THE £10K CHALLENGE
Last month I described how I bought a dilapidated 1986 Fairline Corniche 31 for £31,000 then lived with it for a year to work out what we wanted to change before undertaking a major refit. The first job was to strip everything out and sort out the basics like wiring, plumbing, engines and sterndrives, which I managed to do myself with the aid of countless YouTube videos, an old Volvo Penta manual and a lot of help from website forums and Facebook groups. (If you missed Part One you can read it online at www.mby.com/C31). However, that was just the start of it, with the systems now sorted it was time to get stuck into the main project, creating an entirely new cockpit and interior.
EMERGENCY ENTRANCE
My first goal was to improve access to the boat. Back in the 1980s it must have been perfectly acceptable to climb up a ladder and vault over the transom to get onto the boat. I’m only 40 years old but I still found this irksome. The obvious solution was to cut a gateway through the transom but this would mean losing a section of seating and spoiling the clean look of the stern. I reckoned I could come up with a better solution and inspired by something I’d seen at the Southampton boat show, I settled on a folding transom that doubled as a step up to
