Articles you may have missed from the August issue
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Design The yachtsman’s yacht
Outremer’s reputation for fine long-distance multihulls is driven directly by the personal ocean racing experience of company founder Gerard Danson – for whom safety was non-negotiable
At one end of the scale are the money-no-object speed machines. At the other end are docile cruising cats heavily laden with furniture, equipment and domestic systems. It’s almost a binary choice, but in the middle of the multihull performance spectrum one brand stands alone. Outremer has built a unique reputation as the only major catamaran builder that offers a balanced compromise between these two extremes.
It wasn’t always that way. Most builders started off in the 1980s making cats that were fast, comfortable and fun, aimed at experienced sailors who wanted to cruise long distances and win a few races, too. Then new models from nearly all builders began to get progressively heavier, slower, roomier – and less rewarding to sail. The main driver for this trend, which continues today, is the yacht charter industry. Multihulls tend to have a lot more living space than monohulls and unless overpowered they’re inherently stable. That makes them ideal as a holiday platform for a wider range of charter clients including novice skippers, families with non-sailing members and couples sharing a boat who want a bit of privacy from one another. Thus the builders started producing yachts to charter spec: 40-45ft long with at least 6ft of beam
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in the forecabins to allow full-size double island beds; four big en-suite bathrooms; a foolproof rig; a price tag under €400,000 in today’s money; and a short delivery time. Tax laws also encouraged the charter cat boom, allowing owners to deduct the cost of their boat from their taxable income if the boat was involved in the charter industry.
Outremer’s founder Gérard Danson refused to go down that road. ‘I asked him back then why he was not interested in growing his business,’ says Outremer’s Mattheiu Rougevin-Baville. ‘He told me about his experience in the Transmed Race in 1980, with 60-70kts of wind and six to eight-metre waves. So many boats were lost or capsized. He survived on one of his own designs and became convinced of some non-negotiable safety features.’ Danson’s essentials include long, slim hulls, low freeboard, low centre of gravity, central weight distribution and daggerboards. ‘He was well aware that the company would not grow as fast as the others who were aiming for the charter market but said he wanted to sleep at night, without worrying about owners’ safety,’ Rougevin-Baville explains. ‘It took time to grow but we are very proud that you can meet any kind of weather and still be safe on an Outremer.'
Today, Outremer remains true to
Above: Wheel or tiller – why not both? Multihull
grand master Loïck Peyron at the helm of an Outremer 4X, enjoying the perfect ergonomics of the rather clever deck and cockpit plan that he helped to optimise for efficient and enjoyable sailing. Very few cruising cats have the feather-light yet highly engaging helm “feel” that you get from a well- balanced
monohull... or an Outremer!
Danson’s ideas. Even its sporty models, the 48ft 4X and 60ft 5X, are not overpowered. ‘Both have a sail area : displacement (SA:D) ratio of 14m² per ton upwind and 30m² downwind,’ Rougevin-Baville says. ‘We feel it’s the maximum power ratio to keep a cruiser-racer safety margin.’ Above 14m² per ton the yacht will readily fly a hull upwind, which has serious safety implications for ocean sailing. By contrast, most cruising cats have an SA:D of 7-10m²/ton upwind and 15-20m²/ton downwind. They may have more sail area than an Outremer of similar length, but they’re a lot heavier. ‘The lightest 4X we’ve built weighs 8.5 tons in cruising trim; our lightest 5X is 14.5 tons,’ Rougevin-Baville says. Compare that to 20 or 30 tons for a typical cruising cat. ‘The main difference in performance doesn’t come from extra power, but from reduced drag and better windward ability,’ he says. ‘There are lots of claims about performance but the real one is the ratio between wind force and boatspeed.’
Platform length to overall length is another important ratio. Many cruising cats have a platform nearly as long as their hulls but for Outremer it’s never more than 50 per cent. ‘This is very important to keep the boat light, keep the weight centred and avoid waves slamming
Design Clean, green and mean
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Subscribe here All the best, Baltic’s 68-foot Café Racer really is a yacht for the 21st Century
Breaking new ground. Easy to say, but for Baltic Yachts that is genuinely the core of its DNA. It is almost 50 years since Baltic Yachts was founded on a simple principle, based on a refusal to accept the “norm” and to explore new boundaries. In 1973 five men, young at that time, eloped from Nautor to start their own boatyard and build the very finest sailboats in the world together with a group of native talents from the Bosund region in Finland. They wanted to create top quality, comfortable cruising yachts with racing potential and with lighter displacement than their competitors’ boats, not only to boost performance but also to make life easier and more enjoyable, and they had the idea that hi-tech materials and methods could do this. Not fighting head-to-head with other boatyards but instead creating their own product for the small niche of very demanding performance cruising/racing sailors. Without question Baltic Yachts has led the way in advanced composite construction for superyachts over the past decades, never settling for “good enough” and always looking for the next breakthrough in composites, systems or technology generally to ensure clients could rest assured that they were always getting the ultimate solution. It’s no surprise then that the Baltic 68 Café Racer breaks new ground in many ways. It is a size the shipyard knows well, with notable launches in this size range including Claude from the board of Reichel-Pugh. The inspiration behind the Café Racer stems from clear messaging from clients that has driven many of the key elements of the yacht, from
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eco-friendly building materials to electric propulsion and the concept of “easy sailing”. Clients are looking for a cutting-edge design but combining performance with the latest developments in materials, particularly noting the environment. The way clients use their yachts is changing, shorter trips but more frequently, so ease of use is key. That embodies the Café Racer philosophy. Baltic Yachts has for some time been researching new eco-friendly materials and techniques. Recognising that, very much as they did by being the first shipyard to embrace the challenge of advanced composites for performance cruisers and superyachts, being aware of the future is key. By using naturally grown flax to reinforce the Baltic 68’s hull, not only is her carbon footprint dramatically reduced but the shipyard is again breaking new ground in both adopting new materials and seriously addressing the concerns of clients about the environmental impact of more traditional materials.
For the Baltic 68 more than 50 per cent of the hull structure will use Bcomp ampliTex flax as a reinforcement, which also has excellent sound deadening properties. This has multiple benefits that are not immediately obvious. Not only does the yacht continue the enviable tradition of developing what are widely considered to be the quietest superyachts sailing today, but the fact that the material deadens sound allows a more efficient use of space by reducing the use of insulation.
Materials used in the Café Racer’s
Above: the strikingly handsome new Baltic 68 Café Racer is designed to deliver pure, hassle-free sailing with sparkling performance, easy handling and luxurious comfort. But whatʼs most remarkable about this groundbreak- ing design is its innovative use of more sustainable materials and minimal carbon footprint
accommodation continue the eco- theme with light oak timbers and flax composites combining with specialist wallpapers, wicker and paper cord to produce a light, cool, contemporary accommodation. For the exterior the Baltic 68 Café Racer’s beautifully laid decks, another Baltic trademark, use multi- purpose modified wood which is a sustainable, durable pine that comes with a 50-year warranty against rot. This solution lasts longer and is harder wearing than teak so deck thickness is reduced and consequently there is a 30 per cent weight saving.
The award-winning Lignia Yacht deck material means Baltic can avoid using hardwoods but maintain the feel and performance of a genuine deck and at the same time save weight, something of a holy grail for most owners.
In addition to embracing materials that are quieter and greener, this new yacht takes electric propulsion to levels not yet seen in the sailing world. The Café Racer is completely electric, removing the diesel engine completely from the inventory. The low-emission drive features two 20kw propulsion units. With such potent sailing performance on tap
Design PULITA – SEMPLICE – VELOCE
Karma... the fruit of the latest cooperation between luxury and performance yacht builders Maxi Dolphin and Wicklow-based designer Mark Mills really is just that
This design for a light, wide, and powerful performance cruiser with a large sailplan and a lifting keel prepared for established performance builders Maxi Dolphin shows how far modern raceboat design and construction can influence the next generation of high performance mile-eaters.. Headed by Luca Botter, the company has a lot of experience with this type of build, is located near the project manager, client, and interior designer Nauta in Milan, and understands the client’s vision: ‘pulita, semplice, veloce’ – clean, simple, fast. Moreover, they saw the opportunity for Karma to pave the way for further semi-custom builds of the MD75 design. With the green light to proceed, work started immediately to outline the geometry with the boatyard’s technical office led by Giovanni Pizzatti, to produce a basis on which all the different contributors could begin working: design, engineering from AMS, builder, interior designer, spar builder Maxispar, and keel manufacturer Cariboni all had to contribute pieces of a complex puzzle. Every other facet of the project was Italian.
Once the major decisions on the interior and exterior layout had been made, construction began at the Maxi Dolphin facility near Brescia, where the experienced team quickly set up female moulds for the carbon/corecell hull and deck
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construction. This combination is becoming the most reliable and cost- effective solution for performance designs of this type, bringing weight and stiffness gains complemented by a wider availability of builder friendly materials. It was the interior structure and components where higher tech solutions would pay the greatest dividends. Prepreg unidirectional caps were autoclaved and bonded to the longitudinal and transverse frames for ultimate stiffness, while all the interior parts are nomex cored for the lightest and most rigid possible solution. Another development is the advanced electronic system relying on digital switching, which significantly reduces cabling, and allows everything to be controlled from a simple mobile device. Once the interiors and systems were complete, the deck laid with teak, and the Cariboni lifting keel installed Karma was trucked to the coast in Lavagna, east of Genoa, ready for launch.
The project can be traced back t o 2016 when Mark Mills was contacted by an experienced Italian project manager with a client looking for a very high-performance cruiser of around 75ft.
‘The client had grown up sailing high-performance dinghies and was an active kiteboarder. He wanted to translate his familiarity with the sea and high-performance sailing into a big boat, which would allow him to
Above: clean, simple and fast – the
clientʼs vision for this rather impressively sleek 75ft fast cruiser informed every aspect of the project. Unlike most inshore racing designs of a similar ilk, which need to be optimised for upwind performance, this one has much fuller forward sec- tions to give a hull shape that responds enthusiasti- cally to being pressed hard when sailing downwind. The master- fully drawn deck looks flush from most angles but in fact itʼs subtly raised
sail shorthanded around the Mediterranean, and have a nice family “apartment” to enjoy when he arrived in port. His demands were for very sleek and simple exterior styling, high performance for quick delivery to new locations, and a relaxed and casual interior to be developed with his friends at Nauta Design in Milan’, Mills explains. ‘The vision of the project manager was already well developed, so important features such as the generous beam, large tender storage and swept spreader rig with square top main and no backstay were pencilled in from the start,’ he says. ‘With a coherent brief already established, a light powerful hull shape was sketched with added volume in the ends to reflect its primarily offshore and offwind profile, which helps utilise the full accommodation length available. The difficulty was combining the extensive interior and amenity desired, with the performance necessary, demanding intelligent solutions to minimise weight and maximise performance,’ Mills adds. Greater length is always more accommodating when it comes to headroom, allowing an aggressive low freeboard profile to feature a flush deck relieved only by a slight bulge over the saloon extending aft around the cockpit. This was faired fully into the deck, and was covered with unbroken teak, meaning from many
Andrew Hurst, Editor
H-Nov20-Cover hi res.qxp_Cover 07.qxd 28/09/2020 09:46 Page 2 Seahorse Issue 489 £6.50 US$8.50 Go USA! – Paul Cayard
Silver shotgun – Rob Weiland Maxi answers –Tobias Kohl The mysterious 5.5 – Simon Fry Thriving at 18 – Frank Quealey Angry bedfellows – Clare McComb
The extraordinary Imoca – François Chevalier
NOVEMBER 2020 The official
magazine of the Royal Ocean Racing Club
ISSN 0143-246X 11
9 770143 246146
ROBIN CHRISTOL
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