After the mad rush of building a new composite rudder, carbon fibre chainplate, and replacement bulkhead, along with repairing our fractional asymmetrical spinnaker and numerous other boat tasks we were ready to leave the Caribbean and head for the Azores. The Azores Archipelago are a group of islands off the Portuguese coastline and a popular […]
Caribbean to the Azores – downwind in light airs Read More »
This week we take a detailed look at how we service the winches on Paikea. Winches should be serviced regularly on every yacht. As a general rule of thumb you should service your winches every 1000 nautical miles. Ours were well overdue for a bit of TLC in this episode. Shayne had used a new
Pro Tips for servicing your Winches Read More »
This video is all about understanding the basics of jib trim on a catamaran. In order to get the best out of your vessel you need to understand your headsail. You need to know what sail shape you are aiming for, what leech profile you should have, and what your telltales should be doing. In
Jib Trim Basics for your Catamaran Read More »
Correcting the mast rake on Paikea You may be asking what exactly is Mast Rake and why is it important. Mast rake is the angle at which the mast leans aft from the vertical position. The picture below shows the rake in a Gunboat 68. The angle of the Gunboat mast from the red vertical
Understanding Mast Rake Read More »
Of course, if one chainplate is pulling out of the boat, the other one is not far behind. This week we are fixing chainplates, shortening forestays, digging rot out of the windows, and everything in between as we desperately try and get Paikea ready for another Atlantic Crossing. We showed our rudder-making process as a
A Chainplate for the Starboard Side Read More »
You may be surprised to hear that we think not everything needs to be made from carbon fibre. Oh yeah, it looks cool and it’s super strong but do we really need to throw all those extra bucks at it so that we can say it’s made from carbon? Not really. In this episode, we
Torque Tabs and Tiller Arm Read More »
Join us for the second half of our composite rudder project. As most of you already know, we built two new rudder blades for Paikea when we did our refit in Valencia, Spain in 2020. As the boat was on a cradle that was quite low to the ground, we were unable to remove the
Making our rudder – PART 2 Read More »
We lost our rudder over a year ago during our Atlantic Crossing from The Canary Islands to St Lucia in the Caribbean. The rudder made a rather sneaky exit and at the time there was no catastrophic event to alert us to the problem. We just began to have trouble steering a straight course. In
Rudder Build – Part One Read More »
We can reef at any time, in any conditions at any point of sail Every boat owner should be confident that they can reef their mainsail in any conditions. We can reef our mainsail at any time – this means that even if it is blowing dogs off chains and we are heading downwind we
Reefing Setup on our Catamaran Read More »
A tour of Paikea, our Catana42s, would not be complete without discussing the carbon fibre rotating mast. We have mentioned the rig before in a previous post Recycling a TNZ America’s Cup mast into a rotating rig. Rescued from the rubbish, this is a mast with history. It is the old America’s Cup Team New
Paikea’s Carbon Rotating Mast Read More »