Catamaran Chop: Dart 18 Disposal in Portchester

A Catamaran chop finished our week off nicely. Our Boatbreakers team were out on the road again last Friday. This time it was a nice local job in Portchester. The boat in question was a Dart 18 Sailing Catamaran which had been left on the edge of an office car park.

It wasn’t particularly heavy or difficult to move. However, it was too wide to load in one onto our trailer. For this reason we decided to simply chop the Catamaran into sections and stack them into our boat trailer individually.

First of all any ropes that were still on the boat were cut away and put into the trailer. In addition any parts of the boat that could be broken off by hand were. This can only usually be done if there are areas of rotten wood on a boat as it becomes so soft. On GRP sections of a boat it’s usually fairly difficult to remove anything by hand.

Our first cuts where to the the front sections of both hulls. In simple terms we chopped the pointy ends first. This allowed us to tip the boat forward and drain any rain water which had accumulated inside each hull section. From there we made horizontal cuts across each hull to cut box sections away.

Once we started cutting the boat’s rigidity weakened and some sections like the central aluminium bar were able to just slide out. This is one of the items that we were able to save and will hopefully have up for sale on our Boat Scrap Yard website soon.

The Dart had a wooden section at the stern which had a seat bolted on. This was probably the most time consuming part of the chop. As the wooden areas were slightly thicker than the thin GRP of the hull. The cutting tools we use make light work or both Wood and GRP. It took a matter of minutes to reduce the boat in more manageable sections.

We had a team of two people on the job. We find no matter if the boat is fairly small it always pays to have two people thinking the job through. Whilst one was cutting the other was loading the sections of boat into the trailer. One bonus was that the hull sections had handles which made them easy to lift.

When the boat had been completely chopped into section it was then a case of just making sure they all wedged into the trailer safely. Once it was all in we strapped the sections down tight so they wouldn’t move during the short journey to our scrapyard in Portsmouth.