Design


Hard to believe the Bente is just 24-foot overall – seen on the water this fast little design looks both cool and modern racer and serious pocket cruiser. The Bente sails as well as you’d expect of a design carrying the Vrolijk name while, although simple in base form, the boat offers clever touches like this slide-out galley (far right). And all for less than half the price of a brand new Dragon...


Cracking effort


Filmmaker and passionate sailor Stephan Boden and yacht designer Alex Vrolijk have spent much of the past two years working together to change the face of the pocket cruiser-racer


Bente 24 – basic modern thinking My visit to the 2014 Dusseldorf Boatshow was a disappointment. Three years previ- ously I had purchased a new Dehler Varianta 18 (for €11,000) and did three summer tours of three to four months cruising the Baltic. At the end of my 2013 trip I had a new plan… let’s turn three to four months into three to four years. But for a longer voyage I wanted a bigger boat in the 24-25ft size range.


Used boats are relatively inexpensive these days. But often they are also a bit ‘spooky’. On a used boat everything is used – from the upholstery to the rigging and mast fittings. You never know what next surprise awaits you. Plus, once inside, used boats can remind you of a tired


44 SEAHORSE


Chinese restaurant. I needed to start again. Back to Dusseldorf and there were again many nice boats to see. Wonderful fast modern ones… priced from €65,000 upwards. And of course cheaper examples, few of which looked to be what you might call a ‘good sailing boat’. I left the fair without success.


However, during my trawl of the halls in Dusseldorf I bumped into Alex Vrolijk, son of well-known naval architect Rolf Vrolijk of Judel-Vrolijk fame. Alex and I knew each other already, largely because my long voyages on my little 18-footer are quite well known in Germany, via my blog and a couple of books I have written. Alexander also likes the 24-25ft size and he has the same problem with the current market. It is hard to find anything that is modern, fast, innovative and also sensibly priced. A few weeks later we met up again at his house in Bremerhaven. While chatting, and fuelled with a nice Bordeaux, we took a crazy decision: ‘Let’s develop a new boat by ourselves.’ Later that evening we pro- gressed as far as defining our key require- ments for this as yet unnamed project. Soon afterwards we met up with Michael Adlkofer. Michael sailed around the world a while back and is now a professor at the


University of Design in Hanover. We told him about our idea and he invited us to turn it into a design project for the university. Previously, whenever we talked about boats we talked about boats that we knew. You’re always influenced by what you know. The opportunity to hand our new boat to 20 product design students was perfect for us to get what we call ‘freedom of ideas’. That’s why initially we did not give them any information about boats. We just gave out a short briefing note plus a 3D file of a naked hull without a deck. They should think about living space, new ideas and fresh approaches to old criteria. While the students were coming up with their ideas we also began a viral marketing campaign via Facebook, my blog and the German sailing portal segelreporter.com. This campaign was not just about potential clients, it was also an effort to find industrial partners who wanted to innovate in our rather conservative sector. Lengthy discussion threads with increas- ingly emotional feedback made our project famous within German sailing. And soon we found our first partners. After that it was a chain reaction. For example, the Hamburg Boatshow CEO wrote to us: ‘If you have a mock-up of your boat then


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