Waterdog has been our home since 1996, starting in Goole, East Yorkshire, with a dream of refurbishing her and cruising the French canals. We were towed to our first dry docking in Hull 2002, where we got her old engine (Gardner 4LW 48HP) going and cruised her on the Humber and the Aire & Calder canal in Yorkshire. In the next dry docking in Hull 2008, we replaced the old engine with a new Ford Mermaid Mariner (135HP), and had an electric bow thruster fitted. This would be much more powerful and reliable to cross the North Sea and travel the waterways of France and Belgium, later that year.

While cruising her, and still working full time offshore, we gradually transformed her into a fully equipped cruising barge seeing many sights including the champagne region of France and the canals through and under Paris.

We returned to Suffolk in the UK in 2016, after Brexit made life more challenging in Belgium. Since then we’ve retired and finished the transformation of the interior.

The 9 years in Woodbridge have been the first time that we have become part of a community as we weren’t travelling to work at sea, or casting off to cruise Waterdog.

During a sailing cruise along the Suffolk coast in 2024 a friend asked; ‘In 10 years time, will you look back at the past 10 years and be happy with where you are’? Well, with our cruising days done on Waterdog, and with the boat moored in a lovely place we realised that it was time to look for a new adventure. We used the 2024-25 winter to search for a new start, and put the boat up for sale in the summer of 2025. Now, Waterdog has a new owner and we have a lovely house in a wooded area of the Isle of Wight.