How We Got Here
Why a boat?
It’s a long story, but now that my husband Roy is retired and I’m doing a lot less writing and editing work I have some time to tell it.
Three or four years ago, I gently hinted to Roy that perhaps he should find a hobby to occupy himself with after retirement. This was mostly with a view to his future happiness, but also with the idea of keeping him busy when he no longer had minions to boss around. Perhaps he could take up pottery, or macramé – or we could join a choir together once again (in preparation for the inevitable).
To my surprise and alarm, he started Googling boats. Surprise because he’d shown zero interest in boating of any sort since we met in 1992, discounting the odd cruise on a floating five-star hotel. Alarm because the boat-builder he had in mind was Nordhavn, purveyor of ocean-going, trawler-style motor yachts that start from around a million-and-a-half US dollars. (Everyone knows that there are two happy days in the life of a boat-owner – the day you buy it and the day you sell it.)
As luck would have it, I’m terribly prone to seasickness. His Nordhavn file was already a couple of inches thick with brochures, and Roy’s customised wheelhouse design almost complete, when the cruise we did on the lovely Silver Shadow from Singapore to Hong Kong proved conclusively that I was not a suitable mate with whom to cross the ocean on 40 to 120 feet of vessel. Phew!
Which boat?
I married a tenacious man, it must be said. When he came up with the idea of a canal barge – a Dutch barge, specifically – designed to ply rivers and canals, I thought: why not? It would at the very least keep him busy. Roy is a man who needs a project; and his most recent one, the gutting and redesign of our Singapore apartment, was finally complete.
If you ask Roy, he’ll tell you he’s been interested in barges ever since he was a boy growing up in in the English Midlands. He even recalls doing a detailed barge design in his early teens. (Who’d have guessed?)
And what an absorbing project it has been! To test the waters (so to speak), we hired a wide-beam barge called the Serenity for a ridiculously warm and sunny week in September 2014, and tootled up and down the Grand Union Canal between Milton Keynes and the charming old canal village of Stoke Bruerne. After some trepidation, I mastered the windlass and conquered the locks, together with any doubts I may have had.
Finding the right boat-builder (Simon Piper of Piper Boats in Stoke-on-Trent) was the next step. Debating the size (49 feet, rather than the physically daunting 75 feet that Roy was inclined to go for) and the number of bedrooms (just one, so as to maximise living space) took several visits to Piper’s offices and quite a lot of verbal stamina on my part.
(I’ve always wanted a TV that disappears from view)
Traditionalists might regard the Karanja with perturbation. For one thing, we dispensed with the traditional stove in the corner of the saloon. Instead, we have a concealed TV that glides up and down at the touch of a button on the remote.
(Is life without a bath worth living?)
For another, I have a full-size bath. What’s more, we’ve maximised the deck space by shifting the dog-box (ceiling hatch) as far aft as possible, surrounded the deck with stainless steel yacht stanchions and covered it with gorgeous flexi-teak. Perfect for my sun-lounger!
Why Karanja?
Karanja was the ship Roy remembers most fondly from his nine years with BI (The British India Steam Navigation Co.) – a passenger cargo vessel that plied the Indian Ocean with stops at Bombay, Karachi, the Seychelles, Mombasa, Dar Es Salaam, Beira, Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) and Durban.
A picture of the original ship now hangs in her namesake’s saloon, and the engraved silver mug that was a 21st birthday gift from his fellow officers gleams from a nearby shelf. (How long it will continue to gleam in the absence of domestic help is a question.)
As for her black-and-white exterior, every BI ship had a black funnel painted with two white bands, and our baby Karanja’s paintwork is a sort of homage to that.
Verne & Roy Titchmarsh
www.travelswithverneandroy.com
