Top speed of Narrowboat appx 5 knots. Top speed of outflowing tidal current of Thames appx 15 knots. Narrowboat draft 0.5 - 1.0 metres. Swell of Thames estuary up to 2.0 metres appx. Although someone did take a narrowboat across the channel once!
Diamond encrusted with special cocaine snorting parlors built into the galley no doubt. Probably based on Dutch Barge with 20 litre engines. Rather than narrowboat with detuned 1.8 litres.
Thanks PeP. I would love a dutch barge - but way out of my league and wouldn't be suitable for what I need. As I will be doing agency work I will need to be able to move between areas easily, and would be nice to be able to take the occasional month off and cruise to some of the more remote stretches, which tend to be too narrow for widebeam. A decent woodburner with back boiler to rads should make it tolerably warm, tho cold in the mornings. I would be continuous cruising initially - moving on every two weeks (in London there's a big enough network that you can do this year round), so avoiding ruinously expensive mooring fees (I got a quote of £9,000 pa from Limehouse basin - the rapacious b*****s!, and even CaRT moorings in London are around £4 - £6k). CaRT licence comes in at around the same as council tax.
Yes there are a few oop north that keep on the move to save money. But it's not ideal if you find somewhere you want to be. One thing you need to have to be a boater is a set of skills (not the Liam Neeson kind) that involve fixing stuff. As sure as the sun comes up, boats have stuff that goes wrong, from leaks to faulty water pumps, changing gas bottle, hand pumping in diesel, servicing engines, electric fusing out, you name it boats are constantly going wrong. If you have the skills or someone nearby that has you're sorted. If not, you're kind of stuffed and ther'se no AA / RAC on the waterways. One bonus is that boaters are generally a friendly helpful bunch. Good luck with finding your new home. (Mum sold her's through this bloke by the way - http://www.nationwidenarrowboatsales.com/)
My Dad used to have a boat on the Thames and wore a t-shirt which proclaimed 'a boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money'!
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