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Since purchasing Luna Blu (ex Alure) in 2019 she had been wonderful platform upon which to enjoy the cruising grounds of Thailand and specifically the Andaman Sea, centered around Phuket, and include popular spots like Phang Nga Bay, the Phi Phi Islands, and then further south toward Malaysia, including Langkawi. 

Several upgrades had been completed since then. Some were necessary, others were unnecessary but desirable, and a few were just a downright waste of money. The list is endless. and as any boat owner might testify, there’s always something to do or improve on your boat. Many of the improvements i’d undertaken were in part practically driven, but also part putting my fingerprints on as much of the boat as possible, and in doing so removing the touches of the previous owner. Not that there was anything wrong with what he had done. He was an electrical engineer and with that came its own set of problems. But on the whole things were perfectly sound. I just wanted to clear the decks, so to speak, and make my own impressions on the boat.

Below is a snapshot of some of the modifications we have made. Don’t be deceived; the dot points below are in no particular order, and certainly not listed by cost! A tip though, upon reflection it would seem the fewer letters in the dot points seems to be inversely proportional to the cost of them! 

• Installed a 16,000btu/Hr Marine A/C unit 
• Installed Solar/Lithium/Inverter house power platform 
• Replaced sails (main, genoa, code-o) and running rigging 
• Removed manual toilets (2) in stbd hull and replaced with 1 electric head. 
• Installed domestic fridge/freezer 
• Installed combo oven in place of factory fitted marine gas oven. 
• UV Reducing film applied to the outside of saloon windows/hatches. 
• Replaced old dinghy with a new Highfield 310 classic and 15hp 2-stroke Suzuki short leg outboard. 
• Make good the “spaghetti soup” of cables/wires/electrical componentry behind the navigation station. 
• etc.

Antifoul

I’m confident I’ve missed a lot on the list above. But what hadn’t been done up until recent times was a renewal of the antifouling. Luna Blu came to me with a Coppercoat antifouling system. A system that is a durable, non-leaching, epoxy-based system that uses pure copper powder to prevent marine growth. The benefit of Coppercoat is that it’s a system that is much longer lasting than the conventional ablative systems (a type of marine paint that slowly erodes in the water, releasing biocides to prevent marine growth on a boat’s hull). Coppercoat can last up to 10-15 years, whereas the ablative systems last only 2-3 years and, critically, require the boat to be taken out of the water for recoating.

The disadvantage of the Coppercoat system is that it’s frightfully expensive and highly susceptible to missteps in the preparation and application. Moreover, it wasn’t clear to me when the Coppercoat had been applied, though certainly not within the last 5 years of my ownership and i wasn’t versed enough at the time of buying the boat to ask those sorts of questions. To the boating sale and purchase market, I was a lamb to the slaughter!

That uncertainly had to be removed. The antifoul needed inspecting and probably replacing.

Diesel Engines

Let me clarify one thing at the outset. I am not your traditional sailor. I don’t have a tattoo of an anchor on my shoulder, i don’t have any tattoos for that matter. I don’t smoke a pipe. I don’t own a pair of bell-bottomed trousers, nor a suit with a flap collar. And when there’s not enough wind in the sails, or there is wind but not from the direction that’s useful for the direction I’m headed, I am unashamedly the quickest person to reach for the ignition key. Luna Blu comes with 2 diesel engines, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re not there as ballast!

Fitted with two D2-40 HP Volvo Penta Marine Diesel engines, this was the standard configuration when buying the boat originally from the manufacturer. The previous owner had not elected to upgrade to a bigger horsepower package. It turns out he was likely the only person not to have done so. In my research on the matter, I’d discovered many owners of the Salina 48 model had bigger, and some significantly bigger, engines. Since i bought the boat i had been, for the most part, mostly satisfied with the engines, though what was troubling me slightly was the fact one engine was old (original) and had well more than 7,000 hours. The second engine was as new (200 hours) and had been retrofitted in Australia by the previous owner. One old, one new. It was evident to me that the old one was going to need an overhaul before too long.

What I was also discovering though was that against a head wind, something you find more often than you would prefer when sailing, coupled with an adverse current, Luna Blu would struggle making anything more than 4 knots. Admittedly i wasn’t pushing the engines particularly hard, but it always felt a bit of a drag when working against adverse weather. This all came to a head when we were trying to make our way through a fierce storm toward a safe anchorage. 30 knots of sustained wind, into waves perhaps 2m and we were barely maintaining a 1.5-2 knot speed over ground. Feeling an overhaul of the old unit was not far away, and a strong sense the engines weren’t big enough to comfortably get us out of trouble, i determined then and there that an upgrade was on the cards.

Happy with the Volvo Penta brand after the experience i had with the D2-40’s, and after much consultation with other Salina 48 owners, and a scan of the pricelist, I determined that the slightly punchier D2-60’s were going to be the new engines. They were essentially a D2-50, but with a turbo-charger added on. Along with the D2-60’s, I also replaced the saildrive with the slightly larger 150S, and a new set of 3 bladed folding propellers. I bought them from a wholesaler in the UK and imported them into Thailand. That experience in itself is worthy of a separate chapter, but for the mental health of the author, let’s not go there!

A fish out of water

New Engines and antifoul mean one thing, the boat needs to be pulled out of the water. It’s hard to explain to someone without skin in the game but lifting a 14-ton hunk of reinforced fiberglass, along with its many appendages, out of her natural habitat brings a literal meaning to the phrase “a fish out of water”. Unsightly, unnatural and, importantly, not remotely conducive to the structural integrity of the boat. They simply aren’t designed to be out of the water resting on points where otherwise forces would be comfortably dispersed while floating in water.

Anxiety level’s were elevated when, In October 2024, Luna Blu was lifted out of the water. What followed was a combination of long days of blood sweat, tears and fiberglass shards embedded into our skin.

Blue will do

Old engines removed, new ones installed, some repairs to osmosis blisters on the hull, and then the big decision was made to repaint the hull. Blue has always been my preferred color. What’s more, a blue hull married nicely with the name of the boat. There was a long list of naysayers, all well-meaning. The blue would not hide imperfections as well as the white hull. Inevitable impact scratches would be easier to see, it would be harder to keep clean, the darker blue would seduce more heat from the sun, the blue hull would be harder to see in a search and rescue situation, and so on and so forth. Someone even suggested, with grave concern, that the “swimming pool” area under the boat between the two hulls that had a beautiful cyan like hue to it, presumably encouraged by the white underside of the boat against the sea underneath would be a thing of the past! Mostly all were wise in their concerns. The problem was, is and will remain so, was that when i have an idea and i believe it to be good, it’s always been difficult to deviate me from it! Blue it was to be, and blue it shall be!

Good from afar, far from good

Sadly, while trying to do most of the work ourselves, or with the assistance of professionals procured by us, we found ourselves a little cornered for time. Zippy had unearthed a team of painters based in Samui that with some time off from their automotive painting day job, they could afford 5 days to come to Phuket to do the paint work. Assured 5 days would be enough, though quietly concerned it wouldn’t be, the team arrived and set about work. In the end, the last day or two were hopelessly rushed in an effort to meet the time threshold, and that has created a few little imperfections that to a trained eye up close you can see. But from a distance they are blind to the eye.

If we had our time again, we would have heeded the concerns of many, and ensured ample time to finish the work smoothly, without rushing. It’s a cost benefit analysis, and thus compared to some of the quotes from the Phuket based shops that offered up some eye watering estimates, this approach was far and away cheaper, and given the mature age of the boat, in the end i was happy with the outcome without being overjoyed. Certainly, the bank balance was overjoyed with the work, and that of course matters!

A new bottom

This new coat of blue, whilst looking magnificent, at least to the author’s eye, posed a new unforeseen problem. The Coppercoat antifouling system, when applied, has a copper like appearance! When it comes into contact with the ocean, it quickly adopts a green tone when the copper oxidizes. I’m no color combination expert, but “blue and green should never be seen”! With problems come solutions, and in this case, some benefits. Until now, i had been mulling over the benefits of Coppercoat vs cost of the more conventional ablative antifouling. Coppercoat comes in the one color, ablative paint comes in many, though typically black.

“Black and Blue will do”. Based upon color alone, the decision was made to adopt an ablative system, and it would be black. The hidden benefit of the Coppercoat base was that there was an existing strong epoxy layer over which, with relatively little surface preparation in so far as outright removal was concerned, we could sand then roll on layers of primer and after that, the antifoul. Lots of antifoul! I think it looks terrific, and so far, 1 year after, the effectiveness is as good, if not better than the Coppercoat had been up until we took the boat out of water.

With those major hurdles ticked off, we then tasked ourselves with a bunch of other little tasks that we could get done while out of the water and energy levels high. The principle of these was the removal of the so-called escape hatches, controversially. Escape hatches used to be a mandatory safety feature designed to allow crew to exit the vessel in the event of a capsize. A sensible idea, but poorly designed. It has recently come to light that a number of catamarans that have sunk has been due to these escape hatches failing. There were many problems with ours. They had started to leak. Not significantly, but enough to need a sponge to clean up water ingress. They were impossible to open from the inside without a solid object and some swinging room to lever open the handles. The location was such that it would be highly unlikely we would be in the vicinity of them in the case of the boat capsizing. I didn’t want the risk of these hatched accidentally opening, so we determined that the safer approach was to remove them altogether and fill the open space with foam-cored GRP. If in the unlikely event we were to capsize, there are many other ways we could escape from inside the boat. And in all probability, we would likely be outside in the safety of the cockpit space if the weather conditions were indeed foul enough that a risk of capsize was imminent. Escape hatches removed, one less concern is how I viewed it!

Plenty more projects completed and then in early January 2025, after a little less than 3 months, Luna Blu splashed back into the sea, new engines were satisfactorily sea-trialed, and we were now one step closer to beginning our adventure, safe in the knowledge she was as sea worthy as she might ever be!

It was an enormous project to undertake. We did more than we initially thought, and most of it on our own, trying to avoid increasingly greedy pockets of the Phuket marine service industry that, I have to say, is fast approaching a point of pricing themselves out of a market.

An enormous level of gratitude must be extended too Zippy. With her local language, Zippy was always going to be our front of house with every interaction with suppliers, technicians and labor force. Couple that with her boundless energy and desire to ensure jobs were done right was truly the queen of this operation!

G&T Boatyard, Phuket (Oct’24-Jan’25)

Conclusions

With the benefit of a day job and a steady salary, I had fallen into the dreadful habit of having had suppliers and service professionals tending to most of the tasks needed to be done on the boat, be it major or relatively mundane. This particular experience was something entirely different and so much more rewarding. We undertook this project not on the cheap, but certainly not with the carefree tendencies to which I’d allowed myself to be entrapped. We touched literally everything that was done on the boat, and this gives you a greater sense of a job done well as well as a far better understanding and appreciation of your own boat. The satisfaction as she went back into the water was profound.

The new engines were sea trialed and performed well. I am still trying to get an accurate determination of their diesel consumption. It’s certainly more than the D2-40’s, but exactly how much I’m not yet certain. Something like 2.5 ltrs/hr at 1,800 rpm is my hunch now. But the speeds she can now maintain while pushing into the weather gives us so much more confidence.

The hull paint job looks terrific. Keeping her clean is undoubtedly much harder than the original white, and there are scratch marks that are much easier to recognize. Though each scratch has a story, a memory and I like that! But most of all, there is still a magnificent cyan color to the seawater underneath the boat when we go swimming, it’s glorious!