The Order

Meg and I had been looking for a new boat since we sold Drifter in 1994. Drifter was (still is - see 'Cruising Log 2010!) a Liverpool Boats 34ft cruiser-stern narrowboat with ingenious accommodation for a 2+2 family. But we were outgrowing her and preparing to move back to East Anglia from Cheshire so we parted company.

After we had settled in our new home and organised schools, colleges and jobs we began the search for Drifter No.2. We must have toured every broker and boatyard within a 200-mile radius of Cambridge. The quality of the second-hand market was depressing; we could hardly believe the incredible price tags on some of the old sheds the brokers were trying to shift. If there were any good ones out there, well we missed them. There was always something not quite right with everything we saw.

Then we thought, well, with a little more saving maybe a newly built ‘budget’ boat might be in reach. We hadn’t given much detailed thought to what we wanted; a permanent double and about 50 feet long was about as far as our specification went.

We visited or contacted many boat-builders; it was the old story; what we liked we couldn’t afford and what we could afford wasn’t quite right and we faffed around like this for almost 18 months.

Eventually we had more or less decided to place an order with Liverpool Boats while we were at the 1997 IWA National Waterways Festival at Henley. However, at the show we came across NB ‘Windrush’, the demo boat from Associated Cruisers of Wolverhampton. Despite it being nine o’clock at night, Doug and Margaret, the owners, gave us an enthusiastic guided tour of 'Windrush' and we were goners – this was exactly what we were looking for.

First thing the following morning we met up with Malcolm Till, the builder, who showed us over ‘Windrush’ again and explained the deal. We parted with a deposit cheque on the spot for a 50-foot Associated Cruisers narrow-boat with a delivery date of ‘some time next summer’ and went back to our camp-site tent giggling like a couple of school-kids. We had just ordered a new boat; now all we had to do was to work out how the hell we were going to pay for it.