An Indentation in the Water

Résumé du livre

Recent DNA results show that I have some Viking blood in me which is possibly why I have always had the urge to become a mariner. For 20 years I lived afloat in the London Docklands, skippering boats all over Europe. From 2002 to 2012, from the age of 60, I must have bought and sold or skippered over one hundred boats to England from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Most of these boats were old Dutch barges which no other skippers were mad enough to sail across the English Channel. To a large extent it was a way of exploring the continental canals, which I could not otherwise afford to do, and getting paid for it. These accounts of my adventures at sea and on the canals of Europe - from flat calm to mountainous seas, from great friendships to the company from hell, from smooth passages to being rescued by lifeboat - are as much about the people who accompanied me as they are about the journeys. There is no better method of getting to know a person than boating with them, for better or for worse. It is in some ways a journal of the funniest and most poignant stories, and in other ways an instruction book on how not to do it. The one constant is the fact that a boat is an indentation in the water into which you pour endless time and money. Perhaps if the Canal and River Trust gave a copy of this book to everybody who contemplated living on a boat in London, it would solve their problem of too many boats in the capital. Despite this, even the most unwanted and expensive distractions of owning a boat do not impinge on the dream. The freedom of owning a boat and the overriding joy of living on the water put all the mini disasters into the shadow. Rod Taylor