Some people dream of sailing away on the ocean, and many of them actually do it. My father was one of the dreamers, and his nautical aspirations were nurtured by the adventurers and mariners he met, whose friendships he cultivated as he ever so slowly built his own boat in his backyard. After years of work, that boat never got further than the lake on whose shores he laboured at his love; he was destined to put little more than his toes in the water.

My dreams, though watery, were different… I had always been intrigued by rivers. Not for me the vast expanses of oceans, nor even their shorelines – much as I love beaches and surf and seafood and the wonderful, playful joys so many people associate with the coast My fascination with rivers focused on their central connection to humanity – ribbons of communication, givers of life, creators of community, impossible to think of without the constant interactions they have produced for millenia.

At first my visions involved not much more than name-checking mighty streams…. the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube, the Volga. Perhaps after that might come the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Ganges, the Mississippi. Sometimes I even managed to fix on a starting point and an end point… the North Sea to the Black Sea, the upper reaches of Tibet to the southern Vietnamese delta. Great voyages! Such exotica! But I didn’t really focus on the in-betweens, the passages themselves, the places and people along the way.

Once I did, though, it became clear that rivers were more than just waterways to be travelled. There were so many things to be seen and experienced as part of any journey along a river. People, cultures, communities began to form part of my vision of these streams. Slowly, these elements became the primary source of interest, the rivers becoming more a means to get from one experience to the next.

And then I discovered that for every 1,000 kilometres of river I could traverse in Europe, there were thousands more kilometres of canals which could be used to get to even more places, many of them just as interesting or more so than the large towns and cities and tourist sites along the great waterways.

So my mind turned to the idea of the slow passage, the immersion in the daily life of villages and towns and cities connected by all these canals, the enjoyment to be had by just tying up somewhere beautiful in the middle of nowhere, cycling or cruising gently to a village along the way to buy fresh bread and local goods, with the time to get to know the people who grew or made or sold their products.

I did a lot of online research… on canals, on boats, on people who had made such journeys and recorded them. One day, I thought, perhaps I could do the same.

And one day I did. In early 2016, encouraged by my wife Jane, I got a bit serious about it. Research turned to lists, options, costs, and plans. By May that year it was time to act, by August we were cruising. In November we returned to Australia from our first season in Europe, having bought a boat and travelled on it from Belgium to Eastern France over the course of several months.

I would like to try to recount some of our experiences in these pages, and to record our travels as we return for more in future seasons.

John Rose

April 2017