Hull Weight Reduction & Flush Hatch Installation| youngbarnacles

Hull Weight Reduction & Flush Hatch Installation: Paikea Refit Update

Watching the waterline creep down, tide line by tide line, over the better part of a year is one of the more satisfying kinds of progress on this refit — slow, cumulative, and now finally starting to show.

Why this started as a repair job and became a weight mission

When Paikea was bought, the interior timber furniture was already delaminating, with rotten sections hiding under the windows and genuine leaks throughout. The boat had always felt heavier than she should, though nothing formal confirmed it until repairs to failing chainplates meant pulling out surrounding timber anyway — and each time a section came out, the difference in how she sailed was noticeable enough to ask the obvious question: how much further could this go?

That question eventually became the actual plan. Lock Crowther’s original design for this hull had a specific target weight in mind, and everything accumulated over three decades of ownership had pushed the boat well past it. Stripping the original timber furniture out entirely, and rebuilding everything in lightweight composite, is the path back toward that original intended weight — and, with it, back toward the performance the hull was actually designed to deliver.

650 kilos out, one hull down

The numbers so far are genuinely encouraging, even accounting for some early removals that weren’t carefully weighed at the time. Net of everything taken out and every new composite structure put back in, the port hull alone is 650 kilos lighter than it started — real progress toward the full ton this refit is chasing, with the starboard hull still ahead.

Room by room, the interior keeps shifting

What was originally slated as one layout keeps evolving as actual living and working needs on board reveal themselves. A former bedroom has become the dedicated resin and paint mixing space — genuinely useful given how much composite work this refit generates — while what was meant to be that same room is now becoming a bathroom instead, keeping the existing structural layout but rebuilt entirely in composite.

Bulkhead work continues in parallel. Doorways have been deliberately widened and squared up with foam packed into the rough edges before edge capping goes on properly — messy, multi-coloured foam scraps and all, exactly the unglamorous middle stage every refit passes through before it looks finished. Removing an old fuel locker on one side of a bulkhead opened up clean access to patch and fair two matching sections — straightforward once the obstruction was gone, and a section Anna’s genuinely happy with once finished.

Oliver’s wing deck bed base is next in the queue for prep and sanding before bogging — the same wing deck complexity covered in earlier posts about why these bases can’t simply follow the deck’s raw geometry.

Kids doing real, skilled work

Oliver’s been finishing carbon fibre battens on the hardtop — a job that landed with him specifically because his experience building and fine-tuning pump foil boards translated directly into genuine skill at fine composite finishing work. Harry drew the less glamorous job prepping the fuel locker, though he and Oliver had already worked through an earlier section together before this split. It’s a small but real detail worth noting: two teenagers doing composite fairing and finishing work most adults would need real instruction to attempt.

Hatches installed, drainage sorted

The composite hatches — covered in detail across the preceding three-part series — are now genuinely installed, complete with 3D-printed drains positioned two per side, one draining directly into the daggerboard case for a clean, unobtrusive exit rather than an obviously separate fitting.

A cluster of additional holes appearing around this stage raised an obvious question worth answering directly: not every hole in this section is a hatch drain. Some correspond to the stanchion socket installations covered in an earlier three-part series — sockets that can collect water and need their own dedicated drainage path, entirely separate from the hatch system nearby. Reading a boat mid-refit means learning to tell these apart; what looks like a random scatter of holes is actually several different, deliberately engineered drainage systems sitting close together.

Getting to paint

With hatches, floors, daggerboard bulkheads, and crash boxes all now in place, the outboard wall reached genuine paint-ready status — dusted down, imperfections checked over one final time, and finally rolled with the first coat. It’s a milestone worth marking specifically: after months of structural work that mostly happens out of sight, watching paint actually go onto a wall is the first moment this section of the refit starts looking finished rather than perpetually mid-construction.

In This Series

This post is part of our composite hatches deep dive. Read the full story here: Paikea’s Composite Hatches: The Full Story

Or explore the rest of the series: