There are boats for the inland waterways and there are sea-going craft. But we needed to find one that could do both. As both my husband, Simon, and I are retired, we like to spend five months of the year living and cruising on our boat. Prior to 2020, we’d spend most of that time pottering slowly through the waterways of Holland on our comfortable Dutch steel cruiser. However, since Brexit restrictions came in, limiting us to 90 days in the EU in any 180-day period, we had to find something that would also be capable of crossing the North Sea in reasonable time and comfort.
It took us several attempts to find our perfect boat. First we bought a Beneteau Swift Trawler 44 – a lovely boat, originally built for the 2012 Olympics. Its twin 300hp engines and semi-displacement hull made light work of crossing the North Sea but at the cost of quite a lot of fuel. Then there was the issue of its air draft, which at 12ft 8in with the mast folded was too high to fit under many of the bridges spanning the Dutch waterways. Reluctantly, we decided it wasn’t
