Practical Boat Owner - June 2018

REBUILDING ZEST

LEFT Lifting out

at Muros after the

dismasting

BELOW Kass

demonstrates the

size of the hole

ripped in the deck

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rupert Holmes has

80,000 miles of

offshore experience,

including racing

around Britain and

across the Atlantic,

plus extensive

cruising including a Southern Ocean

voyage rounding Cape Horn. He

also has a 30ft cruising yacht based

in the Mediterranean.

4,000m down on the bottom of the Atlantic
was only four years old when lost, Zest still
had her original early 1990s-style narrow
shroud base to allow tight sheeting angles
with big overlapping headsails. In
addition, the spreaders were not swept aft
at a sufficiently large angle to support the
fractional rig without running backstays.
Given that the boat is no longer sailed
with large genoas, whether for cruising or
for long-distance short-handed racing, it

was an easy decision to move the shroud

base as far as possible outboard. At the

same time, following discussions with

James Harris at Seldén and Andy Postle

of Allspars, we increased the sweep on

the spreaders by 5° and raised the height

of the forestay by half a metre. These

changes gave a slightly greater headsail

area – and larger spinnakers to boost

speed in light airs – as well as eliminating

the need for the running backstays.

Moving the chainplates outboard also

reduced the loads on the rig, enabling the

wire size for the V1 shrouds to drop from

10mm to 8mm Dyform – the breaking

strain of the wire dropped from almost 10

tonnes to little more than 6 tonnes.

Reducing the loads in the structure of the

boat was therefore another clear benefit of

this plan.

Survey of the damage

A knowledgeable and helpful surveyor

makes a big difference to the success of

a big project, both in terms of determining

the extent of the damage, which has

potential to extend well beyond what’s

visually apparent, and in identifying the

best repair methodology. We were

therefore as careful in selecting who to

appoint for this role as we were for the

specialists that actually carried out the

repair work.

Zest’s high tech timber construction of

strip cedar and epoxy is one that relatively

few surveyors are experienced with, which

further narrowed the field. Hugo Morgan-

Harris was both highly recommended and

had the advantage of having served an

apprenticeship at the Elephant Boatyard,

building boats of a similar construction.

One of our key questions was whether

he’d be able to identify a reason for the

structural failure in the first place. The

failure of a bulkhead supporting a

chainplate is normally due to water

ingress, but in Zest’s case he did not

detect any indication that this had been

the case. This added credence to the

hypothesis that the original failure had

been due to the boat having been

re-rigged with stronger standing rigging

View from inside: the damage

to the bulkhead where the

chainplate carried away

Photos: Rupert Holmes