Living aboard a boat: on the coast, or on the canals and rivers?
If you are considering living aboard, which is the cheaper option - on the coast and sea, or inland on the canals and rivers?
Inland marinas on the UK canal network operate at a large scale
Living aboard is a big topic and embraces a huge range of very different lifestyles, with a gamut of boldness and adventure, from cups of tea and vintage engines on the canal cut, to long distance sailing on the open ocean.
This post offers some introductory, practical and cost-focused thoughts on a topic we will come back to.
The details and prices are based on the UK context, though some of the principles can be applied more generally.
If you are considering living aboard completely from scratch, then a strategic decision is whether to go inland, on the river and canal network, or whether to go to a coastal location, on a boat suitable for use on the sea.
A river or canal boat can give you more choice on principal base location, enabling you to choose inland and nodal locations, such as Birmingham and the Midlands on the Grand Union and other canals, or areas of Lancashire or Yorkshire on the Leeds to Liverpool canal route. A boat on the Thames could have you based in southwest London or Berkshire or Oxfordshire.
However, in the UK, from a libertarian perspective, the inland waters deliver something of a cold douche of licences, regulations, mandatory costs and fees, and inspections.
The UK national canal and waterways network is managed and regulated by the Canal and River Trust, the CRT. This is the successor to the old, nationalised, British Waterways. To put your boat on the waters of the CRT, you need a licence, and the annual fee is not a nominal sum. The price depends on the size of your boat, but very easily you could find yourself paying out around £1000 or more per year. In broad terms, a Council Tax kind of amount.
It is possible, having paid this fee, to Continuously Cruise (CC) around the CRT waterways, keeping your boat moving around, parking up for a few days at a time at a bankside mooring, taking advantage of CRT fresh water taps to fill tanks and pump out stations to empty them, then motoring a bit up the canal. This technique avoids the additional cost of having a permanent mooring in an inland marina or canal dock. This is what a few thousand boaters do in Greater London, to avoid the extreme costs of conventional accommodation in the UK capital. However, there is tension between CCers and the CRT, as CCing in this way, perhaps with the boat moving but not moving very far, is not really what the CC rules were designed for. The particularly large numbers of CCers in London mean it can be hard to find a parking space for a boat on the capital’s canals. This breeds resentment from some of the leisure boaters, and boaters who are paying large fees for moorings in inland marinas. The CRT has already been scoping out opinion on differential licence fees for CCers, charging the CCers more and, as CRT frequently complains that it needs more money, it is likely this will happen in the future. Therefore, to go on the CRT waterways now, it is certain you will have no control over your future base costs, but moreover it is probable you will face additional charges for living aboard and/or for CCing without a base mooring.
It is possible to avoid the CRT regime by going on a river that has a separate licence scheme, like the Thames or Avon. Although if you want to travel from these rivers on to other waterways, you may need to use CRT canals, necessitating again the purchase of the CRT licence. Having said that, the Thames in particular is a long, varied and attractive river, and perhaps you would never really need or want to travel beyond it. I spoke to one boater who had lived aboard a 42 foot Dutch steel cruiser on the Upper Thames for several years, most of the time CCing, so it can be done.
To purchase any of these licences, you will need to first go through another bureaucratic process, a Boat Safety Scheme inspection, to obtain a Boat Safety Scheme (BSS) Certificate. The inspection costs £300 to £400, typically, and the Certificate lasts four years.
In addition, you will need boat insurance, another cost item.
From the bureaucracy and financial standpoints, it must be said that a lot of these hassles and costs can be avoided by going coastal - no BSS is required, and if you need a harbour licence for your home harbour area, this is unlikely to be more than £50 or £60 a year, a lot less than CRT. Some boatyards and marinas insist on insurance, although enforcement of the rule is not always energetic.
However, if you are holding down a job or some kind of regular lifestyle, then you will likely need a berth where you can step between boat and land at all states of tide, without getting ankle deep in mud. The ultimate solution in this regard is a pontoon berth in a marina, but of course this is the most expensive option. As a guide, for a boat of around 30 feet, a marina berth will cost at least £150 a month at this time, with these cheapest options being in the east of England. £200 or so a month would be more of a going rate across the different regions and yards for a 30 footer, although Weymouth and Poole areas, and Brighton, are notably more expensive.
Moving downmarket and cheaper, there are tidal mud moorings in places like Canvey Island and other parts of Essex, where your boat would be alongside a jetty.
Cheaper still would be a drying mooring near the shore in a river or creek, where you could walk to the boat on sand or stiff mud at low tide (but your boat would be afloat at high tide, so you would need a dinghy to reach it). There are moorings like this in Devon, but the moorings close to shore tend to be for smaller boats. And most of the boats in the Devon rivers are lifted out and stored ashore for the winter, as the weather can be wild. With no nearby water taps or electrical power points, this kind of approach is an off-grid option.
Is it possible to moor and live aboard a boat on the UK coast and in the estuaries without any mooring charges? For free, or for close to free? That is a topic for another post.