Prologue
The romantic ideal of cruising my narrowboat on Ireland’s waterways had been in me from virtually day one of owning Dawn Piper.
The seed had been firmly planted in my head the more I moved the boat after the traumatic launch and relaunch of her four years previously. Every trip made the idea seem less like a daydream and more like one of those thoughts that waits patiently in the corner until you are tired, emotional, and dangerously close to a pub.
I had even speculated about the plan on camera after my epic tow across the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in series one of Narrow Escapes, which is a bit of an oxymoron when you think about it. Can you actually be epically towed? Apparently, I could.
The more I looked into it, the more hurdles appeared. It became painfully apparent that this was not a trip to be taken solo, by the fainthearted, or by the totally skint.
Hmmmm.
Fainthearted was the only thing I wasn’t, so it only took an hour-long walk along the towpath to the pub to decide and hit the Fuck It button when asked by my not-quite-boyfriend-still-just-friends what I would like to do for my 60th birthday.
This was early March 2026. My birthday was a mere four months away.
I sit here now, just two whole weeks away from that birthday, on a rural jetty overlooked by an ancient monastic site on the banks of the mighty Shannon.
How the hell had that happened?
To be honest, it is still a bit of a mystery to me.
The idea was the easy bit. I let it simmer for, let’s see, two months? Two months of telling everyone, including the television production company of Narrow Escapes, the editor of Waterways World, and my publisher, that I was taking DP to Ireland.
Yet I did nothing.
Every time I tried to get further on in the planning, I was scuppered by conflicting information. Specifically, Customs. The information swung dramatically from needing an ATA Carnet, which involved a possible holding deposit of 25% of the boat’s value and an entire, extremely detailed inventory of everything on and within the boat, through to temporary import of goods costing 1.9% duty and 23% VAT, and finally to: fuck it, let’s get craned onto the Shannon in Northern Ireland and sail her in, skipping Customs altogether.
I had found a Northern Irish haulier who was reluctantly willing to bring the boat in from Holyhead to Dublin Port, as long as I did the paperwork.
No one wanted to touch the Customs paperwork because it was too complicated. I could now see why.
Between the London Chamber of Commerce, Irish Customs control in Dublin, British Customs, and at least half a dozen shipping agents, I still had completely conflicting information.
Then new-boyfriend-yes-you-saw-that-one-coming randomly got in touch with Stoke Chamber of Commerce. The company he worked for had an affiliation with them, and while I had been flapping around in a swamp of forms, fees, duties and increasingly wild plans, Stoke came back with the answer.
A simple loophole. So simple that everyone else had missed it: a temporary admission by oral declaration. My problem was that I was only bringing my boat over to Ireland for two months. Nobody does that. Ever. Too expensive, too complicated, too excessive. Which, if I am honest, sounds very much like the running order of my life.
And so we were set. We were going to put my little boat on a wagon, put that wagon onto a big boat, and then plop her into the mighty River Shannon. We couldn’t crane her in on the Southern Irish canal system, for some reason. No, no. That would have been far too sensible. It had to be balls-deep and dangerous instead. Of course it did.
Chapter 1
Day one of the new Irish Adventure was supposed to go like this: Emma turns up at the aqueduct, has a chat with the TV crew, gets the boat craned out, then romantically follows her onto the Irish ferry and watches the whole thing pan out in front of her including smoothly gliding through customs and passport control, all while being filmed.
Except it changed direction the moment I got in the car, before I had even reached the aqueduct.
It was the phone call that did it.