On Valentine’s day last year my husband and I were in a pub talking about getting a bigger boat. I said that my perfect boat would be a 70 foot narrowboat, green, with side hatches and a ‘boatman’s cabin’. I’ve always fancied having the living room at the front of the boat with glass doors to the front deck so that you can look out at the glistening water up ahead.

Way back when I was looking for my first boat I feasted my eyes on glossy waterways magazines and caught trains all over England to boatyards full of gleaming paintwork and tongue and groove interiors. More than ten years later things have changed and so much of the searching can be done on the internet. After a couple of weeks of casual browsing, my husband sent me an email with no words, just a link to an online boat brokerage. At Boatshed Grand Union there are up to eighty photos of each second hand boat for sale so you can get a really good idea of what a boat is like before going to view it.

There, before my eyes was a 70 foot narrowboat, green, with side hatches and a boatman’s cabin. The living room was at the front of the boat with double glass doors to the front deck so that you could look out at the glistening water up ahead.

Phil, the boat broker said that I could come up to see it the next day. So while my husband went to work I took the kids on the train to Hertfordshire to see the boat. It was a golden sunshiney day: The boat was perfect. We put in an offer and I told Phil that I was moving to Hertfordshire and looking for work.
‘Do you need any help at Boatshed?’

The next day the vendor accepted our offer. I know that we were lucky, but it seemed like such an efficient way to buy a boat. The photos had shown us so much of the boat; the good bits and the bad bits, that we knew it was just what we were looking for.

After we’d bought the boat and moved on board I chased Phil up about helping him at Boatshed and after an eventful interview on his boat where I drank his wine and he broke his leg (another story) he agreed to let me become a part of Boatshed Grand Union! So that is how and why I came to work for Boatshed, the world’s number one yacht brokerage: Global reach and local knowledge.

What’s your perfect boat? Browse canal and narrowboats for sale at Boatshed Grand Union.

Peggy Melmoth
www.narrowboatwife.blogspot.com