From America’s Cup to Mini Maxis: What’s Next in Our Marine World
It’s been a while since the last update, and there’s a good reason — a genuinely busy stretch of professional work that’s kept Paikea sitting on the back burner for longer than either of us would like.
Parting Ways with the French America’s Cup Team
Shayne finished up with the French America’s Cup Challenger team at the end of November, before their AC40 headed to Jeddah. The parting was amicable, and it came down to culture more than anything else — the team’s roots were in French offshore sailing, IMOCA 60s and that world, and the level of detail and preparation that an America’s Cup campaign demands is a different discipline entirely. Both sides recognised it wasn’t the right fit and moved on cleanly. They’re sailing the same design as Team New Zealand now, French-built rather than Kiwi-built, and it should be a genuinely fast boat to watch.
A Month to Get Paikea Back in the Water
The team gave a full month’s notice, which meant a properly stressful scramble to get Paikea seaworthy again. The hull crack repair needed finishing. The rudder rebuild — which had been the plan — got pushed to the back burner in favour of simply reinstalling what was already there. Some blistering had turned up around the waterline, which meant taking the whole bottom back to bare fibreglass, epoxy coating it properly this time as a protective layer, and redoing the antifouling from scratch. New propellers went on. And with the interior still stripped bare, moving back aboard meant sleeping surrounded by exposed fibreglass for a while.
The Balthasar Mini Maxi 72 Refit
Within 24 hours of finishing with the French team, three separate offers came in — and one of them, a Mini Maxi 72 refit in Valencia, has turned into the project now known as Balthasar. What started as a one-week favour, covering for a couple of guys away over Christmas, turned into something much bigger once it became clear the project lead needed help managing the technical and floor side of things. The split settled naturally: financial and political management on one side, technical project management and running the floor on the other — with plenty of crossover in practice.
The scope of that refit is significant. The boat went from a fully human-powered, inshore Grand Prix machine to essentially a bare hull shell with frames and longitudinals, being rebuilt as a coastal offshore boat — water ballast, twin rudders, and a complete winch package upgraded to hydraulic, engine-driven, PLC-controlled operation. One of the biggest jobs turned out to be waterproofing: boats built for racing around the cans are about as far from watertight as it’s possible to get, and getting a moving jib-sheet penetration properly sealed against a rope constantly flogging in and out took real engineering rather than anything off the shelf. Anna took on the covers side of the project — the large protective curtains isolating the boat’s hydraulics and machinery from a spinnaker coming through the boat’s internal volume at speed, and protecting the crew sleeping close by, alongside designing the lightweight bunks themselves. Loft Customs handled the larger cover fabrication beautifully.
Cruising a Gunboat 66 in Croatia
After Balthasar, a friend needed help looking after an owner and his family for six weeks cruising Croatia aboard a Gunboat 66 — a genuinely different boat to the newer 68. Built in South Africa back in 2007 rather than the 68’s French build, it’s an older design with a different philosophy entirely: more of a getaway-beach-house feel than the 68’s chic-apartment style, with a fully painted interior that hoses out easily rather than the fabric-and-finish approach that doesn’t always survive four kids and sunscreen. It’s a little heavier and not quite as stiff structurally as the newer boats, which tracks — fifteen years of build technology moving on shows. This trip was the family’s last adventure aboard before preparing her for sale, and it’ll be interesting to see what a new owner does with a platform that’s still got real potential in it. More on sailing the Gunboat 66: Outnumbered.
Rebuilding Pegasus 50’s Rig in Slovenia
The other project running in parallel was Marcus’s Pegasus 50, a fully carbon, ocean-going, twin-electric yacht — this time a rig rebuild after the previous rig came down. The core issue with the old setup was that it simply couldn’t hold rig tension reliably; the forestay sagged more than it should have, and the boat was missing a piece of equipment that, past roughly 45 feet, genuinely should be standard: a mast jack. Once rod rigging gets past a certain size, tension gauges stop being usable on the wire itself, which leaves jack pressure as the only real way to know what tune you’re actually carrying. See Cap Tang Misalignment: Why Non-Parallel Tangs Crack Rod Rigging Heads for a closer look at the Pegasus 50 rig
The new rig kept the same basic design, with one significant change on Shayne’s professional recommendation: synthetic rigging in place of rod. It met real resistance from both the builder and the spar maker at first — understandably, since it was well outside what either of them had worked with before. The case for it came down to accountability as much as performance: with a rig that can be tuned to known numbers, everyone involved — spar maker, builder, rigger, sailmaker — can point to hard data if something doesn’t match up, rather than guessing at whether a stay is too tight, too loose, or simply unknown. The manufacturer Shayne pointed Marcus toward, Fabrica, is the same team now building the new stays and forestay for Paikea.
Putting synthetic rigging on Paikea has been Shayne’s ambition for a long time, independent of the Pegasus 50 project — she’s carrying a carbon rig, which deserves proper stays and forestay to match, and the forestay upgrade in particular has been on the list for a while. What the Pegasus 50 work actually did was help put the budget in reach, after a genuinely busy run of paid projects. The composite synthetic rigging series for members picks up directly from here.
And a Side Project: Carbon Fibre Prosthetic Feet
Somewhere in amongst all of that, Shayne’s also been designing tooling and specifying a preliminary laminate for a friend manufacturing carbon fibre prosthetic limbs — replicating an existing design without the benefit of pulling one apart to see exactly how it was built, so there’s some genuine engineering guesswork involved in getting the first set right.
Where This Leaves Paikea
All of which is, honestly, the excuse for why Paikea’s refit has been sitting quiet. There’s still a real amount of work left, and it’s only becoming more obvious with three nearly-adult kids aboard just how small a 42-foot boat can feel — on top of the usual wear and tear that comes with genuinely living aboard, coming up on seven years now. Getting back to it, finishing the job properly, and actually taking Paikea sailing again rather than working on her would be a very welcome change of pace.
Follow how these professional projects continue to shape Paikea’s own refit on the Paikea’s Refit page.