Catamaran Front Beam Load Paths: Why We Replaced Aluminium with Carbon The original aluminium front beam on Paikea worked. It had done 45,000 miles. But understanding why we replaced it requires understanding what a front beam actually has to do — and the original arrangement was doing it in a way that had some significant […]
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Paikea’s First Sea Trial: Carbon Front Beam, New Rudders, and a Midnight Sewing Job The sea trial almost didn’t happen on schedule. When we’d left for France earlier in the build — when Shayne was stepping the Gunboat 68 rig — Anna had set the mainsail head webbing in an approximate position, the intention being
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Sea Trials With Our New Mainsail Motor testing only tells you so much. To really know if a rebuilt boat is sound, you have to load it up under sail and see what happens. Paikea had already been out under motor to test the new front beam, longeron, folding propellers, rudders, flush skin fittings, and
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Adding a 24-Volt System to a 30-Year-Old Catamaran We bought a boat with no working electrics at all. Three years later, we’re about to more than triple our usable power — and change the entire voltage of the boat to do it. When we got Paikea, “electrical system” was generous. The batteries held a charge
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Recycled Foredeck Pieces from an America’s Cup Yacht The first modification we made to Paikea wasn’t structural. It was a roof. The cockpit is the space we live in more than any other on the boat, and for the first stretch of ownership, it had no hard cover at all — just a soft top
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From America’s Cup to Our Catamaran: Rescuing a Carbon Legend We’d been stuck in Valencia during the COVID lockdown when we came across a piece of sailing history that was about to be destroyed. Rig #12 from Team New Zealand’s 2000 America’s Cup campaign — later used by the French challenger in the 2007 Cup
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