On the Road: What Crick Boat Show Told Us About Finding a Mooring

I spent the late May bank holiday weekend at Crick Marina, Britain's biggest inland waterways show, and one thing was obvious within the first hour: boat owners still find moorings the same way they did a decade ago, phone calls, Facebook groups, and whoever happens to answer the marina office that week. That is exactly the gap MoorHub exists to close, and Crick was the best possible place to hear it confirmed, first-hand, by the people it affects.

Why I went

Crick Boat Show has run over the late May bank holiday since 2000, and it is still the fixture the inland waterways world builds its year around: close to 200 exhibitors, hundreds of boats, free boat trips, boat-handling courses, seminars on everything from liveaboard living to buying your first narrowboat, and a real ale festival that empties out roughly on cue each evening. It is also, less officially, the one weekend a year when boat owners, brokers, and marina operators from right across the country are standing in the same field. We are onboarding mooring operators ahead of launch, and there was no better place to do that work in person rather than over email.

What boat owners kept telling me

I did not go with a script. I went with a notebook and a lot of questions, and the same three frustrations came back again and again, almost word for word, from people who had never met each other.

• "I don't know what's actually available. Nearly everyone I spoke to described the same routine, a shortlist of marinas within driving distance, a round of phone calls during office hours, and a wait to hear back. Several were keeping their own spreadsheet of half-answers, updated whenever they remembered to chase someone.

• "I can't tell if the price is fair. Without berths to compare side by side, boat owners are left guessing whether a quote is reasonable for the mooring site, the boat length, and the facilities on offer. More than one person told me they had simply taken the first mooring offered rather than face another month of ringing round.

• "I missed it because I wasn't first to call. Waiting lists that live in a marina's notebook rather than anywhere a boater can see are, by their nature, unfair to whoever happens to be busy that week. That came up so often it stopped feeling like a complaint and started feeling like a design flaw in how the whole market works.

None of this was a surprise, it is the same problem we set out to describe when we announced MoorHub, but there is a difference between writing it down and hearing it, unprompted, from a couple mid-refit on a 57-foot narrowboat who have spent three weekends this year trying to find a residential berth.

What operators told me

The trade stands told the mirror-image story. Marina and mooring operators were candid about how much staff time goes into enquiries that were never going to fit, a boat too long, too wide, or too deep for anything on site, and how little visibility they have into what similar berths elsewhere are charging when they set a price. A few run genuinely well-organised sites with tidy waiting lists and clear terms. Most are doing this alongside everything else that comes with running a marina, with whatever system was already in place when they took the job over.

These are the conversations that matter most before launch. Every operator I spoke to who is now onboarding with MoorHub raised something specific about their own sites, a residential quota, a seasonal closure, a facility that is easy to describe but hard to search for, and that is exactly the detail that needs to be right in a listing before a boater ever sees it. It is far quicker to get that right stood at a trade stand than over three emails.

A few conversations went further than I expected. Two site operators asked to see how a listing would actually look before they would commit to anything, which is a completely reasonable thing to ask and not something a phone call ever gives you the chance to do. Showing them there and then, on a tablet, in a marquee that smelled of diesel and frying onions, did more for those two relationships than a month of follow-up emails would have.

What it confirmed

Crick did not change what MoorHub is building. What it did was put real weight behind it, the length overall, beam, and draught questions we ask operators to answer are the same three facts that decided whether a boater's weekend of phone calls went anywhere. Mooring costs and contract terms are the other two subjects that came up unprompted, both covered properly in our mooring costs guide and our guide to mooring contracts for anyone weighing them up now rather than waiting for the marketplace to open.

We are still onboarding operators and loading listings ahead of launch, so there is nothing to search on MoorHub just yet. But if a weekend at Crick told us anything, it is that we are building the right thing, for people who are tired of finding out about a mooring three phone calls too late.

What's next

I left Crick with a notebook full of berth-specific detail, a handful of new operators keen to get listed, and a slightly better appreciation of why the real ale tent empties out at exactly six o'clock every evening. We will be back next year, hopefully with a stand and a live platform to show people rather than a tablet screen and a promise. Between now and then, we are carrying on with the part that does not happen in a field in Northamptonshire: getting operators onboarded properly, checking listings, and making sure the first thing a boat owner sees when MoorHub opens is accurate.