Friday, October 21, 2011

Walking and the Shadow

I knew NB Shadow was going to be arriving in Thrupp sometime so I took a walk up the towpath to enjoy the autumn day and see if I could spot them.

The cement works looked lovely in the light:

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I spotted them at Shipton lock so we turned around and raised the lift bridge for them

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It was a beautiful day and once they had moored up we took tea together at Annies. Afterwards they took Boots for a walk over the fields while I got on with some reading I needed to do.  By the time Boots returned home I had finished my work and he was exhausted so I left him in bed and dined on board Shadow for a most enjoyable evening. 

These share boats really are fantastic. This is the first one I have been on and they are so different to my limited experience of hire boats. I wonder why more people don’t have a share.  If NB Shadow is anything to go by, they are really rather homely and much more like the boats I have seen people living aboard.

4 Comments:

Blogger ditchcrawler said...

I think Share boats are great if you are limited to boating during your annual holiday. We had one for 8 years.
Brian

7:00 PM  
Blogger artymess said...

how do these work ? are they private shares or run by a company ?.....

9:00 PM  
Blogger Halfie said...

artymess, if Bones will allow me to reply via her comments ...

The way it works with most shared ownership boats is this: The boat is fully owned by the members of a syndicate. In our case there are effectively nine of us. As a syndicate we choose to have our boat managed by a boat share company, in our case it's BCBM. We pay them to look after the maintenance of the boat and the booking system for who has which weeks. Many boats have 12 owners, each entitled to about four weeks per year. Some time is lost to winter maintenance. It is not like timeshare in that we can book from year to year which weeks we would like. Obviously the maintenance costs are split between the owners, and we each pay a management fee to BCBM.

Some shared ownership schemes "self-manage", that is, they sort out the maintenance and who has which weeks themselves. Cheaper, but with the potential for conflict, and a lot of work for someone!

I've had Shadow for about ten years now (formerly with OwnerShips, a company which collapsed), and it suits us very well as we both have limited hoidays.

Halfie (Shadow)

10:37 PM  
Blogger Halfie said...

Bones, it was a delight to have you on board. And I survived the walk with Boots!

10:39 PM  

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