Sailing to Work: Paikea Delivers the Family to the Gunboat 68 Launch
We sailed to France for work. That’s the short version. The longer version involves a half-finished mainsail, a plastic bag around the propeller in the dark, three boys who turned out to be surprisingly useful, and a front-row seat at the launch of a brand new Gunboat 68.
Shayne had been contracted to step the rig on the new Gunboat 68 SeaTilt in La Grande Motte — part of his work with Rigging Projects. We’d just had our own new carbon rig installed on Paikea, and I’d been thinking we should start filming everything. This felt like the right moment to begin.
I spent the morning before we left trying to finish the mainsail modifications so we could take it north with us. I got it to a point where it could travel, if not to a point where it was done. Shayne weather-routed the passage on PredictWind — just under 24 hours, mostly upwind, so getting the timing right mattered.
The sail up was good until it wasn’t. After dark something wrapped around the prop — we could feel it before we could see it. Too dark and cold to deal with it that night, so we stuck the GoPro down for a look and left it for morning. It turned out to be a plastic bag. Harry ended up in the water to clear it, masked up and matter-of-fact about the whole thing in the way that kids who grow up on boats tend to be.
La Grande Motte was worth the trip. Watching a Gunboat 68 launch is something — these boats are a serious piece of engineering, and being there while Shayne stepped the rig gave us a view most people don’t get. The boys thought it was exciting. It was exciting.
This was one of the first videos I ever made for the channel. My filming was green and my editing greener, but the trip was real and the footage captures something honest about what this life actually looks like: the work, the passage, the small dramas, and the moments that make it worth it.
If the professional side of what Shayne does interests you — rig design, composite work, how boats like the Gunboat 68 actually go together — that’s exactly what the members’ technical library is built around. One new deep-dive video every month, plus everything we’ve already put in there. Join here.