I moved to live on a narrowboat full time from late March 2021. That involved packing up a house-load of things — some had to go, some to a storage container, and a few things onto the boat.
Why a narrowboat? I’ve been wanting try the narrowboating life for 20 something years. I had a taste for about six months over the winter of 2019-2020 and even with the cold of winter and a beautiful but not ideal boat, I was hooked on this life. I’ll dig into the Why of Narrowboating in a separate note.
Sometimes things work out the way you want them to. I spent most of 2020 and early 2021 looking for the right boat. That mostly meant browsing Apollo Duck and the boat broker websites and falling (temporarily) in love with boats that sold to somebody else before I was prepared to buy. Narrowboats have become very popular during COVID times, prices are up and the supply of boats for sale was and continues to be very limited.
Finally ready to buy, the right boat showed up and as the barriers to owning her dropped away smoothly, I ended up falling in love with, and then actually buying the narrowboat Caparina from ABNB.
That’s the beginning of the story. I’ll write more of the Why and How in later posts.