When Brits Dawn Coles and Jason Ashcroft met in France, they already knew that they had one thing in common; a love of barging… their meeting was to lead to a life changing decision to buy a boat, renovate it and start a new life and business in France…
Jason was a professional hotelier who had lived and worked all over world but when he went to France in 2000 and visited Burgundy he fell in love with the area and got a job on a floating hotel . Not long after he fell in love with Dawn who was working as a hostess on a hotel barge on the beautiful Burgundy Canal.
Jason, an outgoing and gregarious character says he and Dawn passed each other from their different barges, “likes ships in the night” quips Dawn. Eventually they got talking, went out and fell in love.
In 2002 Jason took a job in Cornwall, England, running a hotel and Dawn worked in Bristol, not far away, running a homeless centre. They longed to return to France but it seemed like an impossible dream. 911 had changed the holiday landscape in France, visitor numbers were down, the Euro was weak; getting work was tough for barge staff.
When Jason came into a small inheritance in 2004 the couple decided to “sell everything we had” to make their dream to return to France and buy their own barge come true.
They searched high and low for a boat that their budget could stretch to. When they found the Who Knows moored in Dijon harbour Jason says “we could see the potential straight away. We lived on the barge in St Jean de Losnes and worked on her there, but due to a lack of funds it took us a few years before we could really invest in her, boats require almost non- stop care and attention and so it's an on-going upkeep process.”
“She was good to go but needed a lot of work to make her really shine”