A Week of Many Jobs — and a Flood We Couldn’t Ignore

Living on a boat means the weather isn’t background noise. It’s the thing that decides whether today’s plan actually happens.

Partway through this week, Valencia was hit by DANA — a catastrophic flash flood that meteorologists called one of the most intense the region has seen in a century. Dozens of people died. Entire towns were devastated, and streets near us — usually some of the most beautiful in the city — filled with displaced cars and debris almost overnight. Recovery crews spent days just trying to reopen roads. It wasn’t something happening somewhere else on the news. It was outside, and it didn’t stop us needing to get to work the next morning.

That’s the reality of this lifestyle that doesn’t always make it into a boat-build video — the work goes on, but so does everything else happening around you. With that context, here’s what the week actually looked like — small fixes on Paikea, alongside real professional work that had nothing to do with our own boat at all.

A stiffer bucket for a temperamental vacuum

A minor but genuinely useful fix: the vacuum cleaner’s collection bucket kept collapsing under suction, currently held together with an old yogurt tub standing in as a stopgap. The real fix is a 3D-printed stiffening ring, purpose-built to reinforce exactly the section that was failing — a small print job, but the kind of targeted fix that solves an annoying daily problem for the cost of a few grams of filament.

Door frame progress, and a hinge supply problem

The carbon fibre door frame in the aft cabin is now fitted, following on from the return flange and bulkhead work covered in earlier posts. Sourcing the right hinges has proven more difficult than expected — an order placed through AliExpress was cancelled outright, sending the search back to square one. Hinges aren’t a trivial component on a boat like this: constant salt air exposure means anything metal needs to be genuinely corrosion-resistant, not just cosmetically stainless, and getting that wrong means replacing hardware again within a season or two.

Elsewhere, flow coat went onto the back of a freshly sanded and acetone-wiped panel — prep work ahead of soundproofing and insulation going in behind it. Getting a clean, even coat in a tight working space is its own quiet challenge, one that doesn’t always come across on camera but adds real time to a job that looks simple from the outside.

Rigging and shipping drawings for Balthasar

The rig plan and cradle drawings covered here belong to Balthasar — a Mini Maxi 72 that spent the better part of a year in a full professional refit, with both of us involved in different parts of that project. She’s now out on the racing circuit performing extremely well. This particular stretch of work was shipping and rigging documentation: cradle drawings updated to match the boat exactly as built rather than as originally drawn, ahead of a shipping move, with precision that’s become even more critical industry-wide following a well-publicised incident where a superyacht fell from its cradle during transport.

The rig plan received the same as-built treatment — matched to what’s actually measured on the boat, not what the original drawings assumed. That precision matters directly when ordering new rigging cable: order against the drawing rather than reality, and a cable arrives the wrong length. The CAD model itself was built to be dynamic, so adjusting forestay rake or furler spacing updates the whole rig geometry live, rather than needing the drawing redone from scratch for every design change under consideration.

Wrapping a carbon steering wheel in foam

The most detailed job this week was covering a bare carbon fibre steering wheel in foam — a genuinely under-documented technique, borrowed loosely from boom-wrapping methods and refined through advice from a few people with direct experience doing it. Race teams commonly wrap their wheels for exactly this reason: a soft, grippy surface is far more comfortable to hold for hours at a time than bare carbon, no matter how nicely finished the carbon itself is.

The material is UV-resistant EVA foam, applied to a wheel that’s been given a clean acetone wipe-down first. Centreline markings, both inside and outside the wheel rim, become the guide for accurate application, with masking tape marking exactly how far the foam should extend onto each spoke before the glue line stops.

Each foam strip gets a 45-degree bevelled edge sanded onto one side — creating a smooth ramp where the foam wraps around the wheel rather than a hard, catchable step. A matching centreline on the foam itself, measured to the correct width, lines up directly against the wheel’s outside marking. Contact cement goes onto the bevelled edge, spread quickly and evenly — a credit card or a similar stiff, soft-edged tool works well for this — then left to reach a tacky, workable state before final application.

Application itself starts from the centreline and works outward, pressing gently to chase out air bubbles as the foam settles into place. A hair dryer on low heat helps the foam conform smoothly around curves without overheating or distorting it. Around each spoke, a craft knife trims the foam to shape, with a little extra heat helping it settle into position before any excess overlap gets trimmed away on the inside edge. A final sanding pass, ideally with a sanding block for a consistent, even result, finishes the job — repeated around the entire wheel until the whole thing is uniformly wrapped.