After a 4 YEAR REBUILD full BOAT TOUR of our tiny floating home. [Vindö 32]

Five years ago, my partner Aladino discovered this little boat, completely wrecked, lying in the corner of a boatyard. She had fallen off a crane onto concrete and insurance had written her off. Aladino decided to take on the project and after four years of hard work and painstaking attention to detail, she now looks like this. We've been living on Magic Carpet and sailing around Europe for the past one and a half years, but we realized that we've actually never done a full boat tour, so that's what this video is all about. First, some specs. Magic Carpet is a Vinda 32, built in Sweden in 1976. Her hull is solid fiberglass, her decks are teak, the cabin, superstructure and cockpit comings are mahogany and the interior is mostly mahogany with some fiberglass structural elements. And if you're interested in more about the refit specifically, then check out our channel for more videos on that. Welcome to the cockpit! So this boat tour episode is filmed in different places at different times of the year, so that's why our clothing choices will change throughout it. But starting out here in the winter, we're in France right now, this is the cockpit. Now the teak in the cockpit is actually all brand new, which we didn't actually do. The previous owner had that done, which is really nice. So we have good glued-on teak in the cockpit, which is a huge luxury because it means that we don't have the risk of water intrusion from screw holes like you have on traditional screwed-down teak decks. The cockpit comings Aladino keeps fantastic care of. These are mahogany, laminated mahogany, to get that nice curvature. And there were no big cracks in the cockpit comings after the accident, were there? No. No, okay, so they survived pretty well and they look really nice. One thing that is really different is when you look back on photos of the boat just after the accident, you'll see it had a wheel, it had a big steering column right here with the compass and everything. And Aladino opted instead to go for a tiller, which is actually really really nice on a boat of this size, because it means that when you are at anchor or in the harbor, you can get rid of it. And this, the traveler, Aladino also made removable. So it's installed right now, but there's screws with wing nuts here that you can undo and then the whole traveler goes away, which is also really nice when you're spending a lot of time in one spot and you can have the whole cockpit to yourself. So right now, as I'm filming this little segment, we are actually inland France, in the river systems of France. We're heading up north and usually we have this taken away because the mast is down and so we don't actually need to use it as a traveler. We just installed it for the video so you can see it. So for a 28-foot boat, the cockpit is pretty spacious, especially with the alterations Aladino has done, and that comes with a few pros and cons. In general, for a 28-foot boat, it is quite well equipped to handle rough weather. These cockpit comings are really high and so that protects from waves and stuff coming in. We have had this boat out in a few rough conditions and it's been surprisingly dry in the cockpit, even if the decks are totally wet. So that's really really nice. The downside of having such a big space is if you are in a really huge sea and you have waves breaking over the stern, then you do run the risk of flooding the cockpit. And you'll see here, in more blue water designs, this hatchway would be closed at the bottom so that there's no risk of water coming in, but as it is now, this is just a removable board and could definitely leak if the cockpit were to be flooded. Anyway, that's just a minor point. We're not planning on going around Cape Horn in this boat, but something to add. We have four winches in the cockpit. Only two were original and the previous owner added two, which is really nice. So these are for spinnakers and also this side is for furling in and out the genoa, the headsail. And we also have quite a lot of storage in the lockers here. Aladino also designed a really clever system into this. Originally, so these floorboards give engine access and access to the prop shaft and everything, and originally they were shut with these two kind of latches that you would have to go underneath from inside to open, which is really difficult. You have to like reach around and under the engine, but at the same time they still do have to be very securely tied down because if you get water in the cockpit, then you don't want salt water dousing your engine. So Aladino came up with this system with ropes, which are accessed in the cockpit lockers. This is really cool. So there's a rope here and a rope here. Oh my gosh. There we go. A bit tight. And then through a series of pulleys which go all the way down to the bottom, you can lift this up. You can see here that you can now lift this entire thing out and away and it's secured with these four points to make sure that no water gets in and you can tighten it again once it's down. So that's a very nice feature that Aladino designed for easier access without undermining the waterproofness of the cockpit. One big job in the cockpit actually consisted in laminating the deck to hull joint again because after the crash it had come loose for the whole length of the cockpit, but that is nothing that is visible anymore because I did that from inside by laminating it together again and on the outside I just had to repair the tow rail which is teak. It cracked in many places and now it's back on and it's not visible anymore. I also changed something in the back here. This is also a locker and the access here is really difficult as you can see only from this hole and since I had to rebuild this whole section I needed proper access. So what I've done is I made this one removable and this one which was fiberglass thin and hinged down. Now we just have some things stored in here. Ignore that. But now basically I was able to slide into here and work on it and again of course there is the same pro and con and that is water intrusion. Now it's not a blue water boat and with what we are doing right now I actually prefer the benefits from having access. Yeah as Maya said we're not going around Cape Horn right now but otherwise that is something to consider. Many small boats which go on bigger passages they also seal things in temporarily. We could always do that but for now the benefits are quite big of being able to store for example our wind vane and bigger items. So I'll really briefly go over the things we have on the stern pulpit before we go back in time to a warmer day when the mast was still up to show you the rest of the boat. But here on the stern pulpit there's knives always available they're always coming in handy for fishing or in a case of emergency you've got one there. Here we've got some line which is attached to this floatie in case of a man overboard you can throw that and still be attached to the boat. This is just the stern navigation light. Normally we have a wind vane here but because mast is down and we're in the inland waterways we don't need that for steering right now so we actually took that off just to get it out of the way and and not have it interfere with this mast post. So normally there's a wind vane here and then the outboard for our dinghy also sits here. On a small boat like this space is of course always at a premium and one really difficult decision we had to figure out was how to store the outboard while not having it in the way of the wind vane because the wind vane needs to have a clear read on the wind around it and when you have a big object blocking that wind it can disrupt the pattern and the wind vane won't get an accurate reading and you won't be able to steer correctly. So initially the outboard mount was up here and the outboard interfered with the wind vane which is about yeah it's about here. So we dropped it down and then that problem disappeared which is really good. So I think that pretty much concludes the cockpit tour we have spray hood we have a bimini above which are really nice they also came with the boat so we didn't have to do much there and now let's continue to warmer days and the rest of the deck. So starting off at the bow this is our roller furler so our genoa does roll up and we can use it in whatever size we want we can use it as a jib as a genoa or even as a storm jib that works quite well. Here we have our bow pulpit that one is not original the original one unfortunately got completely smashed and was two-dimensional so it was not to be used anymore. I was lucky to find this one from an x-yacht I was working at their yard at the time and I'm very happy how it fits. The bow fitting is new because that was also too damaged to use again and I had that made by an apprentice to get it done a bit cheaper but it's not the prettiest of things. But what I'm very pleased with is where the anchor sits on normally the winders they have two tiny brackets and a roller and to me this was not serious enough so I had them weld a really serious anchor support which is working perfectly and I'm really happy with that. Coming back here's our anchor windlass I have modified this a little bit so we have a lid now and we have quite a big hole so chain goes through rope goes through and also the knots because sometimes we have a bowline to attach even more ropes so the hole is big enough to make everything pass but to make sure it stays dry we have a lid on it. To the rest coming after the cleats are original this is a typical solution that winder used piece of teak with these two fittings it works quite perfectly but as you can see after 20 or so years you have to replace the teak which is no big deal though. Teak deck, teak tow rails and here I just had to do the maintenance general maintenance I sanded the teak down because the grooves were getting big and the seams were popping out a little bit but that was basically it I sanded everything and I did paint the inside of the tow rail white with the same paint I used everywhere else because otherwise it would have been odd to have the original white there and not mine like everywhere else. We continue with the cabin top the sides are solid mahogany and instead the rounded parts so the front here and also the cockpit comings in the back they are laminated which means you use thinner sheets of wood you use veneer and you glue them together so you're able to get this curvature. Winder always gave you two options you could choose either teak on top which is what I think about 90 percent of the owners chose but also the yard gave you the option to have it fiberglassed over and that's what Rene the previous owner chose and I'm actually very happy he did so because otherwise we might have done it ourselves. It keeps the heat off better honestly it doesn't look that bad. Teak looks lovelier I agree but it's also again more maintenance and more work. I have only painted this again to have everything in the same white and I think it looks really lovely. The repairs here are quite endless some are general maintenance not just because of the crash this for example the hatch being made out of planks of solid mahogany they do work a lot they bend and twist in different ways depending on the humidity so you might be able to see that you you get cracks the wood just moves and it separates so you always have to stay on top of that and either fill it out with epoxy because the old glue is kind of giving up or you just need to make sure it's protected with varnish because once the water seeps in then you get black discolorations which are not nice but also I've had some damages which were due to the crash fiberglass you can repair and you make it you can make it look better than new but wood you always see the scar no matter how professional the repair is made so what I had here on the starboard side was a two meter crack which is about six feet that did hurt quite a bit but now I just call it the battle scar I filled it out with epoxy for doing the first varnishing job ever on the cabin top and it is visible but it's part of the boat as for the rest again it's more general maintenance that I've done here re-varnishing and of course re-bedding the windows that is another very important thing which you might be doing more than once the cabin top is quite spacious actually when we pull the dinghy up and put it in the bag we keep it on the cabin top and when we do have the dinghy up there I noticed that it gets really wet so that's why I do I glued some additional teak on it so it gets ventilated underneath a little bit and also it gives you a better grip when you're walking on the on the cabin top but not that we have to we have let everything aft so we can we can handle all the halyards and lines from the cockpit welcome everybody to the interior of the boat first thing as I come in here on the port side I have the chart table navigation and here on the bulkhead we have this new bulkhead organizer that Maya made and it's just super handy for all the things that you need right away here is the electrical panel that is completely new we have the switches for all the circuits this is a cool thing here it shows which light is on and we have the fridge battery monitor and the tank gauges of course the chart table section is completely new I changed a lot of things here because I wanted to give the boat a more modern look and more open views so basically before we had a bulkhead here like on this side it was exactly the same height so access to the chart table was from the side from here and it was also raised it was at the same level like this little part here I turned it around it gives me the benefit that we have a longer seat in case we have a tall person and they can stretch out and have the feet in here in the garbage can this is new because I dropped it I have to have it lower when I'm sitting here otherwise it would be too high and I also changed the orientation of how it opens now it opens this way around and I have improved storage we have a lot of things in here to the side instead we have just shopping bags and I installed the inverter here so that's actually really nice I can have things which I have to charge all the batteries in here and I plug them in directly to the inverter that's this I found those cupboards super handy to have all my electricals inside the boat and dry we can open up we can check the fuses we can check all the wiring and the circuits also I have the regulator from our alternator here it's always good to keep an eye on that too when it has to be dry and visible same thing with our MPVT controller of the solar panel I have it here in the back and then there's just some extra tools that I always need the electrical stuff and a drill to my right is the galley small but functional and we just replaced the stove now we have an alcohol stove two burners and we've been super happy with it works well same on this side a bulkhead organizer and then the new upgrade for this summer was the ventilator here that is great in the back is a spice rack and I've taken away the slide doors it was equal like on the other side but I like having it open here we literally have our hands in there to grab a snack every half an hour so we don't need those that's good cutlery drawer and down here we have some pans pots and pans we have one faucet it's fresh water from the tank so we are conservative with it and mostly we drink it since now we equipped the boat with a filter and the pre-filter when we fill the water small boat but we are well equipped we also have a fridge back here it is really small I believe 40 to 50 liters capacity but we manage to always have a cold beer and some small items we just bought like cheese one thing I have changed here was the surface finish it used to all be covered with calco that is a protection sheet that looks like this it is actually more water resistant you can wipe it off it seems cleaner but I personally hate it and the good thing is that underneath they use the most beautiful teak plywood so I actually cleaned off the calco from the top and it's teak plywood underneath super beautiful here I painted white I opted for clean white color there is still the calco underneath here that's what reminded me of it and the same with this one we can cover up the stove if we want it we never do we're always using it and now the teak came into sight as I continue forward you can see I have excellent grab rails here not that I need them in the harbor but that has really been a great feature also we have veggie and fruit nets up here those are the most useful thing I also hide my fishing rod inside sometimes settee on either side they're both about 180 long and we have lots of storage in the cupboards we have storage underneath the bunks and the big table is an upgrade but besides that I haven't made any structural changes in this area I have just varnished and painted some TLC we can create two beds they're not quite double beds but they become quite a bit bigger let me show you the conversion here real quick obviously right now we are using it for storage behind here and these are actually the cockpit cushions but we can use them when we need this bed here and they fill out the space perfectly and this makes actually for quite a big cozy bed and the other side instead folds up instead of down but it's basically the same thing this one comes up here and I can attach it on the grab rail up here and as you can see it got quite a bit bigger as well one nice thing about the table also is that it's on slides so I can move it away because it was here I move it away it becomes super big and you can reach it perfectly from both sides like this and it also could rotate special feature and if instead I proceed to the lower part of the bunk I have more storage and this is also new I have made these lids so we can access it from the top too so you can actually stuff them a bit better the net here was a later on added installation that should prevent from us falling out of the bed it's a lee cloth it's a lee cloth yeah being on a full keel boat I also want to show you the floor boards and the bilge it has a little bit of importance because it has more volume and we can also use it for storage here it's actually quite flat because the left part comes up there but so we have cans here and as we progress further back it becomes deeper but they have used it to put the water tank in so here is our 100 liter water tank in the back of the keel as instead the very last one this is actually the sump it's deeper and that's the actual bilge where we have our manual pump and our electric pump there are two items in here from maya's first one dollar boat curlew it's the petrol lamp we still need to get the glass for it and the other one is a lamp too maya's first full-size violin it had broken and I had an idea of how I could use it we come to the next part here which is a little reinforcement that I did not that it needed it but while I was at it I tapped on the bulkheads I put on some fiberglass because vinde only has a fiberglass on one side and then they're screwed on and I thought it would be nice to have them tapped in from both sides so moving forward we have the closet most of our clothes are here we are also conservative with those right now this is our little bar and on this side the head originally the boat comes with two doors there is one door which can close here and you have this one on the head as well I took one off one door is enough and actually depending on where you mount it you can also decide on the orientation I chose this option it could be the other way around as well here's our head the the sink is pretty unique it slides out so this is it really gives you more room but when you need it it slides completely out this is quite cool so this is original but I have changed everything else in here the the hose parts I changed the location of the valves and the seacocks I want to have them very accessible and finally we made it to the v-berth this is where we sleep most of the times it's quite comfortable for two but there's also a few changes that I made here one was a cover here actually you can tell where it was from how the the wood ends I prefer not having that cover here so I have access to the anchor winch and the chain locker Maya's instruments are housed in here it's actually a great place to store them as I look up I can see the stars but what I do when I lie here is I look at the pretty wood this is a masterpiece and it's one of my favorite parts on this boat the curvature in the cabin top front is to me literally amazing and that concludes the boat tour if you're interested in seeing more about the refit or seeing magic carpet in action around the mediterranean or hearing more about my first boat which I got for one dollar then check out our channel where we have all our videos organized in playlists thank you so much to 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