Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Monday the 12th of May.

There's many ways of crossing the channel from the UK to France, but the most interesting one, I think, is to go by Catamaran.

Yes, you can now do this from Dover to Nooulogne, the beautiful port in northern France.

It's a small operation, in contrast to ferries which can carry hundreds, thousands of passengers.

It's just limited to a dozen people, but my goodness, what an interesting way to travel.

And to find out more, I'm talking to the captain behind

it, Andrew Simons. So you're on your boat at the moment. I can see. I think you're in port in Dover.

Tell me more about this idea. Well, this idea comes from my own needs just to travel across the channel.

That's it, in a nutshell. It's a way of linking up,

the word, the name of the company is Cell Link, and that's what it is. We link a journey with

a sailing experience. So what I wanted was to arrive at a port by train or with my bike and be

able to get on a ferry and go across and have a great time

going across and have the experience of the sea. And I found that very difficult to link those

preferences. And in the end, you know, when you have these sort of requirements, then if it doesn't

exist, then yeah, you start looking into it and that's where we get to today. So tell me about

the vessel. This is one that you own.

That's right. This is a sailing catamaran. It's actually pretty much a cruising catamaran.

So it's designed to be cruising the oceans, going to nice places in probably warmer places than this.

But it's the best boat for the job because it's 57 feet long. That's about 17 meters.

And we can get all our passengers on and their luggage and their bikes. And the boat stays nice and

flat. So it's not like on a single hold vessel where it can't as soon as you put the sails up.

This stays nice and flat. It has a nice turn of speed. Yeah,

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