Still at the forefront of our minds is the success of the London Boat Show at the ExCeL centre that Norfolk Broads Direct attended mid January. Fair Chancellor was shipped to London before Christmas, ready for the final touches and dressing leading up to the Show. For ten days, NBD staff showed thousands of visitors around the boat, promoting the Broads and the benefits of wonderful holidays in our beautiful National Park. We had some really fabulous feedback about the Chancellor, our luxury 4 berth cruiser, based on the same hull design as the 6 berth Fair Majesty. From the spacious interior to the scissor style beds (they won’t cut you in half whilst you sleep, but instead hinge together to give options of two singles or a double), there were plenty of impressed reactions all round.

During the Show, we held a competition to win £300 worth of vouchers off a holiday which was won by Mark Goodrum of Kent. There were plenty of interested parties looking for a Broads holiday and we took several bookings from our Show visitors.

Back to the yard, and the wheels here are still turning. Fair Chancellor 2 arrived as a shell before Christmas and is now being fitted out in the warm and dry of the workshop. The shower units are positioned and wires are being assigned to their correct places whilst the dash board is  installed.In other matters, the engineers are hard at work conducting important maintenance on all of the cruisers. Currently, Simon is revamping an older Nanni engine taken from Fair Viscount; here he is putting in new piston rigs and deglazing.

The big news of the month and of 2015 is the announcement that the Broads, Britain’s magical waterland is now to be known as the Broads National Park. It is hoped that this will help encourage more people to visit the area. On a technical note, this will not affect the way the Broads is run from the point of view of the conservation, tourism and navigation triangle but will hopefully bring more visitors to the area to enjoy the stunning surroundings and wonderful wildlife that we have on offer here.