Was it Possible?

 My husband John and I had dreamt of owning a boat for quite a long time. Originally, we had hoped to build our own boat. In anticipation of making this happen, we had purchased the cutting plans for a Bruce Roberts 46 ft motorboat. After much consideration and scrutinising of the bank balance, we decided the project was not practical. The costs would have been enormous and time was the major limiting factor. Aside from which, the price of fuel is only ever going to go up. This doesn't even start to take into account the ongoing outlay of mooring something that size.

I would say that we had pretty much shelved the idea of owning a boat until we retired somewhere cheap! Fortunately, hope never really completely goes away and a holiday in Croatia completely revived our interest in owning a boat.

We had gone on holiday in Croatia and we ended up hiring a 10 ft long 5hp boat with a Bimini. We used this to tour some of the islands off Hvar and despite it being so small and having so little power, we had a fabulous time. We spent a good 3 days on this tiny little boat in what could only be called somewhat uncomfortable conditions and we were thrilled to be on it. The following year, we did the same thing and toured the islands off Korcula. Again, we had an absolutely fantastic time. Whilst pottering about the islands, we passed quite a few people on their sailboats and came to the conclusion, that whilst we might never be able to afford a 40 or 50 ft motorboat or sailboat, we could afford something considerably smaller and with our combined skills, we could make it quite comfortable. It certainly wouldn't be hard to make it more comfortable than the 10 ft boat we had been hiring.

John in sunny Croatia

Once we had returned to grey and gloomy Britain from sunny and warm Croatia, depression set in! We comforted ourselves by looking at property for sale online in sunny destinations. This progressed to looking at sailboats online. We spotted a lovely little Beneteau First 26 for sale, that seemed to be in relatively good condition but it was out of our budget. Less than a year later, the boat had decreased considerably in price. In fact it was suddenly within our budget although it was being stored, quite a distance from where we live. After much hemming and hawing we decided to go and have a look at the boat.