I started sailing in the seventies, and without much hesitation bought a CAPRICE, an 18' plywood pocket cruiser on the Isle of Wight and promptly managed to get myself almost killed in the Portland Bill tidal race a week later.

This experience was not lost on me, and for some time I was healthily scared to death every time I left harbor.

A couple of years later I bought an old, Poland built 8m sloop, an AMETHYST, and sailed it across the channel to France with live-aboard plans for the Mediterranean.

We stopped in La Rochelle for just two weeks to paint the deck, and somehow... well, a dozen years later I was still in the area.

When we were shopping for paint, the first week, there was a guy next to us, fitting out his steel yacht, and we started chatting.

Gerard Chaigne had designed and built his boat himself, as well as half a dozen other boats, and he does mostly that until today. Many of his boats were built for long-term live-aboard projects, have crossed all oceans and sailed around the world.

La Rochelle is situated in the Bay of Biscay, on the French atlantic coast. Within a radius of 20 Km you find most of the European yacht production, all the big yards, from industrialized mass production fiber glass, over small series of Aluminum boats or lovingly outfitted Retro-Wooden yachts, right up to some of the largest luxury Sailboats built today, not to forget Yards like Pinta and others specialized in high-tech trimarans and mono hulls for the racing scene. And of course all the outfitters, riggers and sail makers you could dream of, all the naval designers... La Rochelle is one of the busiest sailing places in the World.

In the Seventies and eighties amateur builders flocked by the dozens to La Rochelle, there was always a cheap mast with a scratch, there were second hand sails.. I still remember our rush on slightly discolored winches after Gib' Sea had burned out.

Whatever you needed, for whatever type of boat was never more than half an hour away by car and all of it at unbeatable prices.

And then there were all the other crazies, to chat, discuss, ask for help or simple get drunk with after a long days work. When I was there, there were more than a hundred amateur projects going on within 50 km, and I knew most of them personally.

There were boats being built in any imaginable material and in all sizes.

Come Spring my own boat was sold, and I found myself living in a small tent, and on the grass in front of the tent I had two and a half tons of black steel, second hand welding and oxygen cutting equipment (from another amateur), a big Hammer and absolutely no practical experience. My first weld I made after having already received the steel, and under guidance from another amateur who had come to help me drag the plates off the truck.

Over the next two and a half years I build my own 10m boat, as well as three other steel shells for friends, to pay the fitting out of my own.

After this I sailed my boat for three seasons as charter/cruising school from la Rochelle, mostly up and down the Brittany coast.

All together I spent about ten years doing nothing else but messing around in boats, including

• Numerous played and unpaid jobs on other amateur projects, all sizes, all materials, Ferro, Strip planked, Steel of course, C-Flex, WEST ply....
• Several delivery trips of 14 and 18 m yachts from France around Spain and Gibraltar to Majorca
• Delivery Trip of a 15 m Motor yacht from Venice to Corfu and back
• Delivery of KOTIK, a double ender Steel Ketch built on the lines of Moitessiers JOSUA from La Rochelle To Madeira.
• Commercial and technical owner coordination in a yard that built serial glass fiber yachts between 15 and 32 m, including surveillance, organizing and running expositions and boat shows in Genoa, Düsseldorf
• Skipper and technical consultant on an 18 m owner yacht
• Not to forget all the smaller things that look like nothing but give you a nice insight into other concepts and methods: an 8 m steel motor launch hull transformed into a houseboat, the supervising of the building of half a dozen canoes built in GRP, a Mirror Dinghy stitched and glued in a Garage in Germany, a couple of older boats bought and sold second hand over the years, and more recently the building with the family of our open 5.5m Spritsail Yawl in ply-epoxy.

In the end I got sort of fed up, also getting older and thinking that maybe it was time to start doing what other people usually do first, before they go sailing: Find a Job and work. So I just stopped messing around in boat and became a serious person ;-)

It did not really work, because since then I have been involved in other silly things like flying ULM (ultra light motorized trikes), but that is another story. I really worked hard to grow up, get sober and "integrated", and work today in IT development and project management.

Life ashore is not bad, and there a really a lot of things you will have to live without, should you go ahead and get afloat. But I don't know, once you have lived on your boat that there will always be something deep inside that will one day come back up to bite your ass...

The bite will itch and itch, no use scratching or rubbing your backside on your office chair, until finally you start - just for fun of course - looking for plans again, and before you know it...

It's an addiction. I was clean for 10 years. But resistance is weakening