New boat - new plans

It was part of our retirement plans to get a bigger boat so we could go on longer cruises. Our previous boat Mind Like Water was basically a single room floating caravan which was fine for the 2 week cruise that we could manage while working but less practical for longer cruises (i.e. 2-3 months) that we plan to do after retirement. Andrew retired from lecturing in August 2021 and Alison will retire from the GMB union in early March 2022.

So… As we were doing this year's IWA lock wind in early August 2021 near Venetian Marina where we bought Mind Like Water, we thought we could go and have a look at what they had on sale - just to start gathering information about what is around of course…

Anyway… a chap from Venetian came to look at Mind Like Water and we went to look at two boats. One was a bit too long at 60ft and also had a rather poor internal fitout done by the previous owner. 

But the other one was the right length (57ft), quite nice and reasonably priced. When Venetian then offered us more for Mind Like Water than we had paid for her 7 years ago, we decided to make an offer on the other boat - Ganzee.

The survey came back with no nasty surprises and less than a month after the lock wind we owned the new boat! We will be renaming her to Vegvisir (the Icelandic / Viking compass symbol which means Way Seer or Path Finder). 

This photo shows the two boats moored end-to-end as we moved our stuff across. It doesn't really show the difference in the length of the two boats. At 57ft, Vegvisir is getting on for twice as long as Mind Like Water.


We have handled a longer boat before. Our share boat Sojourn was also 57ft and we both did our RYA Helmsman Certificates on a 57ft boat. No doubt it will come back to us!

Certainly the move from Venetian Marina back to Nantwich Canal Centre went smoothly enough. It involved reversing off the pontoon then round the corner to get a pump-out and fill up with diesel.

At the other end, we needed to turn at the end of Nantwich basin then reverse into our new mooring spot. We were very glad that Nantwich Canal Centre has a longer mooring become available at the start of September as it's so convenient for getting into Nantwich.

The only issue we had was Andrew not taking his own advice and narrowly escaping a trip to A&E. He has said repeatedly to canal novices to never, ever put any part of yourself between the boat and anything else... However, while reversing into our new mooring, we were about to make contact with the neighbouring boat. So Andrew put his foot out to fend off, totally misjudging how much heavier this new boat is. Foot got rather bruised by being squeezed and rolled between the boats but narrowly avoided serious injury. A good reminder to always pay attention....

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