Narrowboating for Beginners

A narrowboat vacation is so unlike anything most Americans have experienced, especially for those of us from the larger states. We’re accustomed to traveling cross-country, across time zones and through several states on interstate highways at 75 mph (or faster). We plan trips where we visit both the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Glacier national parks in a car, station wagon, van, sport utility vehicle or motor home. Distance is the goal.

It’s therefore hard to contemplate a trip at 2 mph where a full day of travel might only be 15 miles, and more likely 10 because you spent all day in a pub. Admittedly you might have spent several hours on a train or in a car getting to your boat hire, but once you’re on the boat, you experience canal time and distance. You’ll often have no television signal, no Internet access and sometimes no cellular access. You wake up with the sun and you go to sleep when it’s dark.

It is important to relax on a narrowboat trip. Use it as an opportunity to display a side of your personality that you never get to use.

And yet a narrowboat trip isn’t necessarily relaxing. As a beginner, you’ll be pretty scared when you’re handed the keys of a 60-foot-long, 15-ton metal boat after 30 minutes of instruction. You’ll feel overwhelmed at your first lock, not really understanding how the darn thing works much less know what’s the first thing to do. But these fears and worries are nothing like the fear of picking the wrong health plan, religious extremism or whether your 401K will survive.

You also might not relax because everything you see is new. You’ll marvel at the genius of the Industrial Revolution and how two simple, wooden gates, a rack and pinion, sluices and paddles can lift a boat uphill or lower it downhill. You’ll wonder: Is that bird a duck or a coot, a goose or a swan, a cormorant or a heron? You’ll enjoy peeking into back gardens and looking at for sale signs and wishing you lived on the water. You’ll slink away after a feral boat person (See “Feral boat people” in How to Steer) yells at you for leaving a wake. You’ll laugh at some hapless boat handler who rams your boat and then you’ll remember that when you do the same later on.

I remember the line from Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol when Scrooge, after his conversion, “found that everything could yield him pleasure.” Even standing in the rain while tying up the boat for the night is now a pleasant memory and afterward sitting with friends at the dinette table, sipping wine and eating cheese, will be one of the memories I cherish the rest of my life.

If you can find the right mix of people for your crew, it’s an amazing opportunity to both test and deepen friendships. If you have children, it’s a chance to spend time away from distractions. Parents and children alike are sobered looking down a deep lock as water comes gushing in to lift a boat. Opening and closing a lock gate has a primal satisfaction for young and old.

For weeks after your trip, you’ll dream about the canal and suddenly realize how you should have negotiated that bridge. Every once in a while, in the shower, you’ll feel your body sway to the slow dance of the boat.

I’m not alone in quoting from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows when Ratty says to Mole: “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”