Spear It Animal

Who: Raf and Sascha
Where: Grenada, West Indies
Multihull: Lagoon 450S
YouTube: @SpearItAnimal

Some of their YouTube followers were hoping to see them get stuck into working on the boat and getting the rebuild advancing faster, but the value of having a real workshop and a storage area cannot be underestimated. From their experience of fitting out their previous boat, fitting out a shipping container came as quite an easy - if time-consuming - task. After leveling up the container and with a few repairs undertaken, they’ve ended up with great facilities including a long workbench with a sink at one end and all their tools and spare parts and materials neatly organized. The crew will now be able to get the rebuild project moving so much quicker. And being able to have this right behind the boat, well, it’s the stuff of dreams for anyone doing a major refit.

With all their gear shifted from its former location to where the boat now lies, the final job was to bring across the beautiful staircase they’d made last year, but unfortunately, it was just a little too short for the new spot, so they had to construct a new one. This will be so much safer and quicker to use than a ladder like almost all the other boats in the yard (particularly when carrying tools or materials up and down), so that in itself is going to speed the job along considerably.

Work then began on the inside, with much cutting out of fiberglass from the underside of the coachroof, before they could begin moving in the right direction to get it all back together and adding back in all the strength that had been compromised when the boat had been lying upside down in the mangroves in Carriacou. Quite a bit of trial and error was required to get the epoxy to the right consistency, but they got there in the end.

As for commencing work on the exterior of the hulls, they enlisted the help of Dareen and Jay from Fiberglass Pro Grenada who quickly set about cutting out damaged areas and digging out the rotten balsa core before replacing sections of it with a foam core material and epoxy.
To allow the professionals to complete their work meant giving them access to the area where the forward crossbeam attaches to the hull. The beam itself was trashed in the hurricane and held together with timber and rope lashings, so it needed to be removed anyway, but not before the very delicate operation moving a bird’s nest they found in the end of the beam. So Raf and Sascha had to work late into the evening to get the beam out in time for the next day’s work. Completing all the fiberglass repairs to the hull has really added momentum to the rebuild and it looks like the project has finally got the wind in its sails.