Design
A career without end
Michael Schmidt has won ocean races, closed big brokerage deals, launched the successful Hanse Yachts brand and now he has created a new range of large yachts as esoteric as they are captivating
Pioneering carbon raceboat builder, international yachtbroker, Admiral’s Cup-winning skipper and helmsman, creator of the Hanse Yachts brand and now founding director of the award-winning YYachts shipyard… Michael Schmidt is one of the sailing world’s great all-rounders with several careers’ worth of experience packed into his five decades at the cutting edge of marine industry innovation. But why on earth did he go back to the hard graft of establishing a new shipyard when he could be enjoying a well-earned and comfortable retirement? ‘Well, a few things came together,’ he says. ‘If like me you have sailed all your life, virtually since birth and then built thousands of sailing yachts, you have a certain wealth of experience. You have an idea of how a yacht should sail, what a good interior should look like and how the technology should work. When I had time a few years ago and was looking for a boat for myself, there was nothing that came close to satisfying me. So I started to have a yacht built according to my ideas. Lorenzo Argento and Sir David Chipperfield designed the 80-footer Cool Breeze together with me.’
Schmidt’s vision created a
beautiful performance cruiser that turned heads wherever he sailed it. But how did that one-off custom build project escalate into the creation and
80 SEAHORSE
launch of a whole new shipyard? ‘That came a little later,’ he says. ‘When I sailed Cool Breeze, the yacht attracted quite a lot of attention from owners and interested prospects. So my idea of light, easy-to-sail, reduced and yet luxurious yachts seemed to appeal not only to me. Requests came in for a sister ship and I realised that this was a business. In 2016, I founded YYachts in Greifswald.’ That core concept, ‘reduced and
yet luxurious,’ became the founding principle of the YYachts brand. At a time when most of the marine industry is so strongly focused on doing the exact opposite – adding a luxury dimension to yachting by installing ever more complex and sophisticated systems – what does Schmidt mean by reduced? ‘There is this quote attributed to several famous thinkers: "I'm writing you a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one.” A yacht has to be operated intuitively, so you have to rethink and simplify a lot of details, which costs time and energy,’ he explains. A good example of
overcomplicating things, he says, is the current fashion for equipping large yachts’ galleys with induction hobs and electric fan ovens. ‘Why does electric cooking have to be used on a sailing yacht? For that I need either a shore connection or a generator. Why not cook with gas? It's safe and easy. When the gas
Above: the YYachts brand is based on a simple idea that challenges the accepted norms and conventions in the marine industry. Its yachts are large and luxurious yet at the same time as simple as possible,
stripped of all unnecessary complexity. Right: the man behind the brand, Michael Schmidt
bottle is empty, I simply replace it.’ This principle has always been popular among experienced sailors because it boosts the reliability of systems onboard. From backstay deflectors to programmable logic controllers, Schmidt takes a pragmatic and seamanlike approach born out of long experience that favours robust, reliable simplicity over the diminishing returns of adding extra functionality that isn’t strictly necessary. ‘Why do all sails have to be adjustable in so many different ways? If I'm not a racing sailor I don't need these features which are also quite fragile,’ he says. ‘Why do the electronics have to be completely networked and harbour so many potential sources of error? At YYachts, we asked ourselves these questions and many more. We avoid a high level of complexity and thus vulnerabilities and high maintenance costs. That is what I
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