Hillyard to Hungary

Fellow club-members might be interested in the tale of my taking my 1939 Hillyard 5-ton gaff cutter, Elizabeth Jane, to Hungary for her 70^th birthday. 

When I moved to live in Budapest at the beginning of 2008 I had planned to keep Elizabeth Jane at my old home-port, Birdham Pool in Chichester Harbour. I had berthed her there for a few years, been very happy with the service and facilities, and for sheer beauty it is a hard spot to beat. Not only that, Hungary has been landlocked since the Treaty of Trianon.

Well, best-laid plans and all that... I realised after my first trip back to the UK to go sailing that it was not going to be that easy. Having selected dates for my three-week trip I arrived at Birdham on a grey, rainy day with cold and wet weather forecast for another week. Not quite the end of summer break I had hoped for. I stayed on board one night but, unable to give her a good airing, decided to spend a few days in London until the weather improved. After that, in fairness, I did have a glorious ten days aboard and got in a spot of local cruising.

Nevertheless, I realised that unless I was going to make regular trips back to the UK (and heaven knows what that would have done to my carbon footprint) it was not a viable proposition to leave a wooden boat unattended for months at a time.  It was also an expensive exercise: I calculated that if I managed 10 days on board a year the cost would come to almost £400 for a day's sailing!

And then I discovered Hungary's Lake Balaton, central Europe's largest fresh water lake, and what Hungarians call the ‘Hungarian Sea’.  The lake is 77 kilometres long, between 4 and 15 kilometres wide, with an average depth of 3-4 metres and is a sailing paradise.  The Balaton being just over an hour’s drive from Budapest, compared to a day’s travel by air and train to Birdham, made my choice of berth what I believe is called a ‘no brainer’.

My next hurdle was Hungarian bureaucracy: despite it being 20 years since the collapse of the Communist regime and six years since Hungary joined the EU, this is still a country that likes paper. I had also been told that engines are not permitted on the lake, except for the commercial passenger ships and official vessels, such as the police and rescue services, and I was not at all sure whether a boat with a Baby Blake set up to discharge in to the sea would be acceptable. Oh, and what anti-fouling was likely to be permitted?

After a quick web search for a Balaton marina I contacted the marina and sailing school at Tihany, on the north shore at the narrowest part of the lake. I explained that I wanted to bring my old wooden boat over to Hungary and keep her on the lake and asked what formalities I would need to observe: then I sat back and waited for the paper onslaught. The response couldn’t have been further from my expectations: within two days I received a charming reply from Andrea Rutai, the co-owner with her husband of the marina, explaining that there were no formalities at all, just bring her over and put her on the lake: oh, and by the way, we have one berth available for your size of boat!

It seems that with membership of the EU the Hungarian authorities cannot levy charges on foreign boats and are bound to accept the registration formalities of other states. Apart from a £50 charge for using the lake, and the cost of a berth (about 2/3 of the cost my berth in England) all I would need to pay for was getting the boat transported to Hungary. The hunt was on for a reliable and affordable boat transport company… to be continued!