Yesterday was a big day!
I produced my first subscriber only content! Whoop! Cheer!
For those who are subscribed to my email list there is a short story (Sally and the Burger Bombing) waiting in their inbox (or, probably in the spam folder – my own test version ended up in spam)!
If you haven’t received it – check whether you are signed up! Then email me and I’ll sort it out.
Now, I’m off to write Patreon only content!
Have a lovely weekend, everyone. I think it might be sunny in the UK!
It’s been a little while since I’ve written a proper boaty blog. We’ve gotten into the swing of boat life and don’t have so many crises, so I don’t have as much to write about! If there’s anything you want me to cover – just ask in the comments below or on Facebook. This time I’m covering something I’m often asked.
Well, the simple answer is: yes and no; but that’s not very simple!
Boating forums are full of people wanting to move to the water for a cheaper life. And they are often surprised at the responses from seasoned boaters.
Obviously, it is cheaper. It’s a (sophisticated) floating steel box. That has to be cheaper than living in a house? After all, isn’t that the main reason a lot of people chose to live on the water?
There are many things that are cheaper when you live on a boat. One of the things that I am often told is ‘Hey – at least boats don’t have to pay council tax!’. Technically, that’s true. Boats don’t pay any bills – they don’t have hands and would struggle to open a bank account! But I think they mean that people don’t have to pay council tax when living on a boat. Which is also true – sometimes. Boats are not considered to be property, so they are not eligible for council tax. But some residential moorings are although these moorings are rare and most of the time Council Tax is included in the marina costs.
So – most of the time boat-dwellers don’t pay Council Tax.
For the average price of a two-bed property in my area, you could buy between 2 and 4 new build boats like the BBB. So – boats are cheaper to buy – undoubtedly! For some people, that means they can live mortgage free – others have a marine loan or standard bank loan. The interest on a marine or standard loan is higher than a mortgage, but the amount of the loan is much lower so the repayments are less. You don’t need conveyancing or estate agents – but second-hand boats do need a survey and boats over 4 years old will need a Boat Safety Certificate which needs renewing every 4 years.
So, it initially looks like boats are cheaper. But there are hidden costs.
You don’t have to pay to park your house! One of the biggest expenses for many boat owners is the marina bill. This varies from area to area but is generally quite pricey. You could equate marina fees to land rent. You own your boat but have to pay to moor it. A marina which allows residential mooring will give you an address (not many places accept ‘The BBB on the river’)! The marina will give you somewhere safe to moor and often you’ll get tap water, access to a safe car park, a toilet block and facilities to empty the toilet. Some marinas have an onsite cafe/bar, engineers and will sell coal, gas and diesel. Most marinas give you the option to plug the boat into their electricity supply which gives you similar access to electricity as in a house (you can use electric kettles, hairdryers etc). Most marinas charge you separately for the electricity that you have used, using a meter or a metered cable.
The next biggest bill is the boat licence. This is another bill you don’t have in a house. Your boat needs to be licensed with the authority that maintains the rivers or canals that it will be on. If you move around a lot you might need a licence for more than one authority – if you don’t – you probably won’t! If you have a boat that you use on the river (any boat, even canoes and inflatable dinghies) you must have a licence for it. The fines for not being licensed can be quite high – they can seize the boat if you don’t pay!
Just like houses (cars, businesses, pets…) boats need to be insured. Liveaboard boat insurance is a combination of contents insurance (like you would have in a house) and car insurance. They can vary from a simple third party only cover to covering almost everything! Most newer boats have a fairly comprehensive type of cover.
We don’t have a gas bill. But we do have to buy gas bottles. In a house I could shop around to get the best deal (often by bundling my utilities together).On a boat, I can’t shop around to get a good deal on my utility bills. I have to pay the price of a bottle of gas. I don’t have broadband or a phone line, but I still need to be connected to the world. We have a 4g router – similar to the hotspot on a mobile phone. That needs to be paid for. While we don’t have a landline – we all have mobile phones. We can’t shop around for a broadband/mobile/TV landline package which would make it cheaper, we have to buy them separately.
The other thing people forget is the limited space on a boat. It’s hard to buy in bulk – because there’s nowhere to store it! It might be cheaper to buy 18 toilet rolls, but it’s a struggle to store more than 4! If we try to shop in bulk we end up putting things in odd places and forgetting they’re there. Like the baked beans in the bedroom drawer…
So, living on a boat isn’t necessarily that much cheaper than living in a house.
There are things liveaboard boaters can do to make life cheaper.
Continuous cruising (CC) for example. This is exactly what it sounds like. Continuous cruisers (CCers) don’t have a regular marina – so no marina fees. They roam around the waterways. There are some fairly complicated rules regarding how long a CCer can stay in one place and how far they are supposed to travel in one year. As a very basic idea – they aren’t supposed to stay in one area more than 14 days and they are supposed to travel from place to place – not just shuttle from one area to another, then back. CC information. CCers don’t have electric hook up at a marina – so no electricity bills. The engine makes electricity when they are travelling, and a lot have solar panels to make electricity when they are moored. Sometimes in the winter, there aren’t enough hours of daylight in the day for the solar panels to top up the boat’s batteries – that’s why, in the winter, you often hear narrowboats running their engines while they’re moored. They’re topping up their batteries. Although that adds a diesel bill into the equation!
Another similar option is an off-grid mooring. One without any facilities. That keeps the costs low, the mooring costs are much lower and there aren’t bills for electricity, because there isn’t any!
Both CCing and living off grid are a lot more work. You need to consider where you’re going to get water from (is there a riverside tap anywhere nearby) and what will you do if the river freezes/floods when you need it? You have to sort out an address which might involve paying for one, boatmail, for example. How are you going to empty the toilet? Is there a marina nearby to empty it? Will you enjoy cruising when it’s minus 3 outside and everything is slippery with slush?
Yes, it is cheaper to live on a boat, but not necessarily a lot cheaper. The cheaper you make it, the harder you make it.
I wouldn’t live on a boat long term for financial reasons. I do it because I love it!
We’re still marina based. It’s been quite nice to enjoy an easier life for a few weeks, especially in such a pretty marina.
The marina has a gym and cafe on site which I’ve used (the cafe, not the gym!) while we’ve been here. It’d be rude not to!
The article below was inspired by a lovely conversation with the barista.
“Fed up with Brexit? Or Mr Trump?” by Rachel Dodman https://link.medium.com/flGChbowDV
Friend link (in case the first link doesn’t work)
Fed Up with Brexit? Or Mr Trump?
And just in case you missed it,
Downhill From Wednesday is on Amazon. Paperback version is on its way…!
It’s been a while since I’ve updated you guys! Sorry!
Life has been a bit hectic with the new book, writing on Medium and starting on the next book!
Last time I blogged, we had found that our normal water point was unavailable. They were going to fix the pontoon by the tap, which meant that we couldn’t use the water point for a while. We managed to fill up with water anyway and things all ended well.
We still have easy access to water – but not in the way I had anticipated!
The community centre who owns the water tap (run by the town council) organised a safety person to come and view the mooring. He deemed the mooring to be unsafe. So we are not allowed to use it at all until it’s fixed.
That’s fine, it’s only a week or two.
Nope.
First Storm Gareth hit. We had very high winds, which meant they couldn’t start work on the pontoon. Then storm Freya hit. We were fine; high winds mean you can’t move the boat (she doesn’t go the right way in the wind!) and it can be very noisy, but other than that it’s fine. But we were running out of water. And we knew that we couldn’t get any more for a couple of weeks.
The three of us talked about the situation. What should we do? We came up with a variety of options.
We had one afternoon during storm Gareth where it was calm enough to travel. So Mr BBB took the afternoon off work, phoned the marina to check they had space, and off we went! It was a lovely journey! Quite literally the lull before the storm! We arrived at about 5.30 pm. During the evening the wind started to creep up and by midnight it was a gale! Perfect timing! Now we had water…err…on tap!
We planned to stay at the marina until the storms had passed but we are still there!
Only a tiny bit of the pontoon is done. The storms delayed the work, and apparently – so I’m told, someone ordered the wrong size of wood! So it is going to be quite a while, yet!
It is a pain – the marina is expensive. But on the other hand, it is a nice break. We don’t have to worry about water and we have unlimited mains electricity again! I can use the washing machine as much as I like – even on hot settings! We can have the TV on – even if we’re not watching it, and my laptop is never flat! And it is a lot cheaper than going away would’ve been!
Sometimes life doesn’t roll the way you hope. Often, if you roll with it things end up okay in the end!
Downhill From Wednesday is available for pre order on Amazon- buy it now and it will be delivered to your Kindle automatically on Monday 😁
My first book is completed!
It is currently available in draft PDF form for a donation to Comic Relief. From the 22nd March it will be available on Amazon!
I like this winter. It is a lot better than last winter. At the moment I am hot, wearing a hoodie and jeans at 1pm – I think I will be in t-shirt and jeans by 2 pm! There are no clouds in the sky. The batteries are full by lunchtime, charged by sun alone. The river has only flooded once, and not for too long. In the evening we’re needing coats and maybe gloves. At night we need the stove and extra blankets! But right now it’s almost warm enough to sunbathe!
We haven’t had any problems filling up with water this winter. The flood we had was a very well behaved flood. The river was too fast flowing to safely move the boat – but it didn’t burst the river banks. We didn’t need wellies or a canoe to get off the boat. And the river had the decency to stop flowing dangerously fast in time for our next water fill up! I am beginning to get complacent… We don’t need to worry about water or the effects of the weather. All is fine.
And all is fine. Until today. We headed off in the glorious sun to fill up with water, thinking that in a couple of days we might travel a bit, as the weather is so nice. As it’s early in the year there aren’t many boats about. It is easy to moor and there is not normally anyone else wanting the water point. We’d set off early, around 8.30 am. We had the sides of the canopy open and a cuppa in our hands. The sun was glinting off the roof, swans were frolicking around us, dog walkers were waving – the world was perfect.
I was controlling the BBB. At the two points where I sometimes struggle (the river narrows slightly and there are moored boats about, so I often end up in a tree trying to avoid the boats) I was totally fine. I should have considered that things don’t normally go that well…
As we neared the mooring for the water point I could see railings. They looked like they were along the edge of the mooring. My first thought was ‘Oh, they have put up railings to stop people falling in – that’s a good idea’. Then I realised that the railings will also stop people from getting off their boats. People like us, who want water. I could see some signs on the railings and as we got closer I could read No Mooring written on them.
Aaargghhh! It was still a beautiful day, the birds were still frolicking and I still had my cup of tea, but somehow now it didn’t feel so good! We dithered in the middle of the river for a few minutes, while we debated what we were going to do. A 60′ x 10′ boat dithering in the middle of a river is quite a spectacle! Boats don’t generally stay still unless you tie them to something, so as we dithered the boat started taking itself on a lovely boaty pirouette! Had we intended to do it, it would have been amazing!
There is one other place in this area for boats to fill up with water, but the BBB is too big to fit. The next place for water is about 3 hours downstream, through 2 locks. Mr BBB and I were both planning on working today, that’s why we moved the boat so early – so we would be ready to work by 9! We didn’t want to be travelling for 3 hours. And we are dancing in the town this evening (we do Ceroc dancing) – right next to the mooring with the water point that was railed off. If we travelled for 3 hours to get water, we’d have to travel another 3 hours back again.
The water tank wasn’t completely empty – we probably had enough to get through a couple of days. Maybe to the weekend if we were really careful. It was still a lovely day. Maybe tomorrow we could travel the three hours for water, then continue downstream for a few days. We could top up with water on our way back. That seemed like a good plan – the good day was back on! As Mr BBB was letting other boaters know that the water point was unavailable he saw a message about a lock closure. We could get as far as the next water point (3 hours away) but no further! So we could not go for a nice trip at the weekend!
Arrgghhh, for the second time!
Should we continue on and get water, both taking time off work. Go back to our home mooring and try not to use any water, then travel at the weekend to fill up. Or something else? Would the water point be permanently closed? Should we moor in a different town? No – the lock is closed so we can’t get to another town!
Mr BBB phoned the building (a community centre) that owns the water tap and mooring. That was a very sensible idea! It turned out that they are updating the pontoon, which does need doing. We have been saying that it could do with some work for a while. The mooring is fenced off in preparation for the work starting. A lovely chap came out to the mooring and explained that we could move one fence panel so we could still get to the water point. Now the BBB is full of water. She is moored in the park, which is quite close to the centre where we are dancing tonight. The solar panels have been in the sun all day and the boat is nice and warm.
I think we might travel downstream at the weekend, top up with water at the marina and have a nice meander. But if we don’t, I’m quite confident we will still be able to get water. And the work should only take a week or two.
As the BBB was slowly pirouetting in the middle of the river, she avoided any boats, buildings or other obstacles. And we got to have a brief chat with a lovely guy in a smaller narrowboat.
The day started out really well and is set to end really well. That sounds quite good, all in all!
Last year we celebrated Christmas onboard. It was fantastic. Cold, snowy and wonderful. 
But winter seemed to go on forever. It was either freezing or flooding, occasionally both. It seemed like an unusually harsh winter, but it was our first year onboard, so I wondered whether I was just over sensitive.
One day last January I was leaving the boat with Yr Mr BBB, both wrapped up like the love children of an Eskimo and the Michelin man, yet still with cold fingers, and Yr Mr BBB said ‘I think we should go away somewhere for Christmas next year’.
‘Oh, somewhere snowy, more Christmassy?’ I replied (because I am sometimes a bit dense)!
‘No!’ he replied, surprised ‘Somewhere warm!’
We contemplated for a bit and decided on Naples in Italy. It is fairly southern so should be warm but not hot (we are fussy devils). It is possible to get there by train (we didn’t want to fly, as I said, fussy devils) and was far enough to be a definite change and adventure.
It is not a straightforward journey, though. The journey would be part of the adventure.
We would have to go from home to London, London to Paris, (across Paris) Paris to Milan on a night train, Milan to Naples. That is definitely an adventure! The trains all linked in nicely with suitable gaps to change trains, but not too long to wait between them. We were all ready and quite excited!
Then we heard about the Gillet Jaunes riots in Paris. We kept a daily check on the news and the gov.uk website to see if it was safe to travel, and by the time we traveled it was fine. Phew!
We had a painless trip to London and checked in for our Eurostar train. Just after we got on the train I received a text message from the company we’d used to book the tickets. The night train was canceled due to industrial action. Nothing to do with Gillet Jaunes, a completely separate strike! We had a choice. They were providing coaches to replace the train (but it wouldn’t have beds, restaurant car or any of the other benefits of the night train) or we could claim a refund on our ticket and not go. But we were on the Eurostar to Paris! Not going was not an option!
It is a very long way from Paris to Milan. Over 500 miles. The train can do it in 11 or 12 hours. The train has fold out bunk beds, toilets, a washroom. We could have a drink and something to eat in the restaurant car before going to bed in our cabin. Not so on a coach. Once we found the coaches outside the train station (which was not easy) we had a coach seat. They provided us with a bottle of water, a chicken and cheese sandwich, crips and a blanket each. The journey was quite painful – trying to sleep sat upright, and stopping every few hours for comfort breaks (all the lights on and an icy blast through the coach door). And it was much longer than the train would have been. We arrived in Milan at 11am. Our train from Milan to Naples left at 7am. 4 hours before we arrived! They put us on the next train to Naples but it was fully booked so we didn’t have seats. We spent the 5 hour train journey (after not sleeping the night before) stood up in the restaurant car.
We were very glad to arrive at our apartment! It was stunning – views over Mount Vesuvius and Naples, and a jacuzzi bath – perfect after a difficult journey!
The villa owner described Naples as a pretty lady that’s not always well dressed. That is a perfect description! It is the most intriguing city I have ever visited. Steeped in history and rubbish! We walked through small streets where people in flats with peeling paint hung the washing across the street and shouted to each other as they swept their balconies. Youngsters drove mopeds (on the path or the road – whichever they felt like) without helmets and shrieked at each other. Then straight into a 14th-century church. Through an area with a road that is little more than a dust track, through a poor residential estate, and in the middle is the Fontanelle Cemetery. A very large cave with a beautiful and lovingly cared for collection of around 40,000 skeletons. All piled up neatly and decorated with flowers.
A bit more investigating around Naples found some fantastic restaurants and some stunning buildings. It is a beautiful city, just rather lived in!
We visited Herculaneum, which was buried when Vesuvius erupted, like it’s famous sister, Pompeii. Unlike Pompeii, Herculaneum was preserved by the volcanic ash, so there is a lot more of it survived. It was a wealthy city (richer than Pompeii) and it is quite easy to see how the people lived. And how scary it must have been when the volcano erupted.
We had a great Christmas and were much warmer than last year. We also had a bath and didn’t have to worry about running out of water! A real treat!
We were a bit nervous about traveling home, given how difficult the journey there was, but it was perfect! We had seats on all of the trains and the night train had convertible bed-seats. Much better than the last journey.
It is lovely to be home, though. Back on the BBB. However good the holiday was it is good to come home. And it won’t be long until we will be out exploring on the BBB soon.
It was a great idea to go away during the winter. But the weather here was quite mild while we were away. And it is set to be minus zero for the next few days! Typical! Good job we can keep the stove lit well, now!
I have a sequel to my Homeless Blue Squares! post.
It is published on Medium, here’s the link:
The Blue Square of Homelessness Continues!
Pop over and have a read!
There has been plenty of maintenance work to do on the BBB this year. It hasn’t all got done, though. We have planned to do it, but planning isn’t always enough.
We have started most things…and finished some!
I’m quite a positive person, so I’ll start with what we have done.
The BBB has four 12V batteries. That is great, they provide us with our domestic electricity. They are topped up by the solar panels and the alternator on the engine (as the engine runs it tops up the batteries). The plug sockets are 240V. To get the electricity from 12V batteries to 240V sockets we have an inverter. An inverter is a very clever piece of kit which converts the electricity from 12Vto 240V. But it uses a lot of electricity to do it.
So – the electricity was stored in 12V batteries, then some of it was used by the inverter to make it 240V, to operate the plug sockets, so the fridge and freezer would work. Now – we have a fridge that works straight from the 12V system, so we don’t lose electricity converting it to 240V.
Mobile phone chargers reduce the voltage from the (240V) plug socket to around 5V. So it went: 12V (in the batteries) to 240V (inverter to plug sockets) to 5V (through the charger plug). That is crazy!
Now we only need to put the inverter on occasionally, to watch TV, use the washing machine or charge laptops (although I prefer doing that at the pub)! That makes the charge in the batteries last longer, which is great in the low light winter months (when the solar panels can’t do as much).
We did that ourselves. We removed the old pump out toilet and all of the pipework, which was quite frightening on a new boat! I’m glad we did, it looks great in the bathroom!
I think this list may be the longest section…
We have been quite sensible, though. We have quite a few places where the paint is damaged, so we covered them before the winter weather got here. But we couldn’t always cover them straightaway with the correct colour of paint. A lot of the areas needed primer or red oxide to protect the metal. So The BBB is mainly blue, with patches of gray primer and red oxide. It is starting to resemble a patchwork boat!
But at least it won’t rust!
In the spring we will paint them all blue again.
Looking at the two lists, it doesn’t seem too bad. I think we have done quite well. The BBB is still keeping us warm, the engine and electrics are working brilliantly and the things we need to do are mainly cosmetic. We did all of the things that we needed to do.
I think we should celebrate!
