Around again
There’s a new raceboat yard in Lisbon, and they’re flat out finishing off a ‘new’ fleet of round the world raceboats…
Seahorse Magazine: What was your brief right at the beginning of the refit process? Nick Bice – VOR director of boats and maintenance: The priority was reliability. The VO65 created a lot of reliability for the stakeholders in this race, for the teams, sponsors, sailors and of course us at Volvo Ocean Race HQ. In originally selecting the VO65 the criteria were reliability, performance and safety, which is para- mount… and these boats now need to do another 70,000 miles. So my brief to the team was identical to when we were servic- ing these boats during the stopovers in the last race: always be proactive, not reactive. SH: How many are there in your team? NB: I have managed to keep our core team
40 SEAHORSE
from last time and the head of each depart- ment. Then we’ve built onto that family, so we currently have close to 30 people in Lisbon. A significant number of those are in the paint team, as with new sponsors and branding there is a lot to do there! We estimate the whole job will take 3,500-4,000 hours, with 2,000 hours just allocated to painting the boats. We have these 30 people on site but a lot of the components go back to the manufacturers for servicing, so there are many more people involved than you see here in Lisbon. SH: And there is a huge amount of work just in pulling these boats apart… NB: Over 700 components are coming off each boat, so there is a boat captain for each VO65 who is responsible for their boat as it goes through the refit process. Part of that is ensuring that every single part of the boat – however small – gets catalogued, then is sent off to the supplier or serviced on site. We basically have five bays and each bay is set aside for three weeks’ work. The first one is all about stripping the boat – any- thing that is bolted on to the VO65 comes
off. Everything. Hatches, winches, traveller systems, keel systems, sailing hydraulics… everything. Then the boat moves into the painting bay, which means it gets fully sanded back to carbon, then we fill and re- undercoat the whole boat, with all the borders and flat areas on the decks painted to exactly the same specification. Once out of that three-week process we still haven’t needed any input from the teams on how the boat will finally look, and we have the gloss areas painted and the bow area painted with the Volvo Ocean Race logo. All we now need from the teams is how the hull will look and what colour the non-skid will be plus any other branding. This means we get close to 80 per cent of the paintwork done without any team input. SH: You know these boats thoroughly after maintaining them around the world the first time. Surprises… NB: We found a few anomalies through non-destructive testing in a couple of areas but nothing we didn’t really expect. The extent of what we discovered with our NDT after 60,000-70,000nm was no
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88
