The Beginning

I bought a boat. It was a Tuesday, what else was I going to do?

After seeing at least twenty, probably closer to thirty different narrowboats, considering one which then sold the next day, putting an offer on another which was rejected, (for which I’m very grateful!) I finally found the right one. Thinking about it for about five minutes was enough – I went to the office and put in an offer, pretty close to the asking price. The boat had only been for sale for three days, so a lower offer simply wouldn’t be accepted, and I’d been seeing how quickly they were being snapped up.

They (the marina) came back with a counter offer – a small amount off the price of the boat, but they’d also black the hull free of charge. (Blacking a boat is cleaning the bottom of it, then painting the bottom of it with a black bitumen based paint, to stop it going rusty. There’s other options, but I’ll cover the whole subject of blacking another day!) Again, having seen how quickly narrowboats were selling, and generally for asking price, I accepted.

The next step is getting the boat surveyed to see if there’s any issues with it, and to make sure it’ll pass the boat safety certificate – another thing I’ll go through separately. Part of the agreement to buy the boat is that the marina would fix any safety or insurance issues mentioned in the survey – I still had to pay to get the boat out of the water so it could be surveyed, and for the survey itself, neither of which are cheap! (There will be a whole section about the costs involved in owning and running a narrowboat. As a bit of a heads up, ‘boat’ stands for ‘Bring Out Another Thousand’.)

It took about two months from handing over a lot of money, to being able to move aboard the boat. It went into a queue at the marina for works (nothing major) to be carried out.

Before The Beginning

Back in January, during another marathon narrowboat research session, reading blogs, forums, websites, and watching videos on YouTube about people living aboard, a thought popped into my head: I suddenly thought, out of nowhere, ‘Beers Aboard’ would be a great YouTube channel name. Obviously, that name would be taken on YouTube, as a website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. So I checked, because if they already exist, I want to see them! None of them; not a single one had been taken.

To be clear: I had/have no intention of trying to be a YouTuber etc. I just wanted to vaguely document my journey on the boat so I could look back on it in the future. So, I immediately started signing up for all accounts I thought I might potentially use, and shared the idea with my friend David. Within minutes, he’d bought the beersaboard.co.uk website and made the logo for it. (The original logo had a beard, but as mine is terrible, another friend, Tom, removed the beard, and that’s the logo that’s still being used today. (I can’t see it ever changing!))

So, having all accounts that I thought I might reasonably use, and a few I’m pretty sure I will never use, the only thing missing was the boat itself. So if you started reading this section first, scroll back up!