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I've been searching the net for all things boaty for 2-3 months now whilst I awaited the sale of our old family home to complete. As I was to partake of a share of the proceeds this, just like your loan was ear marked as 'boat funds'. I spent many many holidays on the broads as a child, my first holiday away from home with no parents was also to the broads and 2 years ago I went back for a week with a friend.

Owning a boat has always been a back burner dream for me and I never envisaged having the funds or free time to actually own one. Well the house sale solved the money situation and my career has seen me working freelance for the last few years, I am now at the most relaxing stage of being able to work in the winters only, it wont make me rich but it gives me the free time to own and appreciate a boat.

So I started looking around 2-3 weeks back for something, anything within my price range, I had pretty much decided upon a narrowboat and found a decrepit old heap of a thing within my price range that left me enough cash to give the thing a work over, or so I thought. I arranged to have the thing taken out of the wet stuff and a survey done. I met the surveyor lunchtime on survey day after he had completed the hull check, after hearing his diagnosis I told him to stop right there, he may as well save himself the bother of completing the survey as the 5-6 thousand pounds of hull repairs he was specifying were a total show stopper. He left a lot richer, I went home a lot poorer and with nothing to show for it.

Several cans of cold and rather alcoholic stuff later I had mustered some enthusiasm again and decided that a £500 loss was better that an £11k loss and hit the net again in search of something else, I once again stumbled upon your site as it's in my list of favourites and I was doing a top to bottom sweep of them.

After reading your new content and taking a long hard look at a lot of the boats on your site I started to sit back and have a rethink. Did I really need a large narrowboat? I would only be using it for the summer months and there would only be me on it, did I need all that space? And how about handling the thing single-handed? Was I fooling myself that I could get a 55 foot 15 tonne narrowboat through a series of locks alone? I decided that I had just had a close shave, if the survey had been good I would have 11 thousand pounds worth of steel that needed a total refit and probably couldn't be crewed by just me alone, this would mean no freedom. I would have to go back to work for the summer just to finish the thing to a decent standard and I would be reliant upon friends having spare time to come along for a cruise.

So...... to cut this story short.... I just put a deposit on a 27 foot Burland GRP cruiser with a BMW diesel on an Enfield outdrive. It's in good condition, no work really needs to be done at all although a little interior tidying will make it more comfortable considering I intend to spend April-October cruising on it. And without your site I would probably have made a mistake I would have regretted deeply.