Our Narrowboat

Welcome to our website.

We are a group of people who enjoy spending time aboard narrowboats on the UK’s inland waterways.

The cost of owning a narrowboat is quite high, too high for the average person! Apart from the initial capital outlay (£20,000 … £100K+), you have an annual cost to keep her, here are but a few:

• Canal & River Trust license;
• Insurance;
• Mooring;
• Servicing;
• Hull blacking;
• Repairs.

Not to mention your time involved in making sure all the above (and more) are taken care of.

A typical 63 foot narrowboat costs around £8,000 a year to maintain and typically spends only three or four weeks each year actually in use.

We think that shared ownership is a much better solution: All of the costs are spread between several owners, for example with 10 owners the above £8K each year comes down to £800 – each owner would get at least 4 weeks of time aboard which equates to a fairly low cost holiday!

The hire cost of a typical narrowboat for a week is around £2,000

Interested? Get in touch and lets talk.

We have been “into” narrowboats now since 1999, after a ten day cruise on a rented 72ft narrowboat. We got round the four counties ring on that holiday and have been hooked ever since!

We then bought our own boat – “Adia”, a 40ft Springer manufactured in 1974. We did quite a bit of refurbishing, learning a lot about narrowboats as a result.

Our second boat was Morpheus, after we sold our Internet company, we designed the layout and had her built by Weltonfield boat builders. We then took a two year sabattical, living aboard and cruising the waterways of the UK – we had a fantastic time!

Unfortunately, real life intervened and we had to stop living aboard: Our daughter was coming up on 3yrs old and needed to start pre-school, and we needed to earn a living! The plan was only ever to live aboard for a couple of years, however much we would have liked to stay on.

Morpheus is a lovely boat, she cost nearly £120,000 by the time we’d finished adding all those “little extras” and she sat unused for the majority of the year – such a waste! We didn’t want to sell her, but we didn’t want her to sit unused for the majority of the year either. Renting her out was a none starter with the cost of insurance.

So that’s when we came up with this idea – we can sell shares in her, other like minded folk can buy a portion of her and she will hopefully be used and loved for most of the year.

Anyone who owns a share within this scheme can swap weeks with any other member of the scheme, this means you can have a different holiday each year if you want.

We also encourage weekend jaunts, so you can swap weekends with anyone else on the scheme if you fancy a weekend away. If you fancy several weekends away, you can request time from other peoples slots and if they are willing, all you do is pay them the portion of their annual maintenance fees for the period you use the boat over and above your own allocation.

Each boat is “split up” into shares. Each share is a portion of time on the boat. We work on a week basis, each week starts at mid-day on a Saturday and runs to mid-day the following Saturday, although by prior arranagement with the owner of the adjacent share to you, it is possible to arrange a different handover day or time – flexibility is what we want to achieve to benefit all owners!

When you buy a share, you are buying a part ownership in the boat. You pay a one off purchase price for your share, you then own that share for life, or until you sell it on (which you are free to do at any time and at any price you choose).

Boats are expensive things to run, no-one buys an average narrowboat as an investment, in fact when we bought our first boat, the company selling her to us said (after we’d signed the agreement) “You know what you’ve just bought? A hole in the water to pour money into” – they were not wrong, we spent thousands of pounds on that first boat and when we eventually sold her, we didn’t even break even! That’s why shared ownership is so popular – you are sharing all these expensive running costs between several other like minded people.

Each share will vary in price, depending what time of the year it falls in. The summer period being the most expensive and the winter months being the cheapest. Whichever shares you buy, you can always request a swap with another owner, or even offer to “buy” another persons time, by paying their running costs for the period you want to use. All this is done automatically via your own personal login on our web portal.

The only other cost is the running costs of the boat: this is totalled for the year, you then pay your percentage of this for each share you buy. So if you bought a month, you would pay 1/12th of the annual running costs. You can pay this monthly, quarterly or annually – whichever is easiest for you.

The following are all included in the annual running costs:

• British Waterways licence;
• Fully comprehensive insurance;
• Engine servicing;
• Maintenance of all onboard systems;
• Gas for cooking;
• Contingency fund for future repairs;
• Management fee.

This means that all you need to pay for when you go on holiday is your food and your diesel – you must return the boat with the fuel tank full for the next person, that way you only pay for what you use.

Each boat comes with almost everything you will need for your holiday, including:

• Pots, pans and coooking implements;
• Crockery, knives, forks, spoons, etc;
• Mop & bucket, dusters, cloths, etc;
• Pillows, duvets, extra blankets;
• Road and Canal maps;
• A few books and other “general” reading material;
• Radio;
• CD Player;
• Television;
• Gas stove and oven;
• Microwave;
• Fridge/Freezer;
• Washing machine.

All you need to bring are:

• Food;
• Clothes;
• Your own sheets, pillowcases and duvet covers.

Telephone: +44 (0)1844 220033 during normal office hours, you can also try your luck over the weekend, but if no-one answers please do leave us a voicemail, with your contact number and we will call you back.

Or you can fill out the form below:

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