DIY Square-Top Mainsail: 3D-Printed Batten Receptacles Paikea’s mainsail started life on a 72-foot superyacht. It was a delivery main — big, heavy cloth built for a boat three times our size — picked up during lockdown when boat parts weren’t exactly easy to come by and budgets were tighter than usual. Anna took it on: […]
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Building a Carbon Front Beam from America’s Cup Mast Sections This one started with two projects running in parallel. Anna was up in the sail loft recutting a fractional kite while Shayne was in the grinding bay with sections of an America’s Cup mast, working out how to turn them into a front beam. The
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Crane Haul Out Without a Spreader Bar The local travel lift wasn’t going to work. Paikea’s beam is too wide, so a crane was the only option — which meant more logistics, more preparation, and a slightly higher pucker factor when your home is dangling in a sling thirty feet off the ground. We had
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Catamaran Hull Damage Repair: What We Found Under a Bad Fix When we bought Paikea there was a small repair above the rudders that didn’t sit right. The previous owner had a story about it — a cable, he said. We were fairly sure he was telling porky pies. Grinding it back confirmed it. The
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Flush Skin Fittings: Recycling Our Existing Through-Hulls for Less Drag The toilet inlet and the toilet outlet on Paikea were about 300mm apart. Anyone who has lived on a boat knows exactly what that means. The inlet was moving — three or four metres forward in the hull — and while we had the boat
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Boatyard Boredom? Not for These Two Young Sailors. While Paikea was on the hard and we were deep in the refit, Harry and Olly needed something to do. The yard next door had a little Gos 16 sitting unused and said they could sail it as much as they wanted. That was enough. The sails
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