Balancing the continuous cruiser thinking
EACH time someone on narrowboatworld has a go at continuous cruisers (aka, now, boaters 'without a home mooring'), I feel the need to balance out some of the thinking behind the jibes, writes Suzanne MacLeod.
This time, Paul Lillie, hapless MD of Pillings Marina, steps up to the critics' plate. Says he:
6,000 continuous cruisers
'A conservative guess is also that there are 6,000 continuous cruisers, although we all know what that term means in most cases. A well publicised article in September 2013 said 67 boats per month were registering as Continuous Cruisers—that means at a conservative £2k per boat in mooring fees, £1.6m per year was leaving the marina industry and going onto the towpath. Where is the compromise from CaRT for providing a free ride for our formerly paying clients?'
Among the forces at play here is that we all make purchase decisions based partly on perception of value offered. Yes—it is valuable and pleasant to rent a marina berth that provides security, parking, a range of essential services and maybe some additional ones easily to hand; or an on-line mooring with perhaps fewer of those benefits.
Completely rational choice
You pay your money, you get the benefits. In Mr Lillie's eyes, many continuous cruisers are getting a 'free ride'. Well, yes—whilst foregoing all of the benefits of an organised mooring, and instead needing to work much harder to subsist! That seems a completely rational choice to me. If cruisers are doing it within the law, why not? And if the law is unjust or unenforceable and confers an 'unfair' advantage to cruisers, then it's up to marina operators and others with a grievance to lobby CaRT to get the law either enforced or else revised (as a judge has recently suggested), and a waste of breath to blame cruisers for that situation.
But free-riding (see how easily you can imagine this is a positive thing) has benefits that a marina struggles to provide. For one thing, being closer to nature than to your jetty neighbours. Still, it's hardly 'free': the licence costs a fair amount of money, and I for one take it to permit me to live on the waterways within the law.
Relative freedom
In the highly regulated Britain of today, cruisers like myself value above all the relative freedom to live informally, exploring and enjoying the hedgerows and the countryside all around us, leaving a very small footprint indeed, and hopefully unassailed by the bitter words of some of the more land-bound.
Living aboard my boat all the time, I too sometimes get a bit irritated with people who tie up their boats in handy spots on the cut for two weeks at a time, lead another life elsewhere, and then come and shift the boat at the week-end to remain compliant. But I recognise that I don't really have much cause for irritation: it's not as if vast tracts of the towpath are thus occupied, there's usually space for me to moor happily enough, and these are just people running their boats as they see fit within the law.
Besides, what a bind it must be to have to pull your boat around every fortnight, retrieve the car, and then go 'home' till next time, perhaps fretful about the security of the boat meanwhile.
Benefits of a marina
I have been enjoying the benefits of a marina for a few weeks while the tail end of a wet winter makes boating less than a great pleasure, and I'm more than happy to pay the modest amount asked. I do understand and sympathise with the issues arising for marina operators from dealings with CaRT. Nevertheless, if you run a commercial business I believe it's up to you to attract and retain customers with good value for price, and not find yourself in the rather weak position of blaming ex—or would-be—customers for running or staying away.