Category: Life Afloat

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Getting Started Life Afloat

Van Life vs Living on a Narrowboat: Which is Better?

Van life and narrowboat life get talked about in the same breath quite a lot. Both promise a smaller footprint, more freedom, and a break from fixed routines. But once you actually try them, you realise they feel very different.

I like both. I’ve spent time around vans and time on the canals. They scratch similar itches, just in different ways.

The first big difference is speed.

A van is about mobility. You can wake up in Devon and go to sleep in the Alps a few days later if the mood takes you. The ability to jump on a ferry or the Channel Tunnel and drive straight into France or Spain is a huge perk of van life. If you’re into climbing, surfing, hiking, or skiing, vans make it easy to snake up remote valleys, park near trailheads, or sleep close to a crag for an early start.

The road network is enormous and flexible. You can change plans on a whim.

A narrowboat moves at about four miles an hour. Five if you’re really pushing it and the canal is wide. Add a few locks and a ten mile day can feel like a proper outing.

Oddly, that’s part of the appeal. The canals gently remove the pressure to rush. You move because you want to, or because it’s time to move on from a mooring, not because you’re trying to reach the next destination.

Then there’s space.

Even a well-designed campervan is a clever compromise. Bed becomes sofa. Table disappears. Storage is everywhere and nowhere at once.

A sixty foot narrowboat feels closer to a small floating cottage. Proper galley kitchen. A fixed bed – often with a flexible second. A solid fuel stove ticking away when the weather turns cold. When living aboard for three to twelve months rather than a week or two, that extra breathing room makes a difference.

Bathrooms are another practical difference – Most vans simply don’t have one. Some have compact cassette toilets, but showers are much rarer. Many van lifers end up relying on campsite facilities, gyms, leisure centres, or the occasional outdoor rinse after a surf. It works, but it does shape the routine of daily life.

On a narrowboat, having a proper bathroom with a shower is the norm. When you’re living aboard for months at a time, that simple bit of comfort changes the feel of everyday living quite a lot.

Both vans and narrowboats come in endless variations. Clever storage, fold-away furniture, multi-use spaces. People design them in surprisingly inventive ways. In both worlds you’ll see minimalist setups, cosy cabin layouts, or more spacious designs aimed at longer stays.

The difference is scale. A narrowboat simply gives you more length to play with.

Of course, boats come with their own realities.

You’ll be topping up water tanks, managing batteries, keeping an eye on diesel levels and learning how locks work. None of it is particularly difficult, but it becomes part of the rhythm of living afloat.

Van life has its own version of the same thing. Finding good overnight parking, keeping track of water and waste, navigating traffic and parking restrictions. The logistics are just road based rather than canal based.

Road travel always carries a bit of background urgency. Movement, engines, the sense of always going somewhere.

Canal travel feels different. You pass dog walkers and cyclists. You stop at locks and chat with whoever else is passing through. After a few weeks you start recognising other boats again further along the network.

Moorings often appear beside old canal towns, village greens, or within walking distance of a good pub that’s been there for a couple of centuries. It’s a slower, slightly more civilised version of travel than pulling into a lay-by or motorway service area.

Another practical difference is stability.

Narrowboats are designed to be lived on for extended periods. Solid insulation, proper heating, generous storage. Once you settle in it starts to feel less like travelling and more like relocating slowly through the country.

For people curious about canal life but not ready to buy a boat, spending a few months aboard can be a useful way to try it properly. Escape the Rat Race has been helping people do that for around twenty years, with boats that are fully licensed and insured for extended time on the waterways. The practical side of maintenance is handled behind the scenes so people can focus on the experience itself.

So which lifestyle is better?

If you love mobility, mountain roads, and the freedom to head across Europe at a moment’s notice, van life is hard to beat.

If you’re drawn to slower travel, waterside towns, and the idea of watching the countryside unfold at walking pace, the canals offer something quietly addictive.

Different speeds. Different landscapes.

Same basic idea though. A slightly different way to live.

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Life Afloat

A New Kind of Working Boat

There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from opening your laptop on a narrowboat in the morning. The kettle’s just boiled, the boat’s still warm from the night before, and outside the window the canal is already awake. Not dramatic, not cinematic – just quietly beautiful. This is where the idea of being a digital nomad afloat starts to make sense. Not as a novelty, but as a way of folding work into a life that has texture, history, and time baked into it.

Working from a boat isn’t about pretending the canals are some untouched wilderness. They’re working waterways, shaped by industry, trade, and generations of people moving slowly through the landscape. That history is part of the draw. When you moor up for a few days near an old warehouse basin or a flight of locks that’s been here for two centuries, you feel time stretch a little. Emails still arrive. Deadlines still exist. But they sit differently when your commute is a ten-minute walk along the towpath.

The reality, of course, is more grounded than the fantasy. You don’t cruise all day and work effortlessly in golden-hour light. Most people who work afloat settle into a rhythm: a few days moored up and focused, followed by a day or two of moving on. You plan your cruising around your workload, not the other way around. Towns become useful not just for shops, but for decent signal and reliable connections. This isn’t a limitation – it’s part of learning how the network works and letting it guide your pace.

Inside the boat, space shapes your habits. Your workspace might be a small table by the galley or a corner of the saloon that stays set up even when you’re on the move. You learn quickly what you actually need to work well and what you don’t. There’s something clarifying about that. Fewer distractions, fewer possessions, and a clearer sense of when you’re working and when you’re done for the day.

Energy management becomes part of daily awareness too. Boats aren’t built around limitless power, and that changes how you use your tech. Laptops get charged deliberately. Video calls get planned. Sometimes you’ll plug into shoreline power in a marina for a reset, sometimes you’ll rely on the boat’s systems while tied up in a quiet spot for a few days. It’s not hardship. It’s attentiveness.

One of the quieter benefits of working afloat is how the canals recalibrate your sense of time. You start to notice the difference between a rushed afternoon and an unhurried one. Lunch breaks turn into short walks. Finishing work for the day doesn’t mean closing a laptop and staring at the same walls – it might mean stepping off the boat and into a place you’ve never been before. Not extraordinary, just different enough to matter.

Short-term holiday canal hire and narrowboat rental give people a taste of this life, but longer stretches on the water are where the rhythm really settles in. Over months rather than weeks, you stop performing the lifestyle and start living it. The boat becomes home, not accommodation. That’s when working remotely stops feeling like a clever arrangement and starts feeling normal.

Behind the scenes, there’s a lot that makes this possible. Boats need to be licensed, insured,  maintained, compliant, and ready for everyday life – so you’re not firefighting issues while trying to do your job.

Being a digital nomad on a narrowboat isn’t about escaping responsibility. It’s about choosing a setting where work fits into a bigger, older, slower story. The canals don’t rush you, but they don’t indulge fantasy either. They offer something better: a workable, beautiful, lived-in way to spend your time, and your working days, afloat.

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Life Afloat

Life in Slow Motion: Why Retirees Thrive on the Canals

Retirement has a strange effect on time.

After decades of planning life around calendars, commutes and commitments, suddenly the days open up. For some people, that freedom can feel disorienting. For others, it becomes an invitation – to slow down, to travel differently, and to live with fewer edges.

Living aboard a narrowboat suits that moment remarkably well.

While a few weeks on a narrowboat hire each year would be enough for some, a number of our clients choose to spend the first months of retirement exploring the UK’s canals and waterways, not as a holiday, but as a way of easing into a new rhythm of life. Days take their shape from daylight and weather. Plans stretch and soften. Movement becomes something you do because it feels right, not because you’re rushing to the next thing.

We do have a boat called Life in Slow Motion – you don’t need to have retired to cruise her, and you don’t have to take her if you are – but I like to think all our boats help to slow life down!

One retired couple joined us during the strange, uncertain year of the Covid pandemic. With borders closing, they caught one of the last flights into the UK and stepped aboard Wind Rose barely ten days later than planned.

What might have felt risky instead became grounding. The boat was light, modern and comfortable – a proper home not a stop gap – and despite occasional movement restrictions, they spent five months cruising widely and fully.

What mattered wasn’t just where they went, but how it felt to live that way. They spoke about the reassurance of being trusted with the canal boat, the freedom to cruise or moor up without fixed restrictions, and the quiet confidence of knowing support was always a phone call or text away.

By the end of their time aboard, they hadn’t just enjoyed the experience – they bought their own narrowboat to live aboard.

That story isn’t unusual.

Retirement cruising appeals precisely because it doesn’t demand urgency. You can take on longer routes without worrying about being back for Monday. You can wait out bad weather rather than pushing through it. You can spend a week in a place simply because it feels good to be there – whether that’s a lively market town, a stretch of open countryside, or a familiar junction where other boats drift in and out.

There’s also a gentle physicality to life aboard that many retirees value. Locks, towpaths and daily boat jobs keep you moving without feeling like exercise for its own sake. Conversations happen naturally – at locks, water points, moorings – and community forms without effort or obligation.

As anyone who’s spent time around liveaboards knows, canals have a way of drawing people into quiet, unforced connection.

Crucially, living aboard doesn’t mean cutting yourself off. Laundrettes, shops, cafés and train stations remain part of the landscape. Family and friends can visit. You’re still in the world, just moving through it more slowly.

At Escape the Rat Race, we entrust our boats to you. We don’t micromanage where you go or how you cruise. It’s less hands on than a short term narrowboat rental. We offer support when it’s needed, space when it isn’t, and the confidence that comes from knowing help is always there if you want it. Many of our retired clients are new to boating when they step aboard. Some have enjoyed narrowboat holiday hires over the years; others are returning to a long-held idea they finally have time to explore.

Retirement isn’t about stopping. For many, it’s about choosing how to move next.

On the water, with time finally on your side, that choice can feel surprisingly clear.

In a recent post we thought about what living afloat teaches you. If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy that one too!

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Life Afloat

The Rhythm of Life Afloat

Living on a canal boat isn’t just a change of address: It’s a change of perspective. Spend weeks or months afloat and you slowly absorb a new rhythm of life, one where patience, adaptability and calm become natural responses rather than aspirations. It’s a pace that stands in contrast to normal commuter‑driven living, yet somehow complements it beautifully. It’s a chance to work in the world and come home to tranquillity at the end of the day.

Living aboard a narrowboat teaches patience the moment you step onto the towpath. Locks don’t hurry. The weather decides when it will rain. Water levels rise and fall with tides and seasons. And you soon realise that pushing for speed only leads to frustration – whether you’re negotiating a busy flight of locks or planning your next mooring. Instead, you learn to settle into a pace that suits both you and the water beneath you.

Resourcefulness becomes second nature. Things you took for granted on land – fill‑ups, storage, heating and even hot showers – suddenly need planning and care. Diesel boats will come by to top up your fuel or gas if you arrange it ahead of time, but you’re responsible for knowing where to find water points, pump‑outs and supplies along the network. A frozen hose in winter or a tangled rope at a lock used to be sources of stress. Now they’re just another part of the learning curve that turns you into someone who solves problems calmly and creatively.

Creativity on board isn’t just about the novelty of cruising the narrowboat – it’s about living in a smaller space more deliberately. Clever storage solutions, practical layouts, and personal touches all work together to make the narrowboat feel like home not a holiday hire. You discover that a cosy boat with a warm wood burner becomes more comfortable than many houses you’ve lived in. That blend of function and comfort makes returning from a workday – or a walk into town – feel like coming back to your own private retreat.

And then there’s the social side of canal life. Mooring up for a pint at a canal‑side pub or passing friendly waves at a lock starts to feel like being part of a community. Living aboard an unbranded boat helps you feel part of something that those hiring canal holiday boats only pass through. Boaters share advice, tools, and stories – often instantly when you tie up side by side. Whether it’s someone giving pointers on keeping batteries topped up or helping you through a tricky stretch, that camaraderie makes the waterways feel warm and welcoming.

Living afloat also gives you space to reflect on your “normal” life. Many people choose long‑term narrowboat living with jobs they commute to remotely, or as a break between phases – a way to slow down and learn about what’s important without fully stepping away from land‑based work and family. It’s this mix of worlds – the freedom to cruise Britain’s huge canal network at your leisure and the comfort of coming back to your own peaceful floating home – that makes the lifestyle so rewarding.

So if you’re thinking of trying life on the water for a few months, or even longer, expect to learn a lot more than you would on a canal holiday hire. Expect to learn about patience, about independence, and about what makes your heart feel at ease. Because once you’ve mastered a few skills and embraced the slower rhythm of life afloat, you’ll find that the canal doesn’t just show you new places – it shows you a new way of seeing the world.

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Boat Skills Getting Started Life Afloat

Things to Know Before Living Aboard a Canal Boat

  • That everyone dreams of living on a boat. When I have mentioned that I had lived on a boat, a surprising amount of people would admit to me, quietly as if it was some dark secret, that they’d always harboured the same ambition. Many similar questions might then follow – and this list will answer a few of them. But know you will be living the dream. It’s not for everyone – certainly some would respond by looking at me quizzically – but it’s a wonderful experience and we can help you decide if it is for you!
  • How to use a wood burning stove. All boaters know the experience of returning to a cold boat after a wintery weekend away. However, it is also often the only place you will find people sitting with the doors wide open when it’s snowing outside. Lots of boats also have central gas heating or back boilers but there is nothing quite like a wood burner. Get the wood burner going and the boat can be very toasty indeed! Morso Squirrels are especially nice, but they all have adjustable air vents to change the air flow and all of them are slightly different. You can actually get into a rhythm where you can keep it going, without touching it, for most of a full day, and then spend 10 minutes tending to it. You can invest in a convection fan that will blow the heat through the boat as it gets warm. Keep it on low and the heat will flood the boat for hours.
  • How to cope with the cold. Sometimes a cold night or a cold and wet boat move is unavoidable, particularly when you’re still getting used to life aboard and going through your first winter. I once discovered my cooking oil had frozen and had a WhatsApp group of fellow (new) boaters we called “I now live in a fridge”. But modern clothing is incredible. Invest in a good quality down jacket with a high fill power. Get some nice Merino wool base layers, or fleece layers. Own a nice gore tex jacket to keep you dry if you need to move the boat in the rain. Get the fire going so it’s ready and the boat is nice and warm when you stop. The secret to staying warm is layering and these high quality layers can transform your experience when you do need them.
  • The summer is glorious. The winter is fabulous in its own way but there’s a reason people pay a small fortune to rent a week on a canal boat in the summer. When you liveaboard you feel like all the world is your garden and as though you’re fully in touch with nature. The natural light that reflects of the canal and in through the windows is like nothing else. Friends will want to visit to help you move.
  • Moving the boat. Yes, you need to move it every couple of weeks. You need to be on a continuous journey. Some people live on moorings but they can miss out on the freedom and the adventure as a result.
  • Getting supplies. You’ll quickly discover the diesel boats. There will be a few of them, covering a wide area. We have been doing this long enough that we can point you in the right direction. Give them a bit of notice and they’ll come by and fill you up with diesel and fit new gas bottles. Get into the rhythm and you’ll never run out. You do not want to run out – gas usually ensures you can keep your food cold in the fridge, and on some boats helps keep the boat or your water warm.
  • Water. The diesel boats can’t fill up your water. You’ll need to potter along to a sanitary station. Allow a couple of hours to fill the water tank; a small price to pay for warm showers and running water. Read a book or have a coffee while it’s filling. How long it lasts depends on how much you use and how big your tank is. Two people usually get about 6-8 weeks. To make it last longer, narrowboats usually forego dishwashers and washing machines – but you’ll soon get used to that.
  • Waste. There are two options. Pump outs – where the diesel boat comes along and connects a pipe that empties your tank, or cassettes. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. Most long term boaters have heard horror stories about pump out toilets getting blocked, overfilling, or smelling and happily get used to cassettes – you have a couple of spares and sequence it to align with your water filling schedule. It is the least fun job but you get used to it surprisingly quickly. The most important thing is that you think ahead and don’t fill up.
  • The 8am to 8pm rule. You might notice if you walk along a canal that often boats will sit there running their engines. They might be charging their batteries or heating up their hot water via the engine. But you shouldn’t run it outside these hours. A lot of boats also have solar panels and maybe even gas water heaters, so there are other options, but it’s worth being aware.
  • Toasters and hair straighteners. Your leisure batteries (separate to the starter batteries) will run most electrical appliances, but not anything with an element. You can still make toast but with a clever contraption that sits on your gas cooking hobs. If you’re using mains power through an inverter you also should get in the habit of turning it off when you’re not using it. Radiators will need to be gas, oil or heated via the back boiler.
  • Checking the engine. Breakdowns can happen but we do expect everyone to carry out simple checks to make sure they are infrequent. We have been running for long enough that we have seen and found ways to maintain everything. You’ll need to check oil and water levels regularly, and know how to clear the weed hatch. We will talk you through it on the handover.
  • How sociable it can be. In both the summer and the winter, your friends will love to come and help you move. But you’ll also meet a wonderfully diverse and creative group of people. You might moor up two-abreast, tieing on to a new neighbour, get chatting to the boats around you while you’re sitting on the roof or outside. Maybe you will get to know people while you’re moving through locks together or topping up supplies. Maybe you arrive in a new neighborhood and want to know where the best canal side pubs or laundromats are. The boating community is wonderfully friendly and sociable – advice is never more than a few boat widths away.

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