Next after moulding the hull is to reinforce it with a stringer grid. This is made of foam and will be heavily laminated with fibreglass. The fibre is the real strength forming a box section. You can see how many stringers are there down under the waterline.


In the middle you can see the keel box. The keel will be set in this and bolted in. When the keel is retracted it will swing up into this box. This is why no water comes into the boat from the lifting keel ;-)


Here is a shot from a few days ago crossing from Exuma Islands to Eleuthera - 40 miles of water only 15 feet deep. I went overboard to get film of the boat passing near a coral head (which was about 30 meters diameter) you can see the outline of the keel plate set into the bottom of the boat. The keel is mostly retracted. We like to keep it this way if we are exploring in shallow water. This way it acts as a safety in case we come into shallower water than we meant to. The keel will touch first and we slow down (since the keel weighs 3500 pounds it acts as a brake).



With the keel up and retracted the bottom of the boat is flat in the centre so you can beach and sit flat. Here is a shot from a week ago in the Exumas where we beached Distant Shores on a sandbank. The boat is sitting safely on the keel plate and the prop skeg. Its low tide. There is roughly 3 feet of tide in the Bahamas.

Hi from the Bahamas - just a quick note as we are filming today in Harbour Island Eleuthera.

Here are a couple of shots of the new boat being moulded in the factory. Note the first part of the lay-up is done with the hull in two separate pieces which allows easier access and allows the hull pieces to be turned on their sides as you see here. So the port side of the boat is on the right and the starboard half of the hull is on the left

Note also that the upper part in the photo is greenish. This is actually the mould itself we are seeing with just a thin gelcoat applied. Northshore use a clear gelcoat as an osmosis shield as part of their Nordseal barrier system. So the area in green is below the waterline.

More laminate applied as the process continues. You can also see the core above the waterline being applied with vacuum bags (which is on the bottom of the picture as the hull pieces are on their sides.




Now here are a couple of picture from the lovely Bahamas where we are currently filming on location for the Distant Shores TV series. Once again on this trip we are amazed that these islands aren't more visited. They are surely the best cruising area available to boaters on America's East Coast. The shallow water does scare some people off, but you can learn to handle it even with deeper draft boats (up to 6 feet draft is possible). But throughout the islands people are jealous of our less than 3 foot draft. Even the new 49 will draw less than 3 feet with the keel pulled up.


A number of the routes and anchorages we have been in the past month have only been accessible since we were shallow and also could dry out. More on the keel and drying out/bahamas strategies in further blogs. Now off filming...