Hauling Out Paikea: Discovering a Hull Crack and Starting Her Interior Refit
We’re back in the Mediterranean, in Barcelona, which is roughly where this whole project started. It felt right to be back here for the next chapter — hauling Paikea out for her biggest refit yet.
A Quick Recap of How We Got Here
When we first started modifying Paikea, back in Spain, we got hold of an ex-America’s Cup rig that was otherwise headed for the bin. High-modulus carbon, stiff enough that we didn’t need spreaders at all, which simplified the whole rig considerably. We made it rotating while we were at it, mostly because we could. A stack of old racing sails got recut to fit her — a square-top main, a headsail, a storm sail, a code zero, and two RC44 kites that worked perfectly once the luffs were shortened.
Flying sails like that meant upgrading the front beam and adding a longeron, a genuinely big job that came together well. The trampoline netting I was sceptical about at the time has held up beautifully — still looking close to new after almost three years of heavy use. We also fitted two new rudder blades to the existing stainless steel stocks, which in hindsight wasn’t the right call: one of those stocks failed mid-Atlantic, 800 nautical miles from land.
That failure led to close to two years in the Windward Islands, working to fund the next stage — mostly Shayne on professional sailing and rigging jobs, largely servicing and troubleshooting rigs on large multihulls and other race boats. In between paid work, one of the bigger projects was building a carbon fibre chainplate to replace a stainless one that had started to move.
The plan for that summer was interior improvements. That changed the moment Shayne was offered a place on the French America’s Cup Challenger team — a genuine reassessment of location, work, and priorities, but not an opportunity worth turning down. It meant a rushed scramble to get Paikea ready for another Atlantic crossing: new chainplates, a replacement for the rudder we’d lost, and all of it largely handled from Paikea’s own cockpit rather than a proper workshop, since finding materials and facilities on the move wasn’t simple. With two working rudders, two new chainplates, and everything else sorted, the crossing to the Azores and on to the Mediterranean was an easy one.
Arriving in Barcelona
Landing back in Barcelona put us right in the middle of the 37th America’s Cup’s first preliminary regatta, in Vilanova i la Geltrú — a genuinely close series across six teams, with Orient Express Racing pulling off an early win before Emirates Team New Zealand showed just how dangerous they are in tough conditions. Shayne came off the water from that regatta straight into hauling Paikea out — third place finish, no rest in between.
Haul-Out Day
We’d been waiting on this haul-out for a couple of months by the time it finally came around, kids included — everyone genuinely excited to get Paikea onto the hard and start pulling the interior apart. The travel lift pit at the yard turned out to be tighter than expected, tight enough that getting Paikea in required walking her in on dock lines rather than trusting the lift alone. She fit, just.
With Paikea sitting on the hard, one of the first jobs was marking her actual waterline with small notches before cleaning her off — since once the hull’s washed down, there’d be no way to tell where she’d actually been sitting in the water. Worth doing given the whole point of this refit is to change that waterline, first by taking weight out, then by putting some of it back in more useful places.
While the yard crew worked to locate the bulkheads for blocking, the boys spotted something we hadn’t planned on: a large crack in the hull, visible once you knew where to look. Not a cosmetic issue — a proper structural one, and the kind of thing that gets your attention fast the first time you see it.
The cause turned out to be straightforward once we dug into it: a previous haul-out had put a block in the wrong spot, in a location that could genuinely have been anywhere — a different yard, a different country, years earlier. It’s a good reminder of why correct blocking matters every single time a boat comes out of the water, regardless of how routine the lift feels. There was no sign of it from the outside — that repair had already been carried out once before, in Valencia, on a different, unrelated issue where a rudder had gone through the hull. This crack was its own separate problem, and by the time we found it, someone else had already made a first attempt at repairing it — one that needed correcting rather than trusting as-is.
That crack, and the work it led to, marks the real start of this refit. Everything from here — the interior strip-out, the floors, the furniture, the systems — begins with getting that hull right first.
Follow the rest of Paikea’s interior transformation on the Paikea’s Refit page, where every stage of this project gets documented as it happens.