Big Boat Blogs

In advance of setting up the new blog for Chertsey, I've been looking around for other blogs by historic boat owners - particularly of course, big Grand Unions. Well, the good news seems to be that the majority of (if not all) old boat bloggers do indeed have a big G.U. of some sort; the bad news is that I could find hardly any at all.

I started with Granny Buttons' 'boatroll' where I found Oakley, which hasn't been updated for a while, and Barnet, which seems to have the most comprehensive blog at the moment. I'm sure there must be others, so please do tell me, and perhaps I'll have a special blogroll for them.

There are however quite a few former working boat websites. Some of these are small and personal, and might arguable be better as a blog? Liam has a website for his Midland and Coast Ariel, and the big Ricky Hagley, which used to have a blog (still there but not updated for three years) now has a website, which doesn't look to be updated very frequently either.

Some websites however are much more ambitious and a wonderful source of both information and pictures to drool over. The middle Northwich icebreaker Sickle has its own website, and its owner, Matt Parrott also runs the 'Working Boats' website which is regularly updated with the latest news of old boats still in circulation, loads of photos ancient and modern, and links to other websites.

Moving away from Grand Union boats, the Bream website has information and photos relating to 'Fish class' joshers. My favourite quick reference resource remains AMModels' lists, which are compiled from a number of sources and kept up to date by Andy, and also have some links to boats' own sites.

But these are all websites - frequently updated in many cases and a brilliant source of information and pictures. But that's not the same as a blog, which is a more personal detailing of the daily - OK, maybe weekly - ups and downs of a restoration or a trip, with passing thoughts too transient and trivial to be immortalised in a static web page but perfect as part of the here today, moved on tomorrow, journey that is a blog.

So I reckon that Chertsey will be THE very best big Woolwich restoration blog out there once it's launched (the blog that is, not the boat).

Unless of course you know different.