Crack in the Hull and Asymmetric Rudders: Barcelona Refit Begins
With Paikea on the hard in Barcelona, it was time to lay out exactly what this refit actually involves — and the honest answer is: almost everything.
The Full Strip-Out
The interior’s coming out, all of it. It’s original timber — heavy, and in places starting to rot — and the plan is to rebuild the whole boat in foam and composite instead. The galley goes. The table goes. The old ceiling lining, the seats, the bathroom, the wall linings — all of it comes out. The floors are a priority for two reasons: they’re genuinely heavy, and where they’re rotting, that weight only gets worse over time.
The berths are being rebuilt flat this time, which matters more than it sounds. Where they currently sit, over the wing deck, there’s an angle built into the structure that the old bunks were packed out to compensate for — an easy thing to flatten properly while everything’s already stripped back rather than working around it again.
Room by room: one cabin is close to empty already and will get largely new furniture. A cupboard held on with a handful of screws is coming off entirely to get proper access behind the beam, with a new one going back in a slightly different position once the berth behind it moves further aft. The steps are being redone from scratch, aiming for the same look as the originals but built properly this time. The nav station is being rebuilt. New doors and door frames are going in for the engine room. The forward cabin and the second bathroom are both getting the same treatment.
Once the interior’s out, the hull itself gets the real work: filled, sanded, filled again until it’s properly smooth, then primed and painted. Every remaining timber component — steps, structural pieces, anything else built from wood originally — gets replaced with foam and fibreglass as it goes back in. The new carbon chainplate is part of that same pass: sanded, filled, and painted along with everything else.
It’s a genuinely large scope, but the upside is straightforward — a full accounting of exactly how much weight can come out of this boat.
The Crack
The crack the boys spotted earlier turned out to be in the floor rather than the wall — worth the correction, since it changes how serious it actually is. It runs the full length of that section, and it moves when you walk on it, which isn’t something you want to feel in a hull.
The cause was already clear: a previous haul-out had put a support block in the wrong spot, and standing on the crack now made it obvious the load wasn’t being carried where it needed to be. Extra support went in immediately once that was confirmed. The fix meant bringing the travel lift back to reposition the blocks correctly further aft — not the outcome anyone wanted from a second lift, but the right call given what the first attempt had left unsupported.
With the travel lift already booked for that, it made sense to get more done in the same window — specifically, dropping both rudders.
Dropping the Rudders
The starboard rudder, the one that hadn’t been rebuilt yet, had resisted coming apart the last time it was attempted, back in Valencia. This time, the tiller arm’s grub screw had seized solid enough that it stripped rather than releasing — no straightforward way to back it out once that happens. The fix was a cold chisel worked into the gap where the tiller arm clamps around the rudder stock, prying it open just enough to free the stock and drop the rudder clear. Simple once you see it done, genuinely stuck until then.
Both rudders came out in the same session — the port side, already rebuilt once in St. Martin with a carbon stock, came out easily, having already been in and out before. The starboard side, still on its original stainless steel stock, was more of a fight, not helped by a stock that turned out to be full of water and considerably heavier to wrestle out than expected.
With proper mould-making equipment now accessible in Barcelona, both rudder blades are being rebuilt properly this time rather than repaired again — the St. Martin carbon stock gets a new blade to match, and the stainless stock is being replaced with carbon entirely.
The weight difference, once both stocks were on the scale, made the case for itself: the carbon stock came in at 7.5kg. The stainless one weighed 29.8kg. Close to four times the weight for the same job — the kind of number that makes the whole rudder-replacement project worth the effort on its own.
Full coverage of Paikea’s rudder rebuild lives in the Paikea’s Rudders: The Full Story, and every stage of the interior refit is being tracked on the Paikea’s Refit page.