THE DOORS TO MY HEART

Princess V48 owner Tommy Montaigne was tired of fitting canvas covers every time the weather turned so he set about designing and fitting his own set of folding glass doors

- Hugo Andreae

Tommy Montaigne likes a project. Having spent his childhood summers exploring the sheltered waters of the Stockholm archipelago in his parents’ sportsboat, it was almost inevitable that one day he’d buy a boat of his own. The trouble was that as a young married man, funds didn’t stretch to anything fast and shiny so he had to make do with an old wooden cabin cruiser that needed a top-to-bottom restoration just to make it seaworthy. Undaunted, he threw himself into the task and discovered that he had a knack for it.

With the birth of his daughter came the need for more space and comfort so he sold the wooden boat for more than he paid for it and bought a rather tired GRP Fjord 24. That too needed a full interior refit so he went one stage further and fitted a brand new GRP radar arch as well. For a while this refurbished 24-footer kept him and his growing family happy until he got fed up with the constant battle to keep the covers clean, “I’d spend the first hour of the day washing seagull poo off the covers before we could actually go out so I swore that our next boat would have doors,” recalls Tommy.

He was planning to upgrade to a Fjord 30 when he chanced across an advert in the paper for a Princess 37 flybridge. “I had never heard about Princess boats,” recalls Tommy. “It was love at first sight. You have to remember that back in 1986 a 37-footer was a big boat for the Swedish archipelago”.