Hi Chris,
My late father and i owned the boat from the early 80's until 2004 when i gave it away to a guy down the road probably where you visited on Friday.
We purchased it from a dealer in Cowes after it had supposedly had a full restoration, sadly not quite the case… The boat was fitted with 140 mercruisers We kept the boat in Cobbs Quay Marina in Poole for a season and had nothing but issues every time we went out!! so decided to take it back to the midlands to do the work properly. We built a shed specially to accommodate her and a hydraulic powered rotating jig which could be stopped in any position so you were always working down hand. The hull was in unbelievably bad condition with very severe osmosis everywhere even the deck, the quality of lamination was appalling!! more like an aero bar than a boat….., but by the time we had really got into it we had already part exchanged the 140 merc's for a pair of lancing surface drives and gearboxes from Mike Bellamy, we had also built a very nice pair of 5.7 litre chevy small blocks. The motors had steel cranks and rods with forged pistons all top quality stuff and would have made well over 400hp each. At about this time our business had really started to take of so it got put to one side and forgotten about for a number of years. Sold the engines for kit cars actually made money on those, surface drives and gearboxes went to a guy in Germany last year. I still have a few odds and sods from the project kicking around the stores. It needs a very brave person indeed to take her on……
All The Best
Peter
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