Champagne Hippy was never expected to sail again. When the keel ripped off the 82ft Polina Star III in July 2015 it sent shockwaves through the marine industry, and left a £5 million yacht sunk in 40m of water, four miles off the Spanish Costa Blanca (the crew aboard was fortunately able to launch two liferafts and was rescued by fishermen soon after the capsize). After some 12 weeks on the ocean floor, the yacht was raised, a complex operation that further damaged the broken hull. It was taken ashore in Spain and declared a write-off: anyone who saw the photographs of the shredded structure and silted interior would have expected nothing else. Equally unsurprisingly, the legal wranglings surrounding the Polina Star insurance claim were lengthy and complicated. Enter the family-run yard Boats.co.uk, on Essex’s River Crouch. The yard is mainly a motorboat dealer but a separate division does a lot of salvage work for insurance companies. They were contacted by the insurance company handling the Polina Star claim as it needed somewhere to secure the yacht for up to two years while legal matters were resolved. Polina Star III was trucked across Spain and France, and through the Dartford Tunnel, before arriving in Canvey Island, Essex. She was unceremoniously shipped by barge up the River Crouch to Essex Marina, and locked away in a compound, out of bounds even to the boatyard staff. And there she stayed, in quarantine, until summer 2018. The Polina Star sinking was notably the first and only keel failure an Oyster Yacht has ever suffered. The hull construction of the 825s used a different system to all previous Oyster yachts. After the capsize, Oyster replaced the keel grid structures in the remaining three 825s and returned to its original manufacturing process. The enormous costs of the incident contributed to Oyster Yachts going into receivership in March 2018. Under the company’s new management, led by Richard Hadida, the company now moulds all its hulls in-house and has brought in a Lloyd’s Register inspector to survey all yachts regularly during the build process. Quarantined “When Oyster went bust the insurers settled with the owner and the owner relinquished the boat to us to reduce his costs,” recalls Nick Barke, one of four brothers who run Boats.co.uk. “We had £180,000 of costs tied up in the boat at that point and we had to decide what to do.” The brothers decided to repair the boat. Although they don’t usually work on sailing yachts, they had an in-house team with the skills required, and a 12-acre yard with all the workspace ready. They brought in outside contractors where additional expertise was needed. But it was never going to be a small job. “The boat had spent a few months on the sea bed; it wasn’t pretty to say the least, there were barnacles pretty much everywhere. The effects of saltwater had got into absolutely everything, it was dirty inside, it still had food inside the boat, which had … Continue reading Champagne Hippy: From sunken wreck to luxury charter yacht in 13 months