"We had been sailing Skylark for a few years and felt that we were now ready for this bigger project,"  Tony explains. Yet the inspection of Baruna, in the water at Marina del Rey in California, turned out to be rather sobering. "She was only kept afloat by her bilge pumps. When I lifted the floorboards, I could see the water pouring into the ship. One failure of the pumps and she would have gone down immediately!,"  Tony recalls. "In any case, she was no longer fit to sail. There were hardly any sails on board and the masts were, as would later be confirmed at the Derecktor repair shipyard in Fort Lauderdale, completely rotten."