Boat Life - Expectations Verses Reality

We’ve lived aboard our narrowboat for over 5 years now and I’ve been thinking about whether living on a boat has lived up to my expectations, both the positive and not so positive ones. 

Before we committed to buying a boat, we had tried to do as much research as possible, well as much as we could do from halfway around the world. I don’t think you can really know what a life afloat is like until you have lived aboard through all the seasons and really gotten to see the highs and the lows. Many people recommend trying a hire boat holiday before taking the plunge and moving onto water full time, and that certainly does seem to be good advise, but you can only learn so much in a week or two on a boat that someone else is responsible for, you are unlikely to have to deal with the emptying of the toilet and if anything mechanical goes wrong you can just call the base. Plus, on a hire boat you are most definitly in holiday mode, you have left work and responsibility behind, you are probably dining out quite a bit and once you moor up you can just relax and read or explore. When you live and work aboard there is always a long list of jobs to do. We still meet people at locks, who after five or ten minutes of chatting wave us off with a cheery shout of ‘enjoy the rest of your holiday’. It always makes me smile as while full time boat life can be wonderful, it is definitely not a holiday.

I remember someone commenting on one of our videos with something along the lines that shouldn’t complain about our issues as we were living their dream. I mean firstly you really shouldn’t tell someone what they can or cant express about their feelings or experiences, but there was also the implication that once you move onto a boat all your problems magically go away. We’ve always tried to be honest about our experiences on Perseverance because boat life it isn’t always easy, and it most definitely isn’t a ‘cure all’ for your problems. If you get depression, you will still experience that on a narrowboat. If you suffer with mental heath issues, they don’t disappear when you move aboard. We probably haven’t spoken about this side of our lives as much as we have wanted but we are still navigating our way through it all and hope to address it one day. 

When we found Perseverance we were both excited and apprehensive. Change isn’t always easy when you have struggles with your mental health and we had just given up work and moved from the US. Even in 2017, boats were selling fast and we were worried that we wouldn’t find ‘our’ boat or that we would over pay or buy a dud. We knew that there were a few jobs we wanted to tackle fairly quickly, swiping out the toilet and installing solar panels being at the top of the list, but we weren’t prepared for how quickly we would have to start fixing problems. 

We can see now that we made a good choice and we love our narrowboat but those first few months were hard. In hindsight the things that went wrong at the beginning weren’t too bad but at the time they defiantly felt big, especially when YouTube viewers kept reminding us that BOAT actually stood for Bring Out Another Thousand, not helpful when you had just deposited a hefty chunk of your savings buying the boat in the first place.

 We definitely weren’t expecting such a steep learning curve. It was fairly hard to find ourselves limping back to the marina with our dud batteries after leaving in triumph the day before. And we definitely should not have stupidly agree to let the marina engineer look at the electrics in the pouring rain while charging us by the hour to effectively do nothing to the boat that the very same marina took a hefty commission selling to us. Lesson most definitely learnt there. Finding our old batteries were duds lead to us investing in some lithium batteries that have done us proud ever since. We probably would have ended up with lithium’s at some point anyway but it wasn’t great having to rush to make that decision so quickly. In those first few weeks before the battery change electricity on the boat was scarce. We only had the inverter on for an hour or so a day and when I could finally work on my laptop all day after the switch over it felt like such a luxury. The other thing that we needed to change immediately was the toilet. Perseverance came with her original pump out toilet and tank and, we couldn’t work out why at the time but the tank would fill up in a matter of days. This lead to us having to make a very rushed decision on a replacement solution, because who could afford to pump out that often. We went for a separator toilet which we installed on the Thames outside Hampton Court Palace. Memorably we had just placed the old pump out on the bow when Gloriana, the queens row barge went past. Luckily, Her Majesty wasn’t aboard at the time. 

We also found four places where rain water was leaking into the boat. The back hatch, one of the mushroom caps, where the old arial was fixed to the roof and one of the saloon windows. Each time one of these issues came to light it was another little dent in our dream. It’s really not great to wake up in the middle of the night hearing rain dripping onto the floor of your bedroom. It makes seriously question whether you have made a bad decision, had we chosen the wrong boat or even the wrong lifestyle. We didn’t want boat maintenance to be taking up so much of our time. There were other things we needed to focus our time and headspace on. So while we had expected to have a few teething problems, we hadn’t really expected there to be so many. I think if your looking to buy a boat to live aboard then buy one that has been used as a live aboard. Perseverance had definitely only been used as a holiday boat before she was ours and I dont think she had been out of the marina much in the months before we got her. So those little issues that we found straight away were simply not known about. 

Those early weeks on the River Wey, Basingstoke Canal and Thames are a bit of a blur now to be honest. They were wonderful but definitely tarnished by us doubting our choices and the mundanity of having to make so many runs to hardware stores on foot and cobble together solutions to problems we didn’t anticipate. There was definitely a learning curve and it was steep. Godalming will always be the remember for being the place where our electrics blew up my laptop charger. There was smoke coming off it! In Mychette we discovered just how bad our pump out toilet was. On the Frimly locks our transmission cable snapped. The list goes on… but it wasn’t all bad of course. We got to learn just how helpful the narrowboat community can be which is a sentiment that was echoed by many people on social media when I did a quick poll of whether boat life was as it was expected to be. And of course once we got onto the K&A we were joined by our George. 

So after those first few weeks and months and once we had addressed all the little and not so little issues with the boat. Was life afloat everything we thought it would be? I’m honestly not sure. It’s both harder and more magical than I expected. Once I had stopped waking myself up in the middle of every night to make sure hadn’t floated off down the cut I started to sleep really well on the water. The funniest thing is waking up in the morning trying to remember where about in the country you are moored, I still do it now even though we have now been on the same mooring for three months. When you open the bow door you need to check what side you need to turn to step off the boat, whilst making sure George does the same so he doesn’t leap strain into the water by mistake. Continuously cruising definitely doesn’t bring as much freedom as I expected. I really hated having to plan five months of cruising through winter stoppages, especially when we ran into unpublished stoppages. Before living aboard I thought we would simple wake up each mooring and decide that day if we wanted to cruise that day and then just stop when we had had enough. But the reality is there are so many things to plan for. More often than we wanted we needed to get ourselves to a train station for one reason or another. And then there is keeping on top of the fuel and water and groceries and other supplies, then once I had started shipping maps and earrings from the boat I needed to make sure I could get to a post office every few days. I mean its not hard to do, but it does definitely have a big impact on when and how far you move.