The man selling the (pounds) 5m floating gin palace laughed. It was crazy to pay so much for a boat, he admitted, but even if you wanted one you would have to wait for two years. The order book was full. You could not even see the Sunseeker 105 motor cruiser among all the glitzy craft on show, because it was too big to get through the doors of the exhibition centre.

So prospective purchasers had to be

content with a glossy brochure detailing its king-sized master bedroom, with curved staircase leading to a marble-clad bathroom, complete with Jacuzzi.

If they felt like saving time and money, they could snap up a Sunseeker 75 Predator for a mere (pounds) 1.75m. For this modest outlay they get 75ft of rakish fibreglass and chrome, featuring luxurious fittings in cherry wood, soft white leather sofas and a barbecue on the aft deck. It also has three engines, each with its own propeller, in the unlikely event the owner wishes to go anywhere. The Sunseeker salesman happily confided that the average engine running time of such a gleaming status symbols is 100 hours a year. Oh well, I didn't fancy one anyway.

I had come to an annual extravaganza of all things nautical, much as a child is drawn to a toy megastore. As the new owner of an old wooden sloop - which cost about the same as the Predator's barbecue - I had come to explore an Aladdin's Cave of boats and shiny bits and bobs that would fuel dreams of escapism in its purest form, sailing the Seven Seas.

I was not alone. In the past year, turnover in the UK marine industry increased by 10% to more than (pounds) 1.6billion, with exports up by 17%. The marine finance division of the Bank of Scotland saw its lending rise from (pounds) 70m to (pounds) 105m last year, largely to people taking out mortgages to buy big boats.

Not many of these boats are built in Scotland, however. The list of more than 600 exhibitors at the London Boat Show this month included only four Scottish-based firms, of which only one was selling boats

- made in Norway.

''It's the lack of skilled labour,'' said Alan Hogan, boat sales manager of Caley Marina of Inverness. ''There's a lack of boat builders in the UK as a whole. Apprentices are trained to a high standard, but then they go off to Italy or France.''

This has left his company fitting out cruising boats for hire fleets on Loch Ness, and selling Norwegian fibreglass runabouts for boating ponds and fish farms. It is doing well, having sold almost 200 paddle-boats to

London parks.

But for a country that crafted some of the world's finest classic ocean-going yachts and steam cruisers, selling plastic boats to Hyde Park is unlikely to

herald a renaissance in shipbuilding. We may not make many boats any more, but we still have magical places to sail them in the Highlands and Islands.

The only problem

is the weather. Try telling a chap from Sussex to take his chances with a yacht charter in the Hebrides when the Med beckons for the same price.

To find out how we are faring in the international marketplace, I wandered over to the Sail Scotland stand, which was attracting attention with a food stall selling fresh oysters and smoked salmon. Tom Mowat, chairman of Scottish Yacht Charterers, was sanguine.

''It's not easy persuading people who have never been north of Watford that Scotland isn't always wet and windy and hard to

navigate. But once you do, they come back. More than half of our business is repeat

customers.''

Some come from England, but there are more from the continent - France, Austria and Switzerland. And they tend to bring their hiking boots and golf clubs with them. Mr Mowat was pleased to report a lot of interest in Scotland at the show: ''If we don't go away from here with at least a dozen firm bookings we'll be disappointed.''

By the fourth day of the 11-day exhibition, Scottish Yacht Charterers had taken four charters, so they were right on course. I, on the other hand, appeared to have lost my way.

I had come hoping to be completely dazzled by the grace

and beauty of boats which exemplified the finest traditions of an ancient craft.

Soaring spars, smooth carvel hulls, the scents of wood and canvas, that sort of thing. Instead, I was surrounded by plastic boats. Very nice boats with all modern conveniences, of course, but with as much character as well-appointed caravans.

The interiors of some big yachts were like hotel rooms, with no sense of the sea. I half expected to find bells for room service.

I suppose I came to sailing too late. The days when men went into forests and cut down trees to make boats are long gone, and the skills they passed on are being lost.

People don't want wooden boats any more. In today's world they take too long to make, cost too much and are too much trouble to maintain.

But there are a few survivors. McNulty Boats Ltd of Tyne and Wear still build Longstones, traditional open boats used by watermen for serving the great square-riggers which used to fill the harbours of the north-east of England.

At their stand I found one of the smallest craft in the exhibition, and arguably the most beautiful - a nine-foot Longstone with tan sails, hand-built in mahogany on oak frames, with spars of spruce, smooth and dark under layers of varnish. Every part of her was a tribute to the carpenter's craft.

''It's real tree is that,'' Stewart Brown, the sales and marketing manager, says. ''They're not commercially viable, of course, can't make a living out of them. It's just to show we've still got the skills in the factory.''

What keeps McNulty Boats afloat is their popular Drascombe range of small sailing craft, built on the lines of traditional workboats but made of wood epoxy, a wood-

reinforced plastic.

It's a question of moving with the times, Stewart says, of trying to combine the best of the old with the best of the new.

''There's growing interest in wooden boats, but they're expensive to build. The problem is the people who have the money to buy them aren't prepared to put in the work to maintain them.''

Enough of reality, it was time for a bit of fantasy. Bond style. Beyond the Sail Scotland stand was a collection of spectacular craft used by 007 and various baddies to whizz over and under the sea at high speed.

The Bath-O-Sub used by Blofeld in

Diamonds Are Forever was there, along with the Q-Boat that did a barrel roll in The World Is Not Enough.

Personally, I liked the Sunseeker Superhawk with an optional extra on the aft deck - a machine-gun fitted with telescopic sights. Just the thing for blowing noisesome jet bikes out of the water at Largs.

At the end of the day I decided against taking out a mortgage for a plastic boat with a marble bathroom. I am content with an old wooden boat with a plastic bucket for a bathroom.

Although the machine-gun could have come in handy.