Design
The Balance 526 got the brand rolling in 2014 and they haven’t looked back
when sailing down below. It was a Balance innovation that arose from our desire to make sailing more comfortable in any sort of weather and to make short-handed sailing easier all around.’ Strong demand has led to rapid
expansion in the last few years and, according to Berman, Balance has been the fastest growing catamaran brand in the world. The St Francis yard builds three key models in the range: the 526, 580 and 620. These are highly bespoke, hand built by master craftsmen at a rate of seven boats per year. The Paarmans are content with the
scale of their operation, which wouldn’t have been easy to expand in St Francis, so to grow the brand Berman licensed the creation of a new company, Balance Catamarans Cape Town, with local shipyard owner Mark Delany as director. ‘He not only had great catamaran building skills, but the ability to build the additional 20 boats a year we required,’ Berman says. ‘To bring the price of the 442 and 482 into reach for more consumers we tooled them to be crafted more quickly, in larger volumes with less customisation,
Composite engineer Jeff Fish (left) and build director Jonathan Parman discuss a Balance 580 detail
and Mark retrofitted a massive factory space in Cape Town port to fabricate them.’ Despite the obvious differences
between the Cape Town and St Francis yards, the boats’ construction and build quality are broadly similar. ‘Every Balance catamaran is foam cored, carbon reinforced and vacuum bagged,’ Berman explains. ‘Many of our parts are infused, all our doors are custom made with carbon, all bulkheads are composite and hand laminated to the hulls, every yacht is spray finished and all of our cabinetry is custom-made with real wood veneers in foam core panels. The number of labour hours that go into a Balance catamaran far exceeds nearly all catamarans built in Europe.’ Across the entire fleet, the standard-spec boats are lighter in displacement than most other brands and owners have a wide range of options to achieve further weight reductions by increasing the amount of carbon fibre in their boat’s construction. Delany’s core management team in Cape Town has a depth of experience to
‘I knew I had to design a catamaran from the ground up’
match the Paarmans’, including second- generation multihull boatbuilders like Peter Dean from Dean Catamarans, who brings large-scale procurement expertise and heads up customer liaison, and Mark Wehrly from Matrix Yachts, whose experience from large, high-performance custom cat projects like Zingara and Akasha is now focused on delivering additional weight savings and build quality refinements in the Cape Town operation. Major improvements in small- part mouldings have been achieved, with the weight of air conditioning ducts reduced from
12kg to 2kg, for example, and sliding cabin doors from 17kg to 8kg. So what’s next for Balance Catamarans? Alongside the recently scaled-up production of the two smaller models, the big news from Cape Town is that a spectacular, fully bespoke new flagship – the Balance 750, whose features include a flybridge and a forward cockpit – is now also in build.
www.balancecatamarans.com
❑
86 SEAHORSE
ANDREA PAARMAN
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