When I first saw Amazon, or Mavis as she was rightly called at the time, she was covered in a shell of glass reinforced plastic which had been applied some 20 years earlier. Unfortunately the resins used in the early years of GRP tended to have rather a detrimental effect on timber and sadly had turned the wood of Amazon to the consistency of a slightly stale rich tea biscuit.

This is pretty much the state I found her in when I moved down to start work on her, the fibreglass shell had already been taken off by the building company that ran the museum exposing gaping holes in the transom and a great deal of damage to the keel.

The fibres of the wood in the keel had almost completely disintegrated leaving the outer cell structure of the wood without the supporting substrate medium, this having been destroyed by the chemical action of the resin over the years.

The apron had almost completely split into two down its centre along the line of bolts and the stem was extremely badly damaged.

There was also a lot of resins still stuck to the woodwork which would have to be ground off later.

Had she not been such a special boat, it would have been much simpler to build a new one and to give her a decent Viking funeral with a box of Swan Vesta. However being of a mind that anything can be repaired if you put your mind to it, and motivated by enthusiastic conversations with Bridget about her renovation, I set about preserving her and restoring her to a sailable condition. It was a battle of wills as the museum had only envisaged restoring to display condition. But after all, if the job's worth doing it's worth doing properly.