julisa’s woodwork any good at all.

Jos laughed “I have a list of local people as long as my arm waiting for a free space here!” Then he looked at me and scratched his head. He’s smart, and, by now, he now knows all about my practical incapability. Storing our boat there would undoubtedly result in a steady stream of work for him for years to come.

“OK, you can have a place in the yard for your boat in the winter and your motorhome in the summer. I can build a protective frame and cover for your boat to protect the woodwork.” It’s a win win situation. He increases his passive income and taps into a steady stream of remedial work, and we reduce our storage cost and switch to a more sensible cruising base.

We were delighted with our new location, and even more pleased with the price. Julisa’s hardstanding will cost us €550 for the winter. The Hymer’s summer storage will cost just €105.

We’ll need to buy a large sail for Jos to drape over the frame he’s going to build. Sail prices, as you might expect, vary widely according to quality. We can buy a cheap and cheerful sail for €200 to last us a single season, or we can invest in a €400 sail which should last us a decade or more.

We’ll probably invest in a quality sail, but not for a few months yet. We still have to pay for part of Julisa’s remedial work, and we dug deeper into our bank accounts at the end of this week to buy more boating paraphernalia; a pair of oars and rowlocks for the Piraat, two new polyester ropes for Julisa to replace the old bits of hemp currently disgracing the stern and, to complete the appearance of two already ridiculous looking bassets, a pair of boating neckerchiefs. I’ll turn a blind eye to the neckerchiefs, but I’ll have to put my foot down if Cynthia suggests buying them captain’s hats.

Jos had another bash at getting the solar array working yesterday. He discovered that, buried deep somewhere within the incomprehensible circuitry, is a switch that is turned off at the factory but which needs turning on when the system is fitted. He hoped that finding and setting the switch would cure the problem.

It didn’t.

His latest plan is to replace the regulator. Now, I don’t know much about electrics, but I know that our 480w solar array can produce up to 40 amps on a good day. Jos told me that the regulator can only handle a maximum of 8 amps which, to me, is like expecting a camel to climb through the eye of a needle. Surely he should have fitted a regulator able to handle the solar array’s maximum output in the first place?

So, we’re still at the boatyard, six weeks after arriving to have work done which Jos estimated would take a fortnight. We’ve waited long enough. We’ll spend the rest of today transferring our life from the Hymer to the boat, and then we’ll be off tomorrow for a week.

We’ll return in eight days to have the new regulator installed, and to have the new extended davits fitted and have our little sailboat hung in place. That’s the plan anyway, but, regardless of the country we’re in, boating time appears to be much slower than real time, so we’ll just have to go with the flow and enjoy bobbing about on the waterways around Leiden taking advantage of what the Dutch keep telling us is unseasonably warm weather. I don’t know how the next week will unfold, but I’m pretty sure that we will enjoy it.

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Cynthia says…