By now, some of you might be wondering what’s going on in Samoa with Team Plastiki? Well, amongst exploring Samoa, getting some tattoos, and packing up all the supplies for the last leg, we’ve also been doing some minor repairs on the Plastiki after the team noticed a few irregularities to some of the sub-deck beams.

Three of the brackets that connect the deck beams to the hulls were buckled. These “boomerang” shaped brackets have actually been designed to act as non-rigid shock absorbers that allow the hulls some natural movement. You can see some bowing below – but, don’t worry, the bottles here haven’t fallen out of place, we just removed them to carry out the work.

However, it seems the 5000+ miles of movement combined with some super hot weather have taken a slight toll. What has happened is that Plastiki’s two hulls have splayed open a little at the heel forcing these boomerangs to over extend and buckle outwards. The splaying has been caused by the load on the rigging that holds up the main mast.  The attachment point for the rigging is set in the outside edge of the deck, roughly in the middle of the boat and the effort of holding the mast up has partially rotated the hull in the area of the attachment.  It’s a bit like a cartoon car with too much weight in it where the wheels have squashed out.

So is it serious?  We don’t think so.  We took the precaution of getting the Plastiki’s designer Andy Dovell over to Samoa from Australia to assess the situation as the next leg of our journey will have some tough conditions and extreme weather, so we need to ready to handle everything the Pacific throws at us! His recommendation was to apply some local reinforcement to the buckled boomerang brackets.  On Wednesday (tomorrow), we will lift one side of the boat at a time in order to release the pressure on the buckled boomerangs and simply insert aluminium reinforcing pieces that will correct the splaying of the hulls.

Naturally, we are disappointed to be introducing aluminium into the structure at this time, but let’s not forget that The Plastiki is a rather experimental vessel to say the least, and one that defies even the best engineering predictions.  If we had all the time in the world and materials available locally we would certainly be carrying out this minor design adjustment in the Seretex material but, sadly, the Australian winter waits for no man, so we are against the clock.

We all remain very confident in the Plastiki and its materials, and, with a bit of luck, the very keen team of Plastiki Pyrats should set sail towards the end of this week!