When Beryl Chalmers and Simon Palmer decided to buy a boat that could cross the North Sea as well as cruise the waterways of Europe, it took them three attempts to find their perfect craft
There are boats for the inland waterways and there are sea-going craft. But we needed to find one that could do both. As both my husband, Simon, and I are retired, we like to spend five months of the year living and cruising on our boat. Prior to 2020, we’d spend most of that time pottering slowly through the waterways of Holland on our comfortable Dutch steel cruiser. However, since Brexit restrictions came in, limiting us to 90 days in the EU in any 180-day period, we had to find something that would also be capable of crossing the North Sea in reasonable time and comfort.
It took us several attempts to find our perfect boat. First we bought a Beneteau Swift Trawler 44 – a lovely boat, originally built for the 2012 Olympics. Its twin 300hp engines and semi-displacement hull made light work of crossing the North Sea but at the cost of quite a lot of fuel. Then there was the issue of its air draft, which at 12ft 8in with the mast folded was too high to fit under many of the bridges spanning the Dutch waterways. Reluctantly, we decided it wasn’t the right boat for us.
Next we tried a Greenline 39 Hybrid. Another fine boat but slightly tight for four people and not very easy to board or disembark. The electric folding transom, which had seemed such a great idea at the time, offering the benefit of an extended boarding platform without the increased berthing fees of a fixed one, actually proved to be its Achilles’ heel. When boarding the boat, one of us would always have to climb over it before we could get to the button to lower it. There was no side gate allowing access from the pontoon and the bulwarks were simply too high to step over. A lovely boat but still not quite right for us.
By this stage we were beginning to get a little desperate.
Everything we looked at was either too small, too tall or simply too expensive. Yes, we were being fussy, but now we had the time, we wanted a boat that ticked as many boxes as possible without busting our budget. For months we trawled the internet, avidly read every issue of Motor Boat & Yachting, and browsed every motor boat dealer’s website we had heard of in search of our Goldilocks boat.
In a final attempt to find that elusive do-it-all boat, we decided to visit the Düsseldorf boat show in January 2023 to try and view every 40ft motor cruiser on the market. Because of slight mobility difficulties, we really wanted a side boarding gate, something which very few craft seemed to offer at the time. It was here that we stumbled across the Delphia brand, a Polish yard now owned by the French Beneteau grou
