Old Coots Club - Adventures for the over-60s

To the Baltic in a lifeboat and other escapades.

Too old at 60? Rubbish and balderdash!!
Too many commentators are stuck in the dark ages. They seem to think that age 60 ushers in the end of active life. Typical of such vacuous twaddle is a comment by journalists Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour in the “Guardian” newspaper. Commenting on a senior politician who relishes a fight they say: “At an age when most men would be reaching for their slippers, the Business Secretary has experienced a busy week in the headlines”. Reach for his slippers!!! Such airheaded nonsense must be challenged! Rise up, over-60's and show your mettle!
This website is spurred by two ideas:

• Retirement from full-time work is a beginning, not an end
• The best things come when you are least expecting them. So be open to new experiences and one thing will lead to another. Just be active and curious and the world will come to you.

This is a story about Charlotte and Don Young, who decided that retirement from full-time careers was not an ending but a beginning. No longer constrained by full-time work, the door suddenly opened to new horizons and the prospect of exciting adventures.
They knew they wanted to write and use their experience to help others in business and the charitable worlds, but this was simply a sort of extension of what they had done in work. So what else? They owned a boat, but it had a limited range and capacity, not sufficient for real adventures.
Then they had a brainwave: Some years before, Don had glanced at a newspaper article had announced the opening of a canal from the Rhine to the mighty Danube and thus to the Black Sea. That would be an adventure! So why not do it in their own boat? But what manner of boat?
After many false starts, when searching for something quite unconnected, they happened to see a small advertisement baldly announcing, “Lifeboat for Sale, £8000” and giving a telephone number.
They called the number and their lives were transformed. It might be fair to say that the boat first found them and then took over. The first adventure started: converting a coastal rescue craft into a long-distance seaworthy cruiser. A big risk? Not half! But fortune favours the brave. They were lucky to find three remarkable craftsmen and the five of them worked mightily over four years in an old piggery to complete the dream - to create a long-distance cruising boat that would cope with the worst the ocean could throw up - and cruise through canals and rivers.
Plunging into a big project like this provided an ideal bridge from full-time employment to a different life full of interest and variety.

At last, undeterred by a badly broken ankle and a heart attack, they set off on a quest that has taken them over twelve years to 17 countries in Britain, Ireland, the Baltic Sea and Northern Europe. Using the boat as their base, they sailed, took trains, buses, hired cars, cycled and walked to explore the insides of many countries. Don also took up flying, but that's another story.
This site recounts their adventures, the fascinating history of the old boat with a strange name and the antics of the motley crew of friends, relatives and dogs who accompanied them on many escapades. And they haven't finished yet!
But more than anything it is a celebration of what elderly folks can do if they put their minds to it. Burn your slippers! Get up and go! There's a big fascinating world out there! Explore it. Do your thing what ever that may be.