Here we have the big news. She is our new boat.

How did it come to this?

As you may remember a year ago we sold our Hallberg Rassy 31 "EraOra" and after a break and a couple of months in Australia as a winter escape we are back in Italy and started looking for another boat. At the beginning I was thinking of something smaller and found a wonderfully restored Marieholm 26. Please check out Gabrieles work on the boat, he did a wonderful job and I learned a lot from his different videos and all the photos. But back to us.

The smaller boats turned out to be to small there was just not enough head room for me and a longer stay on the boat. During one of our trips to the small Marieholm 26 we had a coffee break and spotted the ad for a Hallberg Rassy 352, our dream boat. We were always lusting after this boat but never had the feeling we found the right one, well believe it to not during our first visit of boat we realized she was in rather good shape, there was a lot of work to do on the hull and as the boat was unused for a long time we knew a lot of things need to be revived, repaired and renewed, but hey it can be fun too.

After months of planning, accounting and lot of talks with the broker and the owner we were able to reach an agreement and now she is ours.

She is: SV GINA H a Hallberg Rassy 352 build in 1983 with hull number 368, she has a new teak deck, the original Volvo Penta engine and a furling main.

Straight away we started working and did sand the bottom down to the gelcoat and apply a complete rebuild as the bottom definitely needed some care. The engine did get a light overhaul and is running nice and smooth now. We will install flexible solar panels from Solbian during the next days. This was a feature we always missed on our previous boat. We also changed about half of the seacocks which stopped working properly and some thru hulls too.

Here some pics during her restoration with different layers of primer and Gelshield 200.

The big jobs are done now and we are exhausted, this was the reason the blog was so quiet we had a lot of work and the heat was unbearable the last weeks so no energy for blogging was left. ;-))

Now as the last layer of primer is drying the next couple of days I will spend doing the antifouling and then we need to fix the Lofrans anchor winch which only works in manual mode and most likely will need a new electric motor. The most annoying part is the Genoa furler which is stuck, probably the top roll on the mast needs new bearings we hope we don't need to replace the complete furler as it would be costly.

Im off now trying to fix the last things so SV GINA H will be back in the water during next week. Fingers crossed and updates will follow.

Here she is: Hallberg Rassy 352 GINA H