Sealing Leaky Windows Properly Paikea’s windows are quintessential Catana — curved, space-age looking, and about as impractical and expensive to replace as boat windows get. On a modest cruising budget, new windows were never really on the table. So the job became fixing what we had rather than replacing it. The crazing in the perspex
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How to Make Waterline Markers (And Why We Think It’s Such a Good Idea) Continuing on from our previous video about watching your weight, Shayne takes us through the process of how we made waterline markers for our catamaran. The idea behind this trick is simple: to give you a visual tool to monitor how
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Why Weight Is Critical on Your Multihull Every self-tapping screw on this boat has been weighed. Not because it matters individually — because the sum of a hundred small things nobody thinks to weigh always adds up to more than expected. Before leaving the marina after months of refit work, everything that had been stripped
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Left & Right Winches, and Mast Climbing Safety When left and right winches meet in the same pit Following up on marking your winches — here’s what it actually looks like at the professional end of the sport. Racing on a big offshore raceboat this week, the starboard pit runs genuinely mixed winch handing: right-hand
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How to Laminate a Repair Properly Most bad laminates aren’t caused by bad materials. They’re caused by skipping the boring parts. This one’s a simple polyester repair — closing up an old port light opening on Paikea, foam-cored, nothing exotic — but the basics behind it are the same basics most people get wrong. Not
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Servicing Vetus Hydraulic Steering Rams Push the cylinder rod side to side and feel it move more than it should — that’s the seals telling you they’re done. Paikea’s steering rams had been leaking hydraulic oil since we got the boat, and once the play in the rod confirmed it, there wasn’t much point putting
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