About Narrowboat Insights

Although this book is primarily for boating novices or those contemplating acquiring or hiring a narrowboat, I hope experienced skippers will enjoy reading the stories and reliving similar events from their past.

The book is all about learning to become a competent narrowboat captain. The book is part adventure

story and part training manual. It’s essentially ‘learn by example’ via a collection of twenty narrowboat journeys that took place over the period 2005 to 2020 when Covid forced their end.

The book is not a travelogue. All the locations mentioned have excellent descriptions and images online and elsewhere. No, it’s a piece about family and friends and their adventures on hired narrowboats. It’s about the pleasures of spending a week or two aboard these quaint craft. It’s about recovering from mistakes and learning from those experiences. And finally, it’s about living in the moment in a parallel universe as glorious British countryside drifts by at less than four miles per hour.

Andrew Denny, well known as Granny Buttons, Britain’s foremost waterways blogger and Waterways World magazine assistant editor said: “I wish more people would record their holidays in such warm terms and tell us their stories.”

And of the many insights in the book, he said: “I particularly liked the one ‘Driving a narrowboat is akin to steering a shopping trolley’...” 

Waterways World magazine has published abridged versions of two chapters – in the February 2022 and September 2023 issues.