Left: the famously low-profile John Reichel does put in an appearance at his own office’s Christmas party. Living the dream (above) – the young partnership at work in Pugh’s converted garage, with Jim doing the hard selling from the floor
helped to establish the company’s now formidable reputation for creating a wave of
the massive 218ft Panamax ketch Hetairos, these super and mega-yachts have become Reichel/Pugh’s standard fare now for nearly a decade, with one or two examples launched each year. The massive size and complication involved are plenty to keep John, Jim and the rest of their team busy. That said… while maybe not as lucrative
‘The Canting Ballast Twin Foil guys were like us also based in San Diego,’ said Pugh. ‘Their first Dyna Flyer 40 CBTF design was fast, but it was drawing little if any commercial interest, so they approached us. We came to an agreement to use their technology in our designs and first tried this as a retro-fit on Wild Oats.’ This boat’s success as a member of the
winning team in the last Admiral’s Cup of 2003 helped highlight the potential power of canting keels in the grand prix fleets, their use previously restricted to French- dominated offshore classes like the Mini 6.50s and later the Imoca 60s. In canting- keel guise Wild Oats also showed that a canting keel could successfully be added to a hull designed for a conventional keel. ‘But I read the IRC rule at the time and it
was not completely clear to me if a canting keel was actually legal,’ said Pugh, ‘and for sure we knew it was not legal in IMS… So I wrote to IRC rule manager Mike Urwin and asked him for a written clarification before too many more dollars were spent. And he did so, showing a welcome attitude in encouraging this new technology. How- ever… when we took Oats to be measured we were told firmly that a canting keel was not allowed in IRC. Handing them Mike’s letter was one of those small pleasures!’
This technology quickly developed to
become standard fare on any first-to-finish monohull contender, with Reichel/Pugh foremost. The next boats to use this tech- nology were in the newest class of top Maxis, the maxZ86s built at Cooksons, commissioned to be the latest Morning Glory and Pyewacket. Indeed, the owners of these 86-footers, Hasso Plattner and Roy Disney, have proved to be two of Reichel/Pugh’s most loyal customers. As these boats achieved success in
finishing first and smashing records event organisers began to allow even larger yachts to compete, finally capping at 30m. Predictably this created demand for new designs built to this limit, resulting in a generation of supermaxis like Alfa Romeo 100 and Wild Oats XI – both built for trusted clients and both still winning 10 years later. Finally, Reichel/Pugh quickly became
well-embedded in the latest genre of large, fast, elegant yachts that are as comfortable as they are beautiful and quick. Their superyacht experience began with regular customer Hasso Plattner’s Baltic-built 147ft Visione. The construction of this enormous – for
the time – yacht shut down Baltic for nearly two years of production boatbuilding but
as a mega-yacht project, Reichel/Pugh have remained true to their roots by keeping active among smaller fast racers. An example is the X-Treme series of boats from G-Force Yachts, with the offshore-capable speedster the X-Treme 37 turning heads from Europe to the Caribbean where it has proved very successful racing under the CSA rule and elsewhere under both IRC and ORC. Entered in Class B at the 2018 IRC/ORC
Worlds in The Hague, what a refreshing, sexy contrast
the single all-carbon
X-Treme 37 will make with its numerous frumpy cruiser-racer rivals! G-Force will be releasing another Reichel/Pugh design this summer: the X-Treme 32. Meanwhile, Jim Pugh’s own appetite for
new challenges is never satisfied and he is for ever travelling the world searching for a new deal. We had caught up with him just returning from PalmaVela where he had lost his mobile phone while sailing on the Wallycento Galateia… which had rendered him uncharacteristically mute for a while. Yet while in Europe he’d also found time
for new business, meeting the folks from Perini Navi to discuss yet another mega- yacht project. If it comes off this one will be an innovative addition to the CV as the first Reichel/Pugh design ever to be built in metal… Funny thing, evolution.
innovative yachts in this highly
specialised and demanding market. Ranging from 30m Wallycentos up to
q SEAHORSE 51
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