Selena and I bought ‘Ordu’ in December 2005.  We had been thinking about living on a Dutch Barge for several years in a fairly abstract sort of way, but during the course of 2005 we started getting serious.  We scoured the rivers and canals of east London to see what sort of residential moorings were available and how we could get hold of one.  Anyone who has ever undertaken this quest will tell you at the start that it is a lost cause, but I guess we just had to see for ourselves.  Well, we saw. There are plenty of tiny moorings on the Regents Canal but the chances of actually getting a Dutch Barge that far up the canal are slim (no pun intended!), let alone the chances of actually securing a mooring there.

There are plenty of moorings on the Thames but very few of them are residential. Boat people will tell you not to worry about whether they are residential or not  because British Waterways turn a blind eye, but they have started cracking down on unofficial residential moorings and are turning people away for staying where they shouldn’t.

Neither Selena nor I want the uncertainty of being kicked off our unofficial residential mooring with nowhere to go and a 70ft boat to house, so we looked at the ‘official’ residential marinas.  These are Poplar Dock Marina on the Isle of Dogs and Limehouse Marina in Wapping (at this point you might be asking why we haven’t considered the Thames in West London – the answer is that we live in, work in and like east London). Having looked at these marinas we crossed Poplar Dock off the list immediately, even though we looked at several barges there that were for sale (have you ever been to Poplar? Perhaps a more pertinent question is would you ever go back?).  We loved Limehouse, but the chances of getting a mooring there are roughly the same as of me being asked to captain the England football team.

What, then, were we to do?  There is a marina in east London that just happens to be 25 minutes walk from our flat.  In the summer we spent most of our time in park opposite and we had fallen in love with the marina years ago, so it made perfect sense to look for a mooring there.  Incidentally, I’m not going to tell you exactly where it is because one of the best things about it is that very few people know about it (although, given that no-one is likely to read this perhaps this isn’t too much of a problem)

OK, so now we have decided where we want to put our boat how do we go about getting a mooring?  Um… we don’t!  When we asked at the marina office about putting ourselves on the waiting list we were cheerfully told that the waiting list had been scrapped some time ago when it had reached a wait of 20 years!  This, unfortunately, is the problem with all residential moorings in London.  There are so many people like us who want a boat that once someone gets a mooring they don’t tend to part with it.  Even if they are getting rid of a mooring, the chances of it being advertised outside of the marina are miniscule. The only way you can get into the marina to hear about such opportunities, however, is to have a boat there because the marina is only accessible to berth holders.  Hmmm, catch 22.

It seemed as though there were only two options: buy a boat that is already on a mooring in the marina of your choice and risk having to wait years, or maybe even decades, until that boat comes up for sale (and then have to bid against several other hungry potential boat owners for the privilege) or buy a boat that you like and wait until a mooring becomes available.  The second option is risky, because you may spend years moving the boat every two weeks (you can’t stay longer than 14 days on a temporary mooring) until a mooring becomes available.  That is the option we took, though, and it paid off as we now have a permanent mooring  just where we wanted it.

Background, Ordu