About The Author
I’ve had an interesting in boating since I was quite young and our first family boating holiday was to be had on a waterway in Germany as that is where we lived at the time. Unfortunately the red tape surrounding getting certification as a skipper for those waterways meant that the holiday plans never came to anything.
Our first boating holiday came in 1989, the year after we moved to the UK, when we hired a cabin cruiser on a British river system called the Norfolk Broads. The boat was an old wooden centre cockpit broads cruiser called Gracious Girl. We booked so late she was the only one left in the agent’s catalogue and she was in her final season as a hireboat before being pensioned off. Even so, she was beautifully presented, if lacking in mod cons. But the boating bug was caught and over the years we’ve hired several more times. The possibility of buying a boat was briefly explored by my parents in 1990 after our second holiday but nothing ever came of it. Finally in 2006 my wife and I took a snap decision to buy into the boating world, despite knowing nothing about it!
This blog was set up to detail our experiences as owners in the murky world of boating about which we knew little but needed to learn fast. And hopefully it will also show any hirers out there thinking about buying a boat that it is possible to survive without being an expert! Our first boat, Silver Dream, was our pride and joy for 2 and a half years before we decided her configuration was not for us. However, the overall design suited our needs and after a gap of about 1 year (most of which was due to my recovering from a serious accident) we purchased Grenick (now renamed Bandicoot), another boat of the same Fairline design but with a different overall configuration.
More details on the hire boats can be found here.
More details on our boat can be found here.