Joanna and Victor Gould, both 35, quit their jobs to open a café on a boat.
They faced many challenges along the way, but the reward was worth it.
They document their journey on YouTube, where they have a devoted audience.
This essay, as told, is based on an interview with husband and wife Joanna and Victor Gould, both 35, who run a café on their boat in Macclesfield, UK. It has been edited for length and clarity.
We have always thought about owning a coffee shop. It seemed like a completely romantic but absurd idea. We both had fond memories of working in cafes and bars when we were younger, before we met – talking to people all day, making them coffee and drinking coffee. I guess we thought of these years as “stress-free” years.
We lived on a boat together for a few years when we decided it would be a good place to run a café. We loved living on a boat and thought it would be a fun project.
It’s a lot of work and we’re still sometimes shocked that we’ve managed to make a living this way, but it’s the best decision we could have made.
When opening our café on a boat, we faced many challenges
In 2018, we felt exhausted by the work of freelance TV editors. It was stressful and the working hours were long. We both needed time off and were looking for an alternative that would allow us to take at least a year off and spend some time boating.
I feel like everyone in the TV industry has an alternative lifestyle that they would like to lead after they leave. People say, “Oh, I’ll quit and become a goat herder or a cheese maker.” For us, it was a dream to have a floating cafe. So that’s what we decided to do.
We had both lived together on a narrow canal boat in England since 2016 and loved the lifestyle and the freedom it gave us. We thought it would be nice to combine this with our dream of owning a café by buying a boat that we could turn into a café.
We spent some time looking around for the right boat.
After a lot of searching, we found a boat with lots of open space and windows – it looked perfect for a cafe. We bought it and decided to call it “Holly the Cafe Boat”.
It actually took a lot of work to turn the boat into a cafe. When we started the renovation, we quickly realized that we had no idea what we were doing. It took a long time. It was also challenging not having a boss. It was effortless to wonder, “What the hell are we doing?”
Although things got a bit easier once the refurbishment was complete, the problems continued once the cafe opened. We didn’t realise how complex it would be to get supplies. At first we had a vision of only using local dairy suppliers. Then we realised that in many places it wouldn’t be possible to walk the 10 minute canal towpath to get a load of massive milk. This really confined the types of companies we could order from.
We don’t have a car, but we do have a kayak that we sometimes employ to carry massive deliveries back to the cafe. People can’t believe it when we meet them with our kayak. They think it’s amusing.
Starting a YouTube channel was a breakthrough
Despite our editing experience, being on camera was nerve-wracking. We almost decided not to upload the first video we made because we didn’t think it was good enough. But we decided to do it anyway and we’re really glad we did.
We didn’t think anyone would watch our videos. We thought they would just get lost on the internet. But the narrow gauge community was very interested and we quickly built a devoted audience. People seemed to enjoy following our journey.
Shooting videos and posting them regularly can sometimes seem like a demanding job on top of running a coffee shop. We never know how movies will turn out. It’s effortless to feel like you’re only as good as your last movie.
Our online presence has become really vital to us. If we had opened the café without it, I think things would have been completely different. Most of our customers found us through our YouTube videos. We employ what3words, navigation apps and maps to let people know where we are so they can visit our cafe as we move around every few weeks.
Today, we rely mainly on our cafe and YouTube channel for our income. We also published a cookbook, sold merchandise, and created a Patreon accountT. We feel like we built a career out of nothing, which gives us great satisfaction.
We plan to continue sharing our journey on YouTube and also want to grow our local customer base
In October we sold the houseboat and moved to a house on land. Our son is 2 years aged and managing two boats was a lot of work.
Living on a boat comes with many challenges that people don’t think about. Both our café boat and the boat we stayed on had a rolling cruising license, which meant we had to move them every few weeks. We had to plan when we would move depending on when we would need water, and that took a lot of time.
But now that we live in a house and not on a boat, we have more time to focus on the café. For the last three years we have only opened in spring and summer because it takes a lot of work, but now we hope to open more often and be more consistent. We would also like to be able to stay in the same place for a while so that we can have local customers. We are currently working on how to do this.
We started doing this without any expectations. We just wanted to take a year off from our careers. But we loved it and we’re looking forward to the future. We hope to continue to grow our café and our online presence over the next few years.
Overall, we probably earn less than when we worked in television, but we are very elated.
