Mr J. Duffy organised a day of delights, which included a verbose brunch at the stylish East London hangout Curio Cabal, followed by jaunt along the canal to a party in Hackney Wick.
It was on this journey where we, the curators of this blog, Richard and Emily, first fell in love with 'Boat Life'. Cruising along the canal, in a 60ft narrow boat, supplemented by aperol spritz and an onboard DJ playing obscure 80's gems, it was nothing less than a post-hipster wet dream.
The sun shone, as we chugged along and decided that this was the life for us.
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Having been on a couple of boats, we felt that our sailing skills and marine knowledge was above and beyond that required to navigate our way around the inland waterways. During the following weeks and months we thought, talked and researched our way through our options visiting marinas, trawling the boat classifieds and reading the canal boat forums. Emily's idea of a cosy little narrowboat was at odds with Richard's preference for a spacious widebeam. However, after several demonstrations of Richard's clumsiness, Emily agreed that confined spaces would not work.
As there are fewer widebeams on the water, they tend to hold their value, therefore nearly all of the second hand widebeams for sale were unafforadable for us. Even the old fixer-uppers would stretch us, and we'd had it on good authority from some boaters that modifying a boat can be a lot of trouble. We realised that if we built the boat ourselves it'd be to our own specification and cost less, which is what we decided to do.
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After two visits to Crick Boat Show and an indepth interview with the extremely knowledgable and charming Mark, of FitOutPoonton, we felt we were ready. We had chosen our boat builders, XR&D, based on their solid reputation within the community and the personal pride they took in their work.
Everyone kept mentioning GUNWHALES, which sounded very exciting to us... We can't wait.
