(Sigh!) It's not going to happen for me. I think the best I can hope for is to spend as much time as possible day & weekend sailing with maybe a trip to the Med. It's the wife - she's not sailed before and needs 'room' - and I doubt she'll change, I mean, occaisionally (spelling) she throws a wobbly and says 'lets just emigrate or get out of here, I can't stand it' but the next day she says 'it's a lovely house, we're so lucky'. So I don't think she'd go for anything less than a 40 footer with ALL the trimmings, whereas myself, I think I'm a closet agorophobic and like nothing better than something small and well designed and thought out, where I can just shut out the world. And yet, I love wide open spaces - when we toured the Western USA, she got very bored with me saying 'wow look at that, isn't it fantastic' etc whenever we topped a rise and another 70mile wide flat desert valley with cactii and a ruler-straight road disappearing into the heat haze. As for pension, finance etc, well, we'll probably end up with the state pension and a couple of SMALL private ones. We don't have kids (just didn't happen for us), but we will have our house and hopefully whatever sailing boat we own paid for, so I guess we won't be too badly off come age 60. She wants a small property on the south coast which can be rented out during the winter months and a small place on either the French Atlantic coast or the French Med. I could live with this IF she'll agree to sail between the two. But I guess I'll always long to slip lines and sail off into the wild blue yonder, so unless she decides she just LOVES sailing and living aboard a 30 foooter, I suppose it'll be back and forth between France and the UK. I couldn't do it without her, 'cos I love her so much, so I'll settle for what I can get, soory about the spelling, cant see the keybord.