Well, I'm about to retire and after having three different yachts in the past have decided to give myself a retirement present of a small (32 foot or so) cruising yacht.

Now here is where the problems start.

After having three smaller yachts in the past It is a good thing to know what I don't want.

It's also good to recognize that being on the other side of 60 y/o I need to purchase a boat that I can manage by myself at times.

I have been looking at boats for several months but living in north Queensland means some quite distant travel by road or air to look at prospective boats.

Here is where I am continually frustrated.

I am totally pissed off with driving several hundred kilometers or flying even further to look at boats that are advertised on the internet with glowing reports and brilliant pictures only to realise when I get to actually see the boat that the reports are almost pure bull**** and that in most cases the pictures were taken 20 years ago when the boat was at it's best.

What happened to just old fashioned honesty.

I asked one private vendor recently if he would reimburse me the cost of a 900 km round trip to look at his yacht. It was not one bit like his advertisement and was just a floating pig sty. The cushion covers were worn and threadbare and weren't even the ones in the photo's on the .net. The deck paint was peeling and the mast had serious corrosion problems visible from the deck. He had told me in a phone call a few days before that the rigging was almost new and the mast was two years old.

I'm guessing I will find what I want in due course but there is so much overpriced crap out there at the moment that I think It will be a lot harder search than I had anticipated.

My first boat I purchased was love at first sight and I had it for many years. My second was the first boat I looked at and was 800 km from home. My third was the third boat I had looked at and I sailed over 14.000 miles in here. This time around I have looked at many, many boats and so far have only seen one that I might consider worth making an offer on.

Talk about frustration.

I'm still looking, lol.