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The conversion is taking place at the Navtech Shipyard in Cartagena Colombia.

Removal work

The first step in making this a yacht is the removal of all fishing-related gear and materials.  Thankfully, labor is plentiful in Cartagena because getting rid of the isolation material in the fishhold alone is a major job as the images below show.   Thankfully, this vessel has no dangerous and cancerous materials like asbestos and we’ve found a company that actually recycles the isolation foam used in the fish hold!  The fishing net hold is also stripped of its wooden covering and cleaned.  As you can see, the steel uncovered behind the wood is in excellent shape.   The lubrication oil storage tanks and daily fuel tank in the side walls of this hold will be removed and relocated to make place for stateroom 1 and 2.  The bulkhead between this hold and the engineroom will be moved backward 3 frames to make the engineroom smaller in order to comply with MCA damage stability regulations.

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On the deck there’s also quite a lot going on.  The wood has been removed and will eventually be replaced by a special teak-look-alike composit compound.  On the foredeck, fishing related gear is now gone and we’ll also remove all vertical stribes on the outside hull.

Work on the winches has started

The week of February 18 marked the start of the work on the removal of the main fishing winches.  This is about 22 tons of steel stuff under the bridge which we are going to remove to make space for a dining area. 

This is how it looked on the 21st of Feb.

Anchor winch area

The forepeak bulkhead in the anchor winch room has been removed to make space for a two-berth cabin. Since the forepeak was used for seawater ballast, it has suffered from corrosion. But all that brown stuff you see is mostly the affected coating.  Our ultrasound measurements have shown that even after 18 years, the steel in this area has lost less than 10% of its thickness. Thank you Maaskant Shipyards for such a great paint job!

The previous 4 pictures show how we want to change the path of the chain. We will probably turn the winch around 180 degrees so the guiding pipe will be in front of the winch.  Then it will go up to the roll attached to the ceiling from where the path will go down in the anchor box.

My visit of April 6 gave me these images.