IN the summer of '86 I was without my favourite toy, a yacht, and had no intention of purchasing a vessel. I had just returned from a winter cruise about the Spanish Main and through the West Indies, and any voyage more extensive than a boating expedition on the upper Thames was quite out of my mind, when I by chance came across a boat lying at Hammersmith of all unlikely places which appeared to me to be singularly adapted for the realisation of one of my earliest yachting dreams.