ROUND IRELAND WITH A FRIDGE …
I was late to boating and had little previous experience of motor cruising when I bought Arthur, a 1977 Broom Ocean 37. In fact, all that stood to my credit was two boat rental weekends in 1995 and 1996, and a third one in 2005. How I had enjoyed those first two weekends afloat. Unfortunately, my joy was not shared by my wife or two young sons, aged 6 and 9 at the time. So in 2005 I persuaded my next door neighbour’s wife to join me on a third rental weekend. No, not that kind of weekend! We had four teenagers in tow as well as a French au-pair. That sealed it for me. Aged 59, and about to retire, I was contemplating the purchase of a boat! I duly spent the winter of 2005 searching and learning about motorboats of all shapes and sizes. A dear friend, now deceased, patiently explained port and starboard, bow and stern and all the other boating terms that were then so alien to me. With advice from other boat-owners I eventually located a Broom Ocean 37 for sale in Friesland, northern Holland. Two flights saw me hop from my home in Galway on the west coast of Ireland to Rotterdam, where the agent picked me up and drove us to view Arthur. She, or should that be he, was to my untrained eye, in pristine condition nestled in a covered boatshed. A report by a local surveyor helped negotiate a significant reduction in the asking price to around €70,000.
A few weeks later she was on had only had two previous owners, one of whom named her after his son. It’s a masculine name but I chose not to change it.
