A high -speed tour in Thames

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To develop a boat surgery on Thames, she pays to have hair like Charlie Matheson. At the time we hit the high speed in the extension between Canary Waryf and Greenwich, his strict mop is again involved. With wide eyes and an immature smile, he looks like a cross between Pierce Brosnan on the boat on the scene The world is not enough And a spaniel that climbs his head from a car window.

“Wonderful, wonderful, yes, yes!” Matheson screams on the noise of twin motors that rocks rebel, the newest and largest addition to his fleet in Thames Rockets. For nearly 20 years, the company’s red -speed boats have turned heads and hair accumulated in Central London, waves on a soothing scene of ferries and crucifixists.

“I think you can always show how good a city is going to Waterway,” adds the former Guernsey Investment Manager, like Charlene Peck, the rebel skipper, throws the boat with 26 places as a holiday ski. “If you have a buzz and excitement below the river, it’s a really good sign.”

Seven years have passed since Matheson, who is 48 years old, to make his dream of an exciting journey intentionally built into the London heart, where he already operates five solid boats with 12 ribs. I am the first passenger to hip the $ 1.6m, who will have his public launch on April 10 from the scaffolding under the London eye in Westminster. As we set off the bottom, passers -by look at red arrows cutting dark water.

“It is so exciting after we thought about it for so long to finally see it here,” says Matheson, as we clash for the awakening of another boat. With the new ship, Thames Rockets, which had a circulation of £ 3m last year, increased its daily capacity for its travels for one hour east of Westminster from about 500 to 700 passengers. Mathereson says the market is growing as London increasingly embraces its water route.

Thames suffered an identity crisis for half a century or more since the arrival of the transport container shifted the capital’s cargo trade to the deep water port in Tilbury in Essex. Re -developed Docks, Warves and power stations have helped to transform an industrial artery into a leisure opportunity.

Entrepreneurial nutrients have been useful in making this transition. The Woods family began Modest River Tours in the 1950s before building its cruisers’ silver fleet for anything and co-founded the passenger service Thames Clippers in 1999. Gary Beckwith, a former fuel operator, began tourist trips in the 1980s, starting City Cruise in 1996.

Companies are also riding up, with record sales and new boats. Thames Clippers, who partner with Uber in 2020, wore more than 5 million passengers in its big catamas last year, a growing number of tourists. In his newest scaffolding near the Renaissance Station Batterssea, visitors descend to the nearly where the coal was once loaded.

Mathereson says Thames was ready for an energy injection when he arrived in London in 2005, at the age of only 28. After getting tired of finances in Guernsey, where he grew up for fishing and waters, he had begun taking tourists in a seal colony using a fast rib. When his father, an asset agent, suggested that he give London a shot, Matheheson and his sister tried all the boats, from dinner navigations to Cringey’s comment. “She fell asleep in one of them,” he recalls. “There was nothing exciting for any of them.”

After making fun of the brochures showing one of his boats in Guernsey attacking under Tower Bridge, Mathereson fascinates London’s Eye owners to rent the end of their scaffolding, a deal he still has. He started the tour in 2006. “There was no speed limit then,” he says. “We would make 40 knots (46mp) directly through Central London.”

There is now a limit of 12 nodes (14mp) in the city center. So for the first 20 minutes, Thames Rockets employs comic actors as a tournament guide before ships can hit 30 knots (35mph) in the extent between Wapping and Greenwich in the East. Trying against my seat belt, I feel like I am traveling twice faster.

Matheson still looks good in a speedy boat, though he no longer has a license to excite the passengers himself, spending most of his time in his office over a bar near the scaffolding. Sometimes he fought to stay in the sea, after copying, falling and a pandemic have come and went. But he says a passion for London – and for speed – pushes business. “I have always been completely drunk from that feeling of reducing water,” he says before I get back to dry land. My legs slightly shaken. “In a strange way, I see it therapeutic.”

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