Narrowboats, Yanks and the good old USA!
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Over the last few months I have dealt with quite a few seemingly genuine enquiries for narrowboats to be built and shipped to the USA, maybe Terry Darlington’s latest book Narrow Dog to Indian Rivermight have something to do with this?
Now my first reaction was it’s a bloody silly idea and why the hell would you want a narrow ditch crawler in the states?
But after about half a dozen enquiries I have begun to wonder.
I do know from looking at the web stats that a lot of the interest came from a link on a US based boat building site but for folk to then go on and actually bother enquiring it makes you wonder.
I am still bemused by why you would actually want a boat designed for a very specif type of waterways environment in a totally alien one that it might not even be best suited too but all I can put it down to is the novelty and British association that the Americans seem drawn too?
We do sell boats through associates and advertise occasionally in the greater Europe but where to start if we were going to try in the USA would be an absolute nightmare obviously the cheapest and probably best approach at least initially is going to be web based but doing the research and the web-work required could be very time consuming so it might be better to just find an agent out there and pay them some commission if they managed to sell one.
The Americans seem to take their boats and boating very seriously but where you would set about finding potential American narrow boaters I just don’t know?