Restoring my cold molded 30 foot Gamefisherman in Costa Rica!

[GringoJohn]

We spent 7 days a week, 14 hours a day, getting her back to new. Had to bring it all the way down to the hull and do a couple of patches, put in new hull and motor supports (the wood beams the motor sits on) and then built a small cabin up front with the bathroom and a ton of rod holders! It was a blast, except for being so tired, it was definitely worth it, I wish I had taken more pictures, here are some before and after and a couple of during pictures.

Here's what we started out with, classic "Palm Beach" Costa Rica Gamefisherman with a but ugly cabin:

Then this is what we did with the cabin and floor and pretty much everything except the hull. We were going to burn it, but I think there was soo much oil and diesel in the wood, it might have exploded and taken out the ship yard here... so we took it to the dump

Here is what the front part of the boat looked like when we took out the floor and the hull. We left a little part of the cabin up front as you can see in the picture that became the visor. In the picture it shows pine boards going across, but before we put those in, we coated them with West Epoxy and surf board cloth so they are waterproof and we don't have to redo any of that. Here is the empty hull:

We then had to patch the hull. There was a rotten spot under where the motor support beam was. The rotten spot was only about 6 inches across, but since the boat has three layers of wood, we opened the first layer up really big, then made like a pyramid, opening the second layer up only half the size and then the hole that went side to side was only about 9 inches big. I called West and they sent me a book on how to do it, this little patch took over a week to redo. We did it with the same weightless Laurel Wood the boat was made with, and each layer we lined up the grains with the existing grains of the surrounding wood layer. Here is the patch when we finish, before putting the board on the outside:

We then had some good rot on the transom and back rail so we rebuilt those as well:

Then I got too tired to take any more pictures, but here is the floor and cabin after we put it back together a bit!

 

[GringoJohn]

Here is a picture of the visor we turned the front part of the cabin into. That was a lot of work as we built it a couple of times until I got it looking right. We also built those two fiberglass boxes you see on the tower that is next to the boat so I can put all the gauges in one side and the GPS / Sounder / Radio in the other. I hate those ugly black cummins things, so I made the gauge holder out of glass and hole sawed it. I replaced the original gauges with the sea cruz gauges that have built in alarms, but I had to buy two temp gauges because the first one they send me didn't work, so I don't know if I would recommend them.

The bottom we treated with the Interconnect sealing epoxy and Micron 66 from Interlux. I really like the look of the blue color, and hopefully after 3 coats of their best paint, I won't see any buildup for the next year or so.

2 and a half months later, we got her down in the water. This is from about 5 minutes after I got it in the water. The boat on the right is the panga we built a couple of months ago. We didn't get to start it until a couple days later because I was waiting on a new Racor.

Here's the first run last weeek:

First trip out was yesterday, she beat my other two boats releasing 6 nice sailfish and a couple of 30 pound Mahi. It was a fun build, I need to take some more pictures...

Here's a before and after just to see the difference, I really thought it came out better than I expected, what do you guys think?

Before:

After:

 

[SuperD]

John, doesn't even look like the same boat. Very nice work. Do you ever target tarpon?

 

[GringoJohn]

Thanks, I showed the old owner and he had to look closely and I think he regrets selling it now!!

I haven't done any tarpon fishing, that's on the other coast and they don't have the infrastructure for my boat yet. It's mostly boats that have to come out of the river. We go after mostly billfish with this boat, Marlin and Pacific Sailfish.

 

[Bduck]

What a beauty. Your talents really show. thumbsup Is this what you do for a job? I'm grounded here since winter is set in and wanting to tackle a couple of projects while I await spring time.

 

[GringoJohn]

What a beauty. Your talents really show. thumbsup Is this what you do for a job? I'm grounded here since winter is set in and wanting to tackle a couple of projects while I await spring time.

I actually run a charter company. We buy hulls that I like but that need work and we restore them up and then run charters with them. We have three that we've restored so far, but this is by far my coolest project because it's wood and it turned out better than I hoped. My last project was a super panga, we built it from just an abandoned hull and finished it about 3 months ago. I probably shouldn't have done two builds back to back as I'm a bit burned out on boat building, but now that they are both finished, it's a blast fishing them! Here's a picture of the panga we finished in September:

Really spent a lot of time on the live bait setups. This boat trolls ballyhoo and lures, but not nearly as much as the other two. This one is more of a find the bait and slow troll. I believe the outboard style boats are more suited to live bait, check out my bait setups:

I also didn't like all the stickers on the motor so we blacked it out and painted it. Man, that was the hardest part of the whole build. It kept fish eye-ing, I had to sand it down and repaint it three times and there was still one small fish eye when we got it done, but I threw in the towel. Next time, the stickers are staying on there!