This is now my private website and all my business interests are at Armstrong Brooks Group
I would have owned a serious boat by now apart from three things
When I started my first job, three of us saw a small sailing boat for sale on Rudyard Lake (Rudyard Kipling's parents met there - hence his name) for £40 - actually quite a lot of money in those days - about £1,000 today. We bought it and spent day after day, sanding it down and varnishing it with yacht varnish until it was spick and span.
The boat was fun and we had quite a few weekends sailing it round the lake. But guess what, a year later all that work needed doing again. And this was on a sheltered fresh water lake. On the sea, the salt water is ten times more corrosive.
Then we got bored and it was left in a boathouse carefully tied up so it would not bang around. A month later I visited and discovered, to my horror, that the water had dropped several feet and the boat was suspended in mid-air. On 4 cables so tight you could not move them - they were as tight as steel rods.
Six of us sailed from Lymington to Cherbourg in France. It was early Summer and the weather was fine. Even so, for 24 hours we had nothing to eat apart from dried bread and marmalade because the boat was moving too much to heat anything. I remember being woken at 4am for my two hours on watch - cold, hungry, thirsty and utterly miserable - why anybody would want to do that I cannot imagine.
Even decades later the thought of marmalade makes me throw up. And as for single handed around Cape Horn you cannot even begin to conceive of what that would be like.
When I lived in Gibraltar, we used to take a car down there (usually the Audi R8) via the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander (the place not the bank). And what a miserable experience that was - 36 hours of nearly being sick and feeling like death. The Bay of Biscay is notorious for bad weather and the boat never stopped going up and down. Yuck.
When he buys his boat and when he sells it.
Modified on 09/08/2019 at 11:37:11 by Bob Cory - 'wavering' on Pprune and Pistonheads