Down tools for a professional job

Outnumbered’s owners wanted a trip around southern France, and getting a boat this size from packed-away-at-dock to fully provisioned and crewed for eight people isn’t a quick job. What was planned as roughly ten days stretched into a full two weeks, plus delivery time either side — a genuinely significant chunk out of both the Paikea refit calendar and the YouTube schedule, but exactly the kind of professional work this whole project exists to support.

The conditions across the trip ran the full range summer in the Mediterranean typically offers: light, glassy motoring in under 12 knots for long stretches, and then a proper, splashy delivery back across the Gulf of Lion — short, steep seas that turned the return leg into something considerably less relaxed than the outward trip.

Oliver’s SFT Pumpfoil World Series win at Lake Garda

Straight off the back of that, focus shifted to getting Oliver ready for the SFT Pumpfoil World Series at Lake Garda — and the preparation genuinely came down to the wire. New gear arrived from Sabfoil, who build everything locally in Italy. Having local, homegrown production supporting Oliver’s programme matters, it’s good to see and worth supporting when the option exists.

That new equipment came with its own lesson in weight-saving ambition. Oliver built a pump board of his own at 900 grams and declared it as light as a board could possibly get. Shayne, apparently unable to resist the challenge, built one at 640 grams — a solid reminder for Oliver about the danger of declaring anything “as light as it gets” around someone who builds carbon parts for a living.

The final week brought a genuinely rushed final push: a brand-new carbon stabiliser, designed and built by Shayne specifically for Oliver, alongside new equipment from Sabfoil and mast position modifications discovered necessary only days before departure. Training in the compressed lead-up focused specifically on race skills — starts, turns, top-end speed — building on a foundation Oliver already had from general pump foiling, refined into something race-ready in a genuinely tight window squeezed between the Outnumbered trip, ongoing Paikea work, and school.

The result was worth every late night: a win in the youth division U19 at the Lake Garda leg of the SFT World Tour, held during Foiling Week Malcesine — and fourth overall against the open men’s field, — a genuinely strong result, close enough to the open podium to signal real potential moving forward. Off the back of that, Shayne’s now working directly with Sabfoil on foil design — a meaningful step given where Oliver’s programme is heading, and a strong indicator that the equipment side of this sport is about to get even more tailored to what he actually needs.

If you are interested in supporting Olly’s pumpfoiling journey, you can do so by subscribing to his youtube channel Oliver Foils and following him on Instagram.

Back to the boat: Oliver’s cabin

With the trip and the competition both behind them, focus returned to the last unfinished cabin in the port hull — Oliver’s. Harry’s cabin is structurally complete and partly painted; Aidan’s is fully finished. Oliver’s was deliberately left until last, partly because the old bunk structure — despite being scheduled for replacement — had become a genuinely useful workbench mid-refit, and there was no rush to tear out something still earning its keep.

Building this cabinetry is the third iteration of the same core technique, and each version has refined the process. The build in the main cabin involved laminating every component in place — slow, difficult work. Aidan’s room introduced pre-formed return flanges bonded to the hull, considerably easier given the smaller scale involved. Oliver’s cabin adds a new variable: open cabinetry on top rather than a solid, closed structure — meaning far easier access to install and finish than either of the two closed designs that came before it.

The technique this time: bottom and bulkheads bonded in place first, shelves fitted with their own return flanges, then the front panel bonded on and taped from the inside — made possible specifically because the open top allowed reaching in from above. Release film on the underside of each shelf during lamination means the shelf itself can be pulled free after bonding, then reattached cleanly onto the cured taping — a genuinely clever workaround for getting a strong bonded joint in a space too tight to tape conventionally.

The infused front panel uses 10mm furniture foam built from recycled scrap sheets — a material trade-off worth understanding if you’re considering something similar. Scrap foam is thirstier than a clean, consistent sheet, soaking up noticeably more resin due to the irregularity in the material itself, adding real weight across the boat even though the per-panel cost savings are significant. Worth the trade for a boat where budget matters more than shaving every possible kilogram, less so if weight is the absolute priority.

A structurally deliberate wing deck bed base

The bed base sitting over the wing deck came with its own design challenge, the wing deck design here is terrible and we have to somehow make it into a bed for Oliver.

The solution: lightweight battens spanning from the hull side to a centre ridge, with a flange on the carbon panel allowing a second, shorter batten to bridge the remaining distance — effectively two shorter, simpler spans rather than one long, awkward one across genuinely difficult geometry. For now, the battens themselves are recycled IKEA wooden pieces — perfectly adequate for the job, much to the kids’ visible disappointment that something so mundane made the cut into their boat. A fancier carbon-and-foam version remains a possible future upgrade, but isn’t necessary for the structure to work properly.

The real payoff of this approach: a bed suspended over genuine open air rather than resting flat against a solid panel — meaningfully reducing the mould risk that plagues flat-mounted mattresses on boats, a problem anyone who’s lived aboard will recognise immediately. Other berths on Paikea use different mould-mitigation approaches, but none will match the ventilation this design provides.

Recycled Alinghi 5 carbon, hiding in plain sight

The black structural member visible under the bunk seat is a piece of recycled Alinghi 5 catamaran transom — now properly laminated into place as genuine structure, in a location that previously had no equivalent reinforcement at all. One more piece of grand prix carbon doing real, permanent work on a family cruising cat rather than sitting in a container somewhere.

Oliver’s own contribution to the room is the ceiling — built from the same salvaged sections, left deliberately clear-coated rather than painted, showing the carbon weave rather than hiding it. Getting that finish right took four or five rounds of clear coat, sand, repeat, before the surface was ready — patient, unglamorous work for a purely aesthetic choice that’s entirely his own. The rest of the room gets painted first, with Oliver’s ceiling clear-coated afterward once everything else is done — his call, and a genuinely striking one once his collection of foils goes up on the wall alongside it, playing into a black-and-white theme that’s shaping up to be exactly what a foiling-obsessed teenager would choose for his own room.

What’s left

With Oliver’s cabin close to finished and the starboard bathroom floor already installed during the mad rush before the Outnumbered trip, most of the interior push for this stretch is close to done — squeezed in ahead of the worst of the European summer heat, though summer’s arguably already won that particular race. Composite work in a full suit during a Mediterranean heatwave is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds.

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