Double The Trouble, Twice The Fun

James Maxey thought he’d created his perfect boat by fitting stabilisers to his 52ft trawler, but it turns out there was a bigger twist still to come

- James Maxey

Regular readers may remember the article I wrote last year about refitting our sturdy Scottish trawler yacht Silver Dee for use in the Med (‘Silver Lining’, MBY December 2016). The upgrades made it much better suited to its new life in the sun but at the end of our first season in Antibes, our thoughts started to turn to zero-speed stabilisers.

The Vosper mini fins fitted to Silver Dee had served it well since 1976 but rough seas could overpower them and of course, they weren’t zero-speed units. A couple of sleepless nights at anchor with our seven-year-old twins on board soon demonstrated to us that unless we fitted zero-speed stabilisers, we’d have to restrict ourselves to marina berths even when we’d prefer to be at anchor.

We’d been on other boats in the area fitted with Sleipner’s curved-fin zero-speed systems and found them to be very effective, so we went straight to Sleipner for a quote. Bryn and his team at Sleipner UK proved to be extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. We took the plunge and wrote out a cheque for the whole kit to be delivered to our home in Cheshire so that we could drive down to Antibes in a convoy of vans with the team from West Coast Marine at Troon, who had done all the previous refit work on Silver Dee.

FITTING THE FINS

On arrival in Antibes, the first job was to carefully take out the old system so that we could try and re-sell the bits and pieces later, then we set to work on Silver Dee’s unusual hull. The multi-chine hull was designed by Allen McLachlan at G L Watson as a prototype for the RNLI’s Arun lifeboat, without any consideration for future owners wanting to retrofit curved-fin zero-speed stabilisers! This involved lots of careful measuring and grinding away, both inside and outside the hull, and then building it back up to make sure the fins had sufficient clearance.