height of small blocks of fl ats, ranked a little too high on our
personal Fearometer.
Option three, and the one that sounded the most fun: go straight
down the middle. Using France’s 5,000 miles of navigable rivers and
canals, a boat can cruise from the English Channel all the way to the
Med. Just take the Seine into Paris. Then the Marne to Épernay and
the glorious Champagne region. From there it’s into the canal system
proper, squeezing through the 280-plus locks that would take us on a
roller-coaster ride over France’s central hills and mountains, down to
the meandering River Saône and on to the huge, fast-fl owing watery
superhighway that is the Rhône. Door to door, a little over 1,400
miles. It sounded like a plan.
The only concern? Size. Back in 1897, one Charles de Freycinet,
France’s minister of public works at the time, pushed through
a law standardising the dimensions of all French canal locks at
128 feet long and 17 feet wide. Bridges would have a minimum
clearance of 11.4 feet. For some reason he failed to take into
account that 119 years later a pair of novice boating ex-pats in a
56ft Dutch steel trawler with a supposed air draft of just over
11ft would want to pass under one of his bridges without losing
their heads.BUYING THE DREAM
For years it had been a bucket-list dream of me and my wife, Mary
Webb, to live on a boat and cruise, to do it while we were still
(relatively) young – in our late 50s – and to be agile enough to enjoy
the experience. And to still work part-time from the boat.
As we’d lived in the States for the past 20-odd years – I’m a Brit,
my wife’s a Yank – the original plan was to buy a trawler in Florida.
We’d ‘Do The Loop’, cruising America’s Great Circle Route up the
eastern seaboard, into the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi
to the Gulf of Mexico. Trouble was, most of the cool places we’d go
through – Washington D.C, New York, Chicago, Tightwad,
Missouri – we’d already visited many times through work. Well,
maybe not the last place.
Why not buy a boat in Europe and cruise there? Why not indeed.
So three years ago, we fl ogged everything; the waterfront home in
Tampa, Florida, the beachfront condo on the Gulf of Mexico, my
treasured ’76 Cadillac Eldorado convertible land-yacht. Our garage
sale could have been hosted by Sothebys.
After days, weeks, months of scouring the internet, we found a
full-displacement 56-foot steel AlmTrawler being sold by a broker
just outside Amsterdam. It had been built in 2005 by the DeAlm yardWe loved the entrenched boating culture,
the mix of deep-water canals and wide rivers,
a huge inland sea, and easy access to the Baltic
The sun sets on another
beautiful day in HollandThe spacious saloon
on board NomadeWillemstad, a moated fortress
town from the 16th century, in
the south of Holland