No doubt, yacht broker Steve Raea has a keen eye for a vessel’s potential, and nothing excites him more than a tired but sound New Zealand-designed and constructed yacht.
It breaks my heart as I walk down the marina looking at all these fabulous Kiwi-built boats crying out for love, and I just want to save them all,” he said.
His latest project, the 20th keeler he’s owned, is the Beale 33 Silver Eye, originally named Taathra, which Raea found in a rundown state at Auckland’s Hobsonville Marina a little over two years ago. With a fondness for Beale 33s, especially the timber ones, Raea saw beyond the lichen-covered toerails, scruffy paintwork, neglected rigging, corroded mast, dodgy engine, and many other issues and envisaged the 35-year-old yacht restored to as-new condition.
As many readers will know from bitter experience, when boats are involved, such visions can be extremely risky to sanity, physical health and bank balances alike.
“With hindsight, I should have walked away, but she had something special. She was nicely built to Ray’s lines, with plenty of good deck hardware and a solid sail wardrobe. While I’ve always tinkered with my boats to improve them, I’ve never undertaken a full restoration, and this drew me in. I thought, you can’t save them all, but you can save one.”
After settling on a price, Raea conducted his own survey, which, as an experienced sailor and yacht broker, he felt well-equipped to do himself.
“After watching hundreds of surveys, you get a pretty good idea of what to look for and where to find it.”
Nothing structural appeared, so Raea finalised the deal and had Taathra hauled out. His first major challenge was finding a suitable workshop and, after extensive searching, Raea found a canopy-covered container shed near Hobsonville Marina, where he stored and worked on the yacht for the next 17 months.
“It was heaven-sent; if I hadn’t got that shed, I would have been done.”
Raea began by stripping all the fittings off the yacht and beginning the mammoth task of painting the exterior. Among the more challenging jobs was repairing the teak toerails, which were in poor condition. Raea wanted these properly coved to the deck, glassed and painted white, and getting them ready for painting was a massive job.
“That was just an awful job; it just went on, and on, and on.”
Toerails finished, Raea turned his attention to the teak-covered cockpit floor, replacing the aged seam compound with epoxy, then glassing over the teak to create a seamless, leak-free surface.
Taathra had been well-raced before Raea’s ownership and bore the scars from it. Her decks and cabin required significant filling and sanding to reach paint-ready standard and this included removing, resealing, and re-bolting the chainplates and jib sheet tracks. Luckily, the hull topsides were in reasonable shape and only needed a good sanding and fairing with high-build epoxy to be ready for painting.
To avoid the expense of calling in the professionals, Raea did all the painting to the undercoat stage using International’s two-pack YRA600, applied with a roller. The topsides and cabin top were finished in Snow White Awlcraft 3000, and the non-skid deck in Off White Awlgrip.
“What I learned about boat painting is you put it on, and then you sand it off. Then you put more on and sand that off, and repeat. You spend all this money on hellishly expensive paint, and most of it ends up as dust in the ceiling or on the floor.”
With boat painters Nautech Marine just across the yard as inspiration, Raea set high standards from the beginning.
“It quickly got to the stage where good enough wasn’t good enough; I wanted it perfect. Well, as perfect as I could achieve anyway.”
Besides the full exterior repaint, Raea also repainted the spars, which were in poor condition, before turning his attention to the interior, which turned out to be another huge job. As anyone who has done it knows, painting yacht interiors can be a lot more challenging than painting the exterior, which offers more space to use power tools.
For example, one of the more challenging parts of interior painting is the main cabin ceiling, especially if it doesn’t have any cabin beams. Not only is this physically demanding, but the smooth, seamless ceiling at close to eye level reveals every minor imperfection.
With the interior painting and varnishing finished, Raea began a long list of other tasks. On the plumbing side, he installed new Tru-Design skin fittings and ball valves, all new piping, a new WC, and updated the tap fittings. The electrical work included all-new wiring, batteries, and discreet yet stylish LED interior lighting. He also thoroughly checked the LPG system, installing new piping and a gas alarm. The final tasks downstairs involved fitting new squabs and adding a stylish splashback above the sink, embossed with the yacht’s name.
Exterior-wise, Raea fitted updated instruments, numerous custom stainless fittings to prevent chafe, a new dodger and bimini, new lifelines, and twin solar panels to keep the lead-acid batteries charged. The anchor system – including the windlass, chain, warp, and Rocna anchor – is all new.
Fortunately, the original sheet and halyard winches had already been replaced with modern Harken units, as had much of the deck hardware, so all these needed was re-bedding and re-bolting. Incidentally, Raea used butyl bedding compound, which, in the opinion of many, is far superior in the long term compared to the commonly used tube-style marine sealants.
Rigger Steve Ashly overhauled the rig and installed new standing rigging on the freshly painted mast, with the final task being a top-end rebuild of the Yanmar 3GM30, which drives the yacht via a saildrive.
Restoring Silver Eye became an all-consuming project, which came at an eye-watering cost in terms of time and money and, at times, took a toll on Raea’s physical and mental wellbeing.
“I hopelessly underestimated how much time and effort were involved. I believe that if I had known what was really involved from the outset, I probably would have walked away. There were some darker times, too, when I seriously considered selling it for whatever I could get. But in the end, I realised this was my mess, and I had to clean it up.”
Fortunately, Raea did knuckle down and finish what he started, and the pain faded the moment the renamed Silver Eye was hauled out from the shed.
Since then, despite the less-than-ideal weather, Silver Eye has lived up to Raea’s expectations and is proving to be the perfect cruising yacht for him and his wife Cherie.
The restored Silver Eye is a real inspiration. Sitting downstairs takes one back to another era. She’s the type of yacht many of us grew up lusting after. While perhaps lacking some amenities compared to modern European offerings, an updated Kiwi cruiser/racer remains a very capable yacht. Besides offering comfortable cruising for a couple or small family, it is perfectly capable of punching back to Auckland from Great Barrier Island into a snotty, 30-plus-knot SW. For those so inspired, there are numerous excellent examples of the classic Kiwi cruiser/racer just begging to be restored to their former glory.
Given Raea’s track record of buying and selling keelers, this writer’s final question to Raea was an obvious one: would he do it again?
“If you’d asked me six months ago, I’d have thought that was a crazy question. But now? I’m not sure, time is a great healer. I get a lot of pleasure out of boats. Will this be the last one? I don’t think so, but it’s unlikely I’d take on a project of this magnitude again. This has been a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
