Renovating a bargain boat: I ended up with so much boat for so little money

Serial boat refitter Ross Barrett promised he wouldn’t start another project but the temptation of a Hershine 37 trawler yacht proved too hard to resist

Regular readers might recall that in 2019 I bought a very cheap 1980s Fairline Corniche 31. It only cost me £31,000 but the wiring was a mess and the interior was very tired and dated. With neither the budget to afford a professional refit nor the expertise to do it myself, I had to learn how to do everything from scratch before getting stuck in.

After watching dozens of ‘how to’ videos and scouring Ebay and DIY shops for cheap alternatives to premium marine equipment, I managed to turn our dark and dingy old classic into a bright, modern, floating home from home for the princely sum of just £10,000.

In the years since then we’ve had some fabulous adventures on board but after a while a number of things started to niggle me. When the conditions were right it was a wonderful boat but in any kind of waves it was really quite uncomfortable and it burnt through fuel at a frightening rate. A single trip to Poole and back from the Solent cost me over £500 – that was 5% of my entire refit budget!

I also wanted to be more independent so we could stay at anchor for several days at a time.

As well as the cost of berthing in marinas, the whole point of owning a boat is to get away from it all, not just hop from one floating boat park to the next. However nice the boat was, it still felt a bit like we were staying in posh campsites.

Renovating a bargain boat: Trawling the Market

I hadn’t really planned on buying a new boat but one day I was driving past Deacons in Southampton when I saw a rather handsome looking trawler yacht for sale. I couldn’t resist popping in for a closer look. It turned out to be something called a Hershine 37.

The broker told me they were built in Taiwan during the 1970s and 1980s largely for the US market, where buyers appreciated their robust build, seakindly manners and spacious interior. However, only a handful of them ever made it to the UK, hence the relatively modest asking price of £70,000 for this 1978 example.

I had a good look round and felt this could be just the thing we were looking for. It had a sturdy displacement hull, a single 200hp Volvo TAMD40 engine, two ensuite cabins separated by a spacious saloon and galley, and plenty of outside space including a sizeable flybridge.

The interior was very traditional with acres of teak-faced ply and forest green leather upholstery that made it feel like a mix between a gentleman’s club and the inside of a tree, but everything seemed in pretty good nick and it ticked a lot of boxes.

The hull had been treated with Coppercoat so I wouldn’t have to antifoul it every year, it could take to the ground so I could keep it on a drying mooring, the single shaftdrive engine would be easy to maintain and cheap to run, and the owner had recently installed an expensive fuel polishing system to guard against fuel bug. In short, it looked like a lot of boat for the money.

Before deciding whether to make an offer, I put the Corniche on the market at an asking price of £55,000. It sold the next day for £53,000!

I took my wife, Lauren, to view the Hershine and she gave it her seal of approval. Her only condition was that it mustn’t become another all-consuming refit project. The last thing she wanted was to lose her husband for a further year. I didn’t have any issue with that.

It may have been a bit dark and dated but everything seemed to work and I could live with the decor in exchange for everything else it offered. I put in a cheeky offer of £40,000 and by the end of September 2023 Sea Star was ours.

Broken Promises

As promised, I did nothing to it for the first six months. Well, almost nothing. I asked a mate of mine to spray-paint a few of the plywood panels in the saloon to brighten things up a bit. And we both agreed that the ensuite bathroom in the aft cabin needed a refresh.

I mean, who puts a hip bath on a boat? It’s far too small to have a relaxing bath in and utterly hopeless for actually washing in. And it had this bizarre sliding basin over the toilet that weighed a tonne and had to be wrestled in and out every time you washed your hands.

I ripped it all out and put in a simple domestic shower unit, a fixed sink, a radiator and a new electric toilet from Force 4. Stick-on vinyl tiles from Amazon, teak grating for the floor and an offcut of kitchen worktop completed the look, all for a shade over £1,100.

I reassured Lauren that was it, and set about making the most of our new boat for the summer of 2024. The first few day trips were a great success but the first night we slept on board didn’t go so well. The double bed in the aft cabin was tiny and half of it was tucked under the side deck with so little headroom that I nearly knocked myself out getting out of bed in the night for a pee. We ended up topping and tailing just to get some sleep.

The next day it was raining and we ended up sitting in the saloon trying to watch a movie but the green dinette seats were so firm and the backrests so upright, it was like sitting on a church pew. I told Lauren there and then that I couldn’t keep my promise any longer, I was going to have to redo the interior.

Only this time, it wouldn’t take as long, now that I knew what I was doing. Besides, I was only going to do the aft cabin and the saloon since the galley and forecabin were fine. As a final incentive, I told Lauren I would get it done over the winter so she wouldn’t have to see any of it until I was finished.

Cabin Rebuild

I started by stripping out the old bed and wardrobe, tearing up the carpet and removing all the panelling. Initially, I looked at buying a ready-made bed but nothing I could find fitted the space so I went to B&Q, bought a load of wood and started laying it out on the floor to see how I could make better use of the space.

Once I’d settled on the shape, I built the frame and ordered a made-to-measure mattress. I also bought an electric ram so I could lift the base at the touch of a button and store all my tools underneath it. Lauren still doesn’t know she’s sleeping on top of my power tools!

For the headboard I found a nice piece of fluted panelling which I cut to fit and installed on the aft bulkhead. The wardrobe took a bit of planning as I wanted to watch television in bed, so I designed a new unit with a false interior panel that left room for a TV on the side facing the bed.

The wardrobe door was another challenge as a conventional hinged one would have clashed with the cabin door. In the end I found a roller door online that was originally designed for a motor home. Once I had painted and upholstered the side panels with my usual vinyl and spray glue, I then topped it off with another wood offcut I bought on Facebook Marketplace and some traditional brass fiddle rails. The cost for the aft cabin refit came to £1,288.

The forward cabin is where our daughter Georgia (10) sleeps. The vee berth beds were fine so that was just a case of brightening it up with some fresh paint, retrimming the deckhead and bulkheads with white vinyl, installing a new bedhead and fitting electrical sockets and lights for the grand sum of £260.

I’d already done an initial refresh of her ensuite in spring 2024 but this time I started all over again, fitting the same electric toilet as ours, a pull-out shower that was originally designed for a bidet, vinyl tiling from Amazon and finding more space behind the toilet for a handy shelf and locker. Total cost £560.

The saloon proved a little trickier. Part of the problem was how to make everything work around the old galley units. In the end, I decided to strip out the galley too – in for a penny, in for a pound! Now I needed inspiration for what to replace it with so I watched countless MBY video tours of modern trawler yachts.

I loved the look of the Beneteau Swift Trawler 34, especially its practical U-shaped galley. I actually joined a Facebook group for Swift Trawler owners so
I could ask questions and seek advice about what they did and didn’t like. One of them even sent me all the measurements of his galley.

I marked them all out on the floor and came to the conclusion it was far too small. I also wanted to use off-the-shelf kitchen cabinets rather than making them all myself and inevitably they were larger than most boat galley units. In the end I contacted a young chippy, sent him the drawings and asked whether he could built it for me.

He took the drawings to Howdens, got them to design it on their software, ordered it all and installed it himself. I found a simple two-ring induction hob for the worktop, bought a sink and combination oven/microwave online and managed to re-use the Dometic fridge from the existing galley. I even fitted a Water2 filter system that I’d seen Bear Grylls advertising on Facebook for £129.

Nobody could tell me whether it would work on a boat but I went ahead anyway and am delighted with it. I would now happily drink straight from the tap. The whole galley ended up costing me just over £6,000 – a little more expensive than if I had made it myself but a lot quicker and far less hassle.

Saloon Style

The sofa was another online find. It took a while to track something down that fitted the corner space but eventually I found a Swiss company called Beliani that made a stylish looking sofa bed for £500. The icing on the cake was a folding centre backrest that turned into a snack table with a built-in bottle holder.

That just left the problem of where to put the television. There was a narrow side unit between the helm and the galley where a small television could sit but it was hardly the home cinema experience I was hoping for. Once again I stumbled across the solution while watching another boat video tour. It showed the television swinging down from a recess in the deckhead.

I made a box with a hinged bottom to fit the television, attached it to the deckhead, wired it all up and now have my own manual version that drops down when we want to watch it and clips out of the way when we don’t.

To make the space cosier I decided to swap the original worn parquet flooring for modern grey carpet. However the saloon had multiple hatches in it for access to the engine and bilges. From previous experience, I knew that cutting holes in fitted carpets soon led to frayed edges.

Carpet tiles were the obvious solution but finding ones which didn’t look like they belonged in an office block took a while. Eventually I tracked down something called Cosy Toes carpet tiles from DCTUK.com. These had a lovely deep pile but were still stain-safe and hard wearing. I bought 68 of them and cut them to fit so the fitted edges lined up with the hatch openings.

The blinds were all made to measure and ordered online from Blindstogo.co.uk, except for the two rear ones which are mounted on a slanting bulkhead. Thankfully, I found a guy on Ebay selling caravan blinds with encapsulated cassette-style frames. The standard ones were too big but I asked if he could make some to fit and sure enough when he contacted his supplier in Turkey, they made them to measure for just £80 each.

Article continues below…

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Engine, Electrics, Exterior

As the depth sounder on Sea Star wasn’t working properly, I opened up the helm console only to discover a bird’s nest of wiring, including one cable that was too hot to touch. Safety being my top priority, I ripped the whole lot out and started again with one big power cable leading to each helm.

New digital fuel gauges and programmable Veriton dials for the flybridge helm gave me all the information I needed to drive the boat from inside or out.

A mate of mine works for Raymarine and managed to get me an Axiom 12 and Axiom 7 MFD at trade rates as well as a new autopilot control, radar and VHF. I also kept the old Garmin chartplotter as a back-up and added a new sound system using Fusion speakers and a cheap Chinese copy of the head unit.

I bought a set of garden furniture from the Range for the flybridge aft deck and a new removable teak table for £400.

I also reupholstered the cushions for the fixed furniture myself and fitted a small Dometic fridge in the locker where the gas bottle used to be. I did splash out on a new bimini and frame, though, which at £1,200 was one of my more expensive buys.

The mast for the steadying sail, steaming light and radar scanner was another headache. The original one had been removed and sawn up by mistake before I bought it and when the quote for making a new one came in at £8,000, I nearly fainted.

After a bit of scratching around I found an old aluminium dinghy mast going for free, cut it down to size, fitted new spreaders and stays and asked my brother-in-law to make up a stainless steel footing. The total cost came to £235.

I do all my own servicing anyway so I gave the engine a once over and fitted new glow plugs, alternator and water pump. I also added a camera in the engine bay and repositioned the fuel filters so they were easier to clean without crawling into the bilges. My final job of the refit was to clean the decks using a two part Wessex treatment and a lick of Semco teak sealer.

Final Reckoning

I finished the rebuild of Sea Star in July 2025, just in time for the school holidays. The refit cost came to just over £15,000, so all-up the boat owes me just £55,000. When Lauren came to see it for the first time, she could barely believe it was the same boat.

Sea Star still has all the charm of a traditional trawler yacht exterior but the interior is now a fresh, modern and above all comfortable place for the three of us to live aboard. The proof of the pudding will be when we set off this summer for our first proper cruise.

If all goes well, we will only be popping into marinas for refuelling and recharging the batteries – a portable AC power pack and solar panels are next on my list. And this time I really hope it will be our forever boat…at least until I stumble across the next unmissable bargain!

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