THE £10K CHALLENGE
When I stop and think, “when did my boating life begin?”, it always makes me smile. My earliest memory dates back to when I was on holiday as a child in Mallorca watching a family eat pasta on the back of a motor cruiser as the sun went down. Somehow that vision etched itself into my brain as my idea of holiday heaven and it’s a dream I have clung to ever since. When my dad bought a little fishing boat a few years later it only served to stoke the flames, as did a couple of weeks’ work experience at Northney Marina when I was 15, helping to clean, refuel and move boats around.
These early boating experiences helped steer me towards a career as a mechanical engineer, working for the Ministry of Defence at a Portsmouth naval base. Being involved with ships and living close to the sea helped keep the dream alive of one day being able to own my own boat but it wasn’t until I returned from a four-year stint working in the Middle East that I decided it was time to take that first step.
We’d only recently bought a house so my wife wasn’t entirely thrilled at the prospect of me spending more money on a boat so we compromised and bought a 3.2m inflatable dinghy with a 3hp outboard on the back. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind but at least it got us afloat. It was great fun and we spent a lot of time pottering up and down the
