Recycled Foredeck Pieces from an America’s Cup Yacht
The first modification we made to Paikea wasn’t structural. It was a roof.
The cockpit is the space we live in more than any other on the boat, and for the first stretch of ownership, it had no hard cover at all — just a soft top doing an average job of keeping rain out and nothing to make working the boat any easier. Putting a hard dodger over it was the very first project on the list, and true to form, what went up there came from an America’s Cup yard rather than a chandlery.
Salvaged from someone’s backyard
The main hardtop structure is carbon-Nomex construction from the Swedish America’s Cup challenge in 2007 — dug out of a yard manager’s backyard, where it had been earmarked as ramp material for his children. We took it before it became a skate ramp and gave it a second life as Paikea’s roof instead.
Building a hard cover over a cockpit isn’t as simple as bolting a lid on. The obvious problem: put something solid overhead and you lose sight of the mainsail, which matters a great deal on a boat where trimming and shooting the main correctly depends on being able to see it. The piece that solved that problem was one of the best finds of the whole project — a section of Cup boat foredeck complete with its original three-man sliding hatch, originally built for launching the spinnaker through. The hatch skins are e-glass over a Nomex core, which lets a surprising amount of light through, and that turned out to matter more than expected. Hard tops have a habit of turning cockpits and cabins dark, and this one panel does a lot of quiet work keeping the back of the boat liveable. Painting the underside white helps too, bouncing what light there is back down into the cockpit.
Building the roof out of broken parts
Structurally, the rest of the hardtop is a patchwork of salvaged pieces, laminated and bonded together into one unit. Busted rig spreaders — headed for the bin after a broken rig — became structural supports, taped and bonded in, peel ply still visible where the paint hasn’t gone on yet. Jumper spreaders from a Cup rig, complete with their original hydraulic ram access hatches, were repurposed to route wiring for lights inside the hardtop — a functional detail that came for free because the part already had the right holes in the right places.
The old console, and the day it nearly got torn off
The instrument console sitting under the hardtop predates the rebuild, and it’s had its own history. A jibe gone wrong once wrapped the mainsheet around the steering wheel and very nearly ripped the whole console off the boat — it had only ever been held on with half a dozen self-tapping screws, which says everything about how seriously the original builder took that mounting. It’s now bonded and laminated in properly as part of the hardtop structure, with drilling and tapping for real bolted fixings still on the list.
Small fixes that make a real difference
A few details, unglamorous but worth mentioning:
The old winch handle clearance was tight enough that a hard swing could clip the steering console — not dangerous, but the kind of thing that catches you out at the worst moment. The new geometry between the spreader supports, the console, and the wheel opened that clearance up properly.
Winch direction confusion is a real hazard with kids or newer crew aboard, especially on a boat where most winches turn clockwise but not universally. Bright tape marking left-hand winches is cheap insurance against exactly the kind of mistake a young or inexperienced crew member can make in a split second — worth doing on any boat, not just this one.
The split bridle mainsheet system on this boat is, without exaggeration, the worst mainsheet arrangement either of us has used — it takes two people to adjust the main properly, with both winches needing coordinated trimming just to keep the boom centred, and no reliable way to know both sides are actually matched without markers on the lines to check against. It’s the first boat either of us has had one on, and it’ll be the last.
More than just a roof
Beyond keeping the weather out, the hardtop fundamentally changed how the boat gets sailed. With the main up almost constantly — sailing is faster than motoring on this boat, so the sail stays hoisted far more than it comes down — having a stable, walkable surface to work the boom from made flaking and bagging the main dramatically easier than it ever was under the soft top.
It also opened up real estate for solar. Semi-rigid panels are going up on the hardtop rather than rigid ones, not because rigid panels are bad, but because they’re the wrong tool here — at roughly the same weight as the hardtop itself (around 40 kilograms for two rigid panels, matching the hardtop’s own 40 kilograms), doubling that load on the roof wasn’t sensible. Semi-rigid panels come in at less than half the weight and can be walked on safely, which matters on a surface people are standing on constantly. The rigid panels found a better home instead, mounted over the dinghy davits.
A few smaller upgrades rounded out the cockpit: refurbished compasses (one fully sealed and clear, one still with a slow leak to sort out), new McConaghy trim tab wheels — a generous gift that came with an unusually odd internal spline to work around — and a rebuilt engine control panel with new waterproof buttons, though the tachometer on one engine remains stubbornly temperamental thanks to a long, old run of wiring likely losing signal strength over distance.
The finishing detail was Anna’s call: clear coat left on the aft edge of the hardtop where you step in and look up, the rest painted white, with a moulded lip running the perimeter that doubles as a handhold and channels water and dirt away rather than letting it pool. A drain hole behind the hatch takes water away from the slide rail rather than letting it pour straight into the cockpit — small, but it’s exactly the kind of detail that decides whether a hard top actually works in real conditions or just looks good until the first rain.