I know this guy. Lets call him Steve to protect the innocent. Steve is one of the most interesting guys I know. He was brought up in Ireland and came of age in the late 60s. He built a successful career in the music business among other things working with Jimi Hendrix as a tour manager and then founding a very successful independent label in the 70s which he sold to a big international label.
Steve is never one to do anything you might call orthodox. That would be boring. Sometime in the late 90s, he was visiting a friend in Amsterdam who had been a drummer for the British ska band Madness. This drummer lived on a canal boat.
Steve took a shine to the boat and became enamored with the idea of living on a canal boat in London. He could picture long weekends pootling up to Henley, exploring the East Coast of England. On a whim he bought the boat you see in this picture in Holland. The thing was that Steve had no experience of boats at all. The second thing was that he had to get it back to London.
Somehow he got the boat through the canals to the Dutch coast. Knowing Steve, probably using a road map. Then he had the small matter of the Northern end of the Channel to cross. I asked Steve how he did it.
“Well, I waited a couple of days till the weather seemed good enough and then I just followed the ferries.”
Unknowingly, Steve had crossed one of the busiest, stormiest, sandbank strewn , miserable patches of water just by following the ferries from Ostend to the English coast.
To this day, I don’t think he quite knows how lucky he is.