Start to Finish: Building Our 50' Skater
 

We are finally in the home stretch of finishing our 50' Skater. It has been a long process to get this boat built the way we need it - to eventually attempt the around the world speed record - but we are nearing the end and should be on the water in a few months.

We thought you might like to see the build process so we will post photos from the very beginning until the boat is done. We plan on doing some testing at poker runs later this year before attempting any endurance records so keep an eye out for a silver and black 50' Skater rolling through a town near you!

We will start out with the 46 Skater hull mold being guide coated. And the start of balsa core installation

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When they say a flat deck skater, it truly starts out as a big flat piece of cored fiberglass. Here it is on the table being vacuum bagged.

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Kevlar anywhere there is a corner, it is not as stiff as carbon and fiberglass so it will flex instead of break. We may end up in huge waves a thousand miles from shore so we wanted it to have quite a bit more laminate and bracing than a normal Skater
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There was another 46 Skater sitting there so Peter taped the side in sections and measured the inside then did the math to figure out how much fuel was in each section to see where and how big of fuel tanks we could get. We ended up with main tanks that are 600 gallons each sitting at the center of gravity and two 100 gallon tanks about 3/4 of the way to the front.

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Interesting ride to cross the Alantic with. What kind of power?

the amount of effort, care and detail in those pics is staggering. If people only knew what it takes to set core at that level. Great pics, its not often you get to see a view like that. . . . . the fit and finish of that core is mind bending.

I notice a section of the tunnels vertical wall at the stern has a marine ply laminate in instead of end grain. Never seen that done before was this part of the "over building" heavy seas program? Just curious, keep pics coming . . .

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Awesome trip!

Hope you transmit via satellite so we can watch in real time, day and night.

where are the scheduled refuel stations?







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We are building custom diesels, they are based on a Duramax. I will add more pics each night.

The guys at skater that laid up my boat have worked there for 30 years. They have a lot of experience and are definitely good at what they do.
You know the amount of work it takes to do this, which is why it takes so long to build a Skater compared to other brands.

The marine ply is for more strength. There are several areas we used plywood instead of balsa as a core to get more strength.

I'm building the boat to set long distance endurance records, and after we started building it and looking at different records we wanted to try to break the distances kept growing and getting more complicated and then we decided the biggest record would be the around the world record.

We have a satellite uplink and 8 cameras on the boat and will be transmitting live the whole way on each endurance record attempt. When we did the Bermuda Challenge we had live video with one camera the whole way.

There is a lot of logistics to setting the around the world record, we have worked on the logistics side of it for two years now. studying weather patterns from the last 30 years, plotting a course that we will have enough range to be able to make and contacting countries to see what we will have to do to be able to fuel up but not spend a lot of time doing paperwork when we get there. With the course we are planning on right now there will be 16 fuel stops. The longest legs will be San Diego, California to Hawaii, and then Hawaii to the marshal islands. Each of those runs will be around 2,400 miles. All the other legs of the trip will be less then 1,800 miles.