2019-2021 Refit

A passing conversation with a well known classic yacht broker with whom i’ve bought and sold over the years lead me in September 2019 to a mud berth beside the old ferry at the Elephant Boatyard, setting in train a 14 month long roller coaster of a journey. 

One Saturday morning i met Matt Richardson at the Elephant. He’d agreed to open up Border Legend for me. I knew very little about her: a 49 foot long McGruer ketch built in the early 70s was all I’d been told. It was low tide. She sat there deep in the mud, covered by a tatty old cover. As Matt opened up the cover on this warm autumn day, the waft of stale air from inside hit me. Damp. Rot. Nothing good in there! I poked and i prodded, wary of putting my finger through the deck, or possibly even the hull. Every instinct was to walk away. And yet, there was something that drew me in. The lady had class, even in her neglected condition.

Border Legend was laid up at the Elephant Boatyard at the head of the Hamble river, some 8 years ago and was pretty much left to her own devices. Rain water had been getting in through her leaking covers. Water had flooded the bilges to a level at which the engine was partially submerged, as were some of the electrics. It was pretty clear that she needed a guardian angel to step in, or else be consigned to slowly perish. Such an ignominious end for such a beautiful yacht.

I’d held some initial discussions with the son of her late owner who, by some strange quirk of fate, had offices in the same building as my own. We hatched a plan but, not wanting to rush in where angels fear to tread, i said that I’d think on it during a forthcoming business trip. Two 36 hour flights to Fiji and back were ample time in which to pause and reflect on the folly of my plan. On the last leg home, i typed a charming email in which i announced that the project was too much for me and wished him well in finding her another saviour. Maybe blame the jetlag, but 24 hours later, during a follow up call, in a moment of weakness, i agreed that if I didn’t do it, no one else would. The paperwork was soon done. For better or for worse, I’d taken the first step in that 14 month long roller coaster journey.

By the next weekend, the covers were off for the first time in 8 years. With the light now flooding into the huge raised pilot house saloon, she took on a different feel down below, making it apparent just how spacious she was. On deck too, wide open expanses of teak deck (albeit in a very sorry state) gave a feeling of a much larger yacht than perhaps I’d expected. 

The task of sorting out lockers of gear and dry stores began in earnest. As she hadn’t been de-stored before being laid up, absolutely everything had been left onboard. The Elephant’s wheelie bins were filled to the brim. Some of what was onboard posed a health hazard, not least the 1970s vintage flares (which the Elephant gently reminded me shouldn’t go in the wheelie bin as apparently someone had once done so, resulting in a rather scorched refuse lorry, although not form the Elephant, I hasten to add). There was a lot of paperwork, offering a potted history of family cruising and boat maintenance stretching back to the early 80s, with pages of type written boatyard bills sitting in the chart table. 

I’d drawn up a preliminary work list with the Elephant, dividing the jobs between ‘no skilled and low skilled’ (these being mine) and those that required their expertise. The work was to be lead by the shipwright who had worked on her several times previously, and he wouldn’t be available immediately, but i agreed that we should wait until he was available, which gave me some time to make a start with the preparation that would pave the way for the arrival of the experts.

By the next weekend, Border Legend had been hauled up the slipway and blocked off in a corner of the yard where she could stay, uninterrupted, whilst work was underway. The entire boat was covered in scaffolding and then a weatherproof tent so that work could continue, whatever the weather. I was lucky to be keeping Dicer, my Kim Holman ketch, at the Elephant as well, so she became my floating weekend home and respite from the dirt and the destruction on Border Legend as work gathered pace. I’d usually drive down after work on a Thursday and back on a Sunday, giving 3 days of hard labour.

The more we dug, the more problems we found. Deck that looked sound from above had no means of support underneath, with the deck beams rotted all the way through. You had to be careful where you stood. We knew from the start that the cockpit was going to have to be rebuilt, together with the aft deck and the aft side decks. We also knew that the engine was seized and would have to come out, That opened up the frames and planking in the bilges, which we knew to be in a bad way. The rot in the bow came as a surprise as someone had previously decided to ‘fix’ it with car body filler and then paint it to match the rest of the paint. The deck beams, beam shelves and sub deck had all rotted through. The common denominator for all of this damage was that water had been getting in underneath fittings where no flexible sealant had been used. The work list grew week by week.

The engine and gearbox weighed just under half a tonne. The original Mermaid engine is, as the  cognoscenti will know, essentially a marinised tractor engine. I spent a weekend dismantling it into the smallest bits possible so that the yard could manhandle the block out of the saloon through the rather tight companionway hatch. Even after stripping the engine, what was left still weighed a quarter of a tonne, but with 4 hefty men and quite a bit of grunting, the engine was out for the first time in 50 years or so.

I’d agreed with the yard that I’d chop out all the dead wood and rot, having first taken copious photographs and measurements and whilst leaving enough clues as to the original structure to allow the shipwright to know how to rebuild it. Setting to work with an armoury of power tools was oddly satisfying, as was the growing pile of rotten wood beside the boat (alongside the rotted steel fuel tank, miles of old cabling and pipework, ancient navigation electronics and heads that are best not described in detail here). As promised, the yard set to work in January, with 3 shipwrights working on her in different parts of the boat. Week by week, things started to progress, and generally they got worse before they got better. I think that for a while i may have developed a nervous twitch when the yard foreman’s phone number flashed up on my screen: it was never good news and it was usually always going to be expensive to fix. What had i got myself into? 

I had a decision to make as to how authentic and complete a restoration i wanted. My philosophy was straightforward and i think looking back, the correct one to take: firstly, for each and every structural defect to be fully addressed, using the best standards of craftsmanship (which are timeless) but with modern materials (knowing that McGruers embraced what was then the state of the art wherever possible, i had no problem in agreeing that we should use modern epoxies); and secondly, to respect her style and design ethos, knowing that Mr Barton had specified what was then a contemporary (early 70s) look and trying to keep it as original as possible; and thirdly, trying to keep and repair original equipment, except where it would compromise practicality. As examples of this, the original engine and gearbox were rebuilt, as they were absolutely suited to the boat; the green boxed Sailor VHF radio was restored and made to work (probably because as a child sailing in the 70s I’d always wanted what was then a rarity and had a soft spot for the clunk rotary channel selector and GPO like handset) although there’s a hidden modern ICOM DSC VHF radio hidden behind a panel; but the two avocado coloured Baby Blake heads were removed and replaced with modern heads, on the basis that i favour reliability over originality in that department!

One of the largest jobs was to scrape the hull and topsides back to bare wood, taking away a couple of decades of old paint. I spent cold winter 2 months using a wickedly toxic paint remover on the varnished topsides and then a good old fashioned gas burner on the bottom. For the topsides, scraping was only half the job, as the varnish was deep into the grain of the mahogany, so there was then another month of sanding. Slowly, the deep mahogany colour started to reveal itself, but at a cost: the topsides planks are bronze fastened and each of the screw holes had been plugged and sanded fair to the hull when she was built. After 50 years of winter sanding, some of the plugs had become wafer thin or had disappeared altogether. As my vision was that the topsides should remain varnished, there was no option but to withdraw the fastenings, re drill the holes, refasten, replug the holes and then to make them all fair again. In what seemed like a never ending task, over 500 fastenings re replugged.

By mid March, we were ready to start painting, but we had to delay until the temperature increased and the humidity dropped. As it started to become clear that we were going to be headed into lockdown, i made a dash to apply a couple of coats of primer to the bottom, but the topsides were still too damp to do anything. And then Wednesday 23rd March 2020 bought everything to a halt. The yard went into full lockdown. 

It wasn’t until 16 May 2020 that anyone was back in the yard. That morning I received a couple of photos via WhatsApp from the yard foreman that made my heart sink: some of the seams on the topsides and hull had opened up horrendously. In some instances, the seam had held, but the intense drying out caused by the 10 weeks of sun and warm winds during lockdown had caused the planks themselves to split apart. We could see daylight all too clearly in places where daylight should never be seen. We needed a plan of action, and fast, in order to try to stop the situation worsening still further. The goal was simple: to get Border Legend watertight and back afloat as quickly as possible. The shipwright splined over 50 metres of seams above and below the waterline. Then the painters moved in and applied 8 coats of varnish over the course of a couple of weeks. The bottom was primed and antifouled. Skin fittings were checked. Bilge pumps made ready. The tent came off in late May, the scaffolding came down, and then in the first week of June she slid back down the slipway that she’d been hauled up 8 months previously. And then we waited to see if she’d float. 

It was touch and go with salvage pumps for the first 24 hours. At one point the boatyard seriously considered pulling her back out. But having foreseen the likely inrush of water until the hull closed up, she was pretty much empty inside and, provided that she was still safely on the launching cradle, couldn’t come to much harm. The next day, with pumps still running, she was moved to the working berth. Slowly the torrent diminished. If nothing else, the bilges were certainly clean.

Over the next few months, the refit continued afloat. Having been baked in the sun whilst ashore, we were now treated to what seemed like a never ending deluge of wind and rain. But despite the weather, things slowly took shape. Glen continued rebuilding the cockpit and then moved onto the teak deck. We’d had to rip up all the deck aft of the coachroof and at the bow. All of this was replaced with great quality new teak sourced through the father of a friend. But the original deck, even though it had enough thickness left, was looking very tired and the caulking was almost non existent in places. Over a month of weekends, i cleaned the caulking out from all the deck seams (those of you who are good at mental arithmetic can do the sums on a 15m long yacht with a 4.3m beam and 60mm wide teak planks and feel my pain). But removing the old caulking was the easy part: the seams had to be deepened to 6mm in order to accept the new caulking. There’s an neat little plane with a blade just wide enough to make a caulking seam. I took a week off, by the end of which i had aching arms but my decks were ready to be recaulked.

It was some time in late August that a space became available in the main shed. As the weather had been so uncooperative, causing us to lose time as so much of the work was soft necessity outside, i took the decision to have Border Legend hauled ashore for a second time. The weather was cooler and with a full paint scheme applied and the hull now fully taken up, we reckoned on having a month or so to do what was required whilst undercover. The engine went back in. There was more varnishing. She gained a gold cavita line and a white bootstripe. Her name and the club initials were applied to the transom and work continued on the deck. Three weeks later she was back on the slipway, looking much more like a finished yacht. Having been launched, we took her alongside the barge and restepped the masts and then back to the berth where work continued. Each time I went down to the yard at the weekend, things had progressed a bit further, albeit at what seemed like a glacial pace. We eventually got the engine started. The steering was reassembled. All the beautifully re-chromed deck gear (84 pieces in total) went back on. Sails were bent on. Systems were checked and double checked.

On 4th November 2020, almost 14 months after we started, Border Legend slipped from her berth under her own power for the first time since 2011. I can’t say that I wasn’t a little nervous. But she  slid down the river, gaining admiring glances, and then out into the Solent. There wasn’t a breath of wind to start with, but by lunchtime a sea breeze started to fill in, and soon we had 12 knots over the deck and Border Legend picked up her skirt and went sailing. Having first seen her in a mud berth, I’d no idea how she was going to handle, but she was as beautifully balanced and as sure footed as her lines suggest. After a picnic lunch and a glorious sail, we handed sails and headed back up the river to Bursledon. As my crew started to get warps and fends out, i sensed a momentary change in engine pitch. Five minutes later, as the Elephant Boatyard hove into view, the engine died entirely. As way came off, i spied an empty pontoon and we made a damage free engine off landing, which is something that I’d rather not have to repeat in 20 tonnes of varnished yacht. But we’d had our moment of glory. We got back to our berth, not caring too much that we had to get towed the last 200 yards by the Elephant’s dory. I had a smile on my face from ear to ear. Lockdown 2 started the very next day, but by then I didn’t really care: we’d got her out sailing again, despite the chaos of 2020. Border Legend was back from the brink.