Making our dome skin fittings sit flush with the hull. Why would you bother? When you are chasing performance every little bit counts. Especially, my friends, when we are looking below the waterline. In our case we have a few obvious items to address. These include swapping fixed blade propellers for folding ones, fitting saildrive boots and replacing rudders. Yes, we need new rudders. Actually we only have one rudder – the other one is an emergency rudder that was supposed to be only a temporary fix. We don’t know the story behind what happened to the real rudder or how long the temporary one has been in situ but the more work we do on the boat the more clues we get.
Anyway I digress. We are chasing speed and our hulls are in a sorry state. We need to fix rudders, swap over propellers and scrape back way to may years of antifoul to have a good look at our hulls, repair any damage then epoxy coat before painting on the antifoul. The other major item is our skin fittings. We needed to glass over some redundant skin fittings (no one wants to have unnecessary holes in their boat) and modify our existing skin to make them flush with the hull. Previously they were some shaped so effectively our hulls had raised domes at every skin fitting. In the eternal search for doped and performance we were convinced they needed to go. Of course cruising is all about being frugal where you can and because our skin fittings were still in good condition we decided to machine the flat and recess them into the hull.
We are super happy with the result. They are flush with the hull and should reduce drag. They will also be more efficient at collecting water for our watermaker too.
Check out our video to see how we did it and if you have any questions please feel free to comment below or on our YouTube video.