A boat yard comparatively near us built standard boats. It was High Line Yachting Limited. I think they don’t do that anymore but are still in business.
http://high-line.co.ukThey built a boat range called the Euro Boat at £900/ ft fully finished. So that would be £56000. They might also have built us the basic shell, complete with electrics and plumbing enough for a boat safety certificate and we could fit out the rest as a hobby prior to moving in?
Two other companies seem to be in the right ball park. They are Liverpool boats (£65,000 70ft fully fitted) and Tritton Boat Fitters. One in Liverpool (duh!) and one in Manchester.
We had also seen a boat on sale from Alechurch, 67ft with a layout that could be adapted, it’s a 13 year old ex-hire cruiser so may have had a hard life. It’s £38,000.
Finances are worrying, buying a boat is fine but living until the state pension cuts in may be very tight. Current estimates put likely income in the £15k range. We were trying to budget on that but may need out of season work to top up. Not quite our ideal but still better than a fully stressed out life.
Off to HighLine Yaughting to meet John Bolsom. He was very helpful and the first question was ‘have you got a mooring’. We discussed our ideas and he assured us that winter moorings or short terms at their boatyard would not be a problem. We then went through our ideas and came out with 70 feet and a guess of £80,000. John was very knowledgeable and as far as I could tell not in the business of building boats or running moorings but of taking your problems away. We saw him re-assuring an owner about all the admin details of his boat all safely filed in a pocket on the wall. We went to the Packet Boat Marina to see two boats being fitted out, one was a ‘Euroboat’ the other bespoke. They both looked good.
The next day we explored Iver and, to be frank, didn’t like it. We couldn’t imagine staying there for any length of time. The realisation also made Jo come out with ‘I don’t want to leave Alton’.
So now our plans would have to change, maybe rent the house out for the summer, or leave our son in it paying rent whilst we went long distance cruising. We wouldn’t have to worry about the cats or Jo’s Wild West Gear, or demolishing my railway (the one I’ve now demolished!). Financially it was a bit harder so the new boat was probably not on. So we decided to focus on 2nd hand boats and asked John to put the plans for a new one on hold.
In the meantime life at work was getting a lot more interesting, I was back to playing with state of the art technology and had new customers too. Perhaps I didn’t want to pack it all in!
Cheers Graham
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