In which the long process of Looking for a boat finally bears fruit.

After viewing a number of boats in my first week in Europe and being just a bit disappointed by them, I was really looking forward to my trip to Verviers. I had no idea where the town was, other than somewhere in far eastern Belgium, but I was excited to meet the man who had promised to find me my new boat.

Patrick, a boat broker from southern France, had been sending me pictures and summaries of a number of boats for a few weeks, prior to my departure from Australia, and some of them looked really, really good. He seemed like a charming man, and knew his stuff. He spoke no English, and I spoke almost no French, but with the help of Google Translate our emails managed to communicate all that was necessary…. or most of it.

He planned to take me on a three-day trip to inspect a number of boats in Belgium and Holland. Where exactly this would take me, I had no idea, but Patrick would take care of everything.

So early one Sunday morning in late May 2016 I set off from Diksmuide, in far western Belgium (the Flemish-speaking part) where I had spent a few pleasant but disappointing days looking at private-vendor boats. I had booked my train tickets, I had booked my hotel in Verviers, and was set for the next part of my boat-finding adventure.

Well, almost. You see, Verviers is in Wallonia (the French-speaking part of Belgium). And, when their comrades in France called a snap strike, the Wallonian railway employees went out in sympathy. The railways in Flanders still worked fine, but that only got me as far as Leuven, about 100kms short of my destination.

“Le trafic des trains sera perturbé suite à une grève à partir de ce”

I didn’t find this out until I had already checked out of my B&B, lugged my suitcases to the station and checked the timetable on the platform. It was too late to pull out, but too early to call my Verviers contacts. So I boarded the train, thinking maybe the railway workers would decide to return to work by the time I got to Leuven. Not a great prospect, but my choices were limited.

As the train sped eastwards, I constantly checked the onboard screen displaying upcoming destinations, for news that I might be carried to my ultimate goal…. to absolutely no avail. When I arrived in Leuven, the station platform and the train were almost deserted.

My personal worries were distracted by a lone woman who did not budge from her seat, although I knew this train was going no further. I attempted in very poor French to inform her of this and was rewarded with a kind thank you in a clear, crisp English accent.

We exited the train together and repaired to a bar opposite the station, where we bought a couple of consolatory beers as she called her husband in Maastricht to advise that, instead of picking her up in Liege, he would have to divert to Leuven instead.

My own task loomed more challenging. I had no idea how to get to Verviers. I had no idea whether I could get a hotel room in Leuven. I had no idea whether my failure to arrive in Verviers would derail our boat-finding plans altogether. I was in a foreign country, on a tight schedule, with limited funds and due to meet an unknown man on an uncertain mission.

I dialled Patrick’s number, desperately trying in my mind to construct sentences in French to communicate my predicament. When he answered, I launched into what was most probably a load of gobbledygook, and I was almost pathetically relieved when he transferred his mobile phone to a new presence – an associate, Pierre who delighted me by revealing a passable knowledge of English.

No problem. Pierre and Patrick were completely unconcerned about the 200km round trip to pick me up and return to our hotel in Verviers. I hung up and ordered another delicious Belgian beer to celebrate and pass the time until their arrival.

A couple of hours later they pulled up in their little Peugeot festooned with the broker’s logos and emerged to shake my hand. Patrick was just as I had imagined – a tanned, self-possessed southerner with a shaved head capped by an impossibly broad black leather beret, a paunch revealing a love of good food and wine but the athletic frame of a former boxer. Although he hailed from Carcassone, in my imagination he was as much at home in the darker lanes of Marseilles as on a gleaming white cruiser off the Cote D’Azure. Pierre was shorter and more nervous, the big man’s consigliere, but cheerful, always ready to light another cigarette and chat, easily distracted but simultaneously constantly focused on the task at hand. Able to speak a kind of English, he was my conduit, my anchor and my safety blanket.

The sense of reassurance I gained through being rescued in Leuven by Patrick and Pierre wavered at times, but managed to survive the next three days, as they took me on a cross-country odyssey to places I would fail today to identify on a map. As they drove and chatted rapidly in French, across hundreds of kilometres of utterly mysterious roadways, guided constantly by the lady on their GPS (“au rond-point … tournez à gauche … à droite … continuez tout droit”), I sat in the back seat and resigned myself to my fate, trusting that they would (1) get to where we could view some boats and (2) get me back to a place where I could recognise a route to home.

We wound our way through northern Belgium and the southern Netherlands en route to five or six vessels that they thought were potential buys for me. I was grateful for their planning…. and for their forthright advice on the boats we viewed.

On one occasion, we stepped aboard a boat and off again in less than a minute. Patrick, despite listing the boat on his brokerage site, had not seen the boat before and it took only a brief glance for him to know it was not suitable for me or, probably, anyone else. He indicated to me, and pointedly so to the owner, the places where rust had progressed beyond minor damage; where rotten timbers in the superstructure needed immediate replacement; where windows had been sloppily fitted and were likely to admit rain and wind. I was embarrassed for the owners, in a way, but relieved that Patrick would not stoop to sell a lemon to me.

Another boat we saw was very beautiful and well kept, all wood and brass and heritage and Dutch neatness. I admired it but did not covet it. Patrick gently and discretely reinforced for me my opinion that, though a lovely vessel, she was not really suitable for living aboard, more appropriate for weekends away, which was indeed what she was used for by the family who owned her.

Other boats were similarly excellent eye candy and in all cases much loved by their owners but were, in one way or another, unsuitable. One beautiful “tjalk” had an open helm, exposed to the weather. One “klipper” was nearly right but in the end, again with the benefit of quiet advice from Patrick and Pierre, I thought was set up too much for a sedentary lifestyle, moored permanently at some well appointed yacht club rather than a months-long season of cruising rivers and canals, constantly on the move.

You might be thinking I was running out of options on this weird, apparently directionless foreign jaunt. But you’d be wrong. You see, there was one boat, in a place I can today not only identify on a map but describe to you in detail. It was in fact the first boat we’d looked at, after leaving our hotel in Verviers on day one. It was in Schoten Yacht Club, on the Dessel-Tournhout-Schoten Canal a few kilometres northeast of Antwerp. Her name was Eben Haezer.

She had pretty much everything I was looking for, yet lacked one ingredient of most boats in our price range: the need for work or fitting out before sailing off in her. Beautiful in her own way as you might expect of a steel Dutch barge built in 1916, she nevertheless had been thoroughly modernised and was exceedingly well-equipped.

Her hull was in excellent shape. Her fairly modern engine had recently been completely overhauled. She came with just about everything aboard required to cruise and live comfortably – fully equipped kitchen right down to crockery and cutlery, large domestic fridge/freezer, nearly new expensive mattress and bedding, washing machine and dryer, central heating and mobile evaporative cooling unit, excellent navigation and communication systems, all ropes and chains and gear for mooring and lock handling, excellent electrical systems, tools and supplies for maintenance, and more.

Having exhausted our alternative options in the subsequent couple of days, we returned to Schoten for a second look. This time I got out my phone and turned on Skype and the camera to take Jane, stuck back at home in Australia, on a remote tour of the boat. As I walked over and through the vessel, I pointed out all the positive features, and how they conformed to the criteria we had assembled and discussed exhaustively before I had left for Europe.

Jane’s responses were all positive and in the end, with both of us wound up like clock springs with nerves and anxiety, we managed to convince each other we had found what we were looking for. I indicated to Patrick and Pierre that we were “interested”, desperately trying to appear cool and contingent, since I had yet to negotiate a price.

The two Frenchmen pretty much responded as if they had expected this all along. They knew they had a sale and probably had done for a couple of days. We repaired to a local brasserie for a beer, a review of the trip, and some negotiations.

We discussed the various craft we had seen. We discussed Eben Haezer. We discussed the state of Belgian and Dutch roads. Finally we arrived at the point of making an offer. Much shrugging and pursing of lips on my part. More quickly than I had anticipated, Pierre said he would ring the owner and obtain an amended price. While he was on the phone, I pulled out my calculator and converted the price I was prepared to pay (in Euros) into Australian dollars. It was a significant sum, but much less than the asking price, and considerably lower still than the prices being asked for some of the other boats that we had viewed and that I had seen for sale elsewhere.

Pierre got off the phone and wrote a sum on a piece of paper. Slowly he pushed it towards me. I looked at it and blinked. I showed him my calculator. The two sums were exactly the same.

I suppose I could have prolonged things and tried to make a counter offer. But the price reduction was already significant, the list of inclusions had grown beyond my initial expectation, the list of items that needed work had failed to appear, and the sale could be completed in time for the current cruising season.

And so the deal was done. I ordered another beer for Patrick and myself – and a soda for designated driver Pierre – and we brought out the paperwork for the next stage…. Buying a boat.