In 2019 a large Tanker Ship was attacked by Somali Pirates off the East African coast. The kidnapping was unsuccessful and a Lifeboat was taken and used by the fleeing Pirates to escape. The Lifeboat was discovered three years later drifting between the UK and northern Spain - a distance of over 6000 miles via who knows where or by what route. We're guessing a rather bendy route.
It ended up in our yard in Surrey, and we won't be taking any questions on this matter...
What to do with a Lifeboat? Especially one full of oil, diesel, seawater and a level and type of grime only normally found in an MPs expense claim form. Firstly, having decided it wouldn't sail ever again, we drilled a hole in the bottom. Somewhere in Surrey, nettles grow, having once been watered with stale seawater from the Indian Ocean. Nobody has ever written that.
What did we do with the Lifeboat? We ordered a skip, initially. We then ordered gloves, overalls and with a flask of tea set to work. The stripping out was horrible. We filled the skip with 20 fibreglass seats in pieces, safety equipment cupboards, smelly foam, lumps of metal and all the detrius, flotsam and jetsum of an old boat that had sailed unmanned from Africa to the UK. Cue the joy of having friends with an industrial steam jet-washer.
We now had an empty lifeboat, with just a slight residual smell of marine engines and fibreglass coupled with the stale breath of a sea monster from the Indian Ocean. So what next?
Tools; Flask of tea (we are British, after all), tape measure, notepad, pencil, and the imagination of an 8 year old boy...
Next; Design & Build, and Design & Build again...