Technology
Sleek and purposeful
Not so long ago the idea of employing composite rigging on an 81-metre world girdling schooner would have earned you a medical referral. Today it’s the obvious choice, even for Royal Huisman’s biggest sailing vessel
Solid carbon rigging for an 81-metre three-masted Panamax schooner? No problem at all. When Royal Huisman built the world’s largest aluminium- hulled sailing yacht – the Dykstra- designed Sea Eagle II, delivered in July – the standing rigging was custom made by Carbo-Link. Sea Eagle II is one of the 10 largest sailing yachts in the world and the largest vessel Huisman has ever built. The 90-metre Athena is a bit longer if you count her bowsprit, but in terms of gross tonnage – which for superyachts is the measurement that really counts – the 1,150GT Sea Eagle II is in a different league. Before the build could start, Huisman first had to extend its biggest shed. The project began back in 2016 when the Taiwanese businessman and philanthropist Dr Samuel Yin commissioned Huisman to build his ideal world cruising yacht. A lifelong sailor with a lot of offshore voyaging experience, Dr Yin already had a Royal Huisman superyacht – the 43-metre cruiser-racer Sea Eagle – when he decided to build something truly exceptional. The design brief for Sea Eagle II contained plenty of pragmatism amongst the superlatives. The owner’s priorities were eminently sensible: low maintenance, functionality and safety. The exterior design and styling – a collaboration
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between Dykstra and Mark Whiteley – is sleek and purposeful, yet sensibly understated, resolutely modern but destined to become a classic. The same philosophy extends to
the rig. Sea Eagle II carries a mighty 3,500 square metres of upwind canvas split between seven sails: three fully battened mainsails with generous amounts of roach, two staysails, a yankee and a blade jib. It's a practical configuration for a vessel of this size, giving a 60-metre air draught that allows her to slip beneath the Bridge Of The Americas at the western end of the Panama Canal and circumnavigate the world in warm weather while similar-sized sloop-rigged yachts are obliged to lower their masts or make an 8,000- mile detour. The choice of a schooner rig might be informed by practical considerations but it still produces enough power to achieve more than 20kts on passage.
The carbon masts, roller-furling booms and deck hardware, including 34 winches with working loads of up to 18 tons, were built by Royal Huisman’s sister company Rondal and designed as a fully integrated sailing system with the emphasis on simple, effective sail control for the crew of 13. A stand-out innovation of Sea Eagle II’s rig is a hydraulic crow’s nest on the mainmast, which guests can ascend to enjoy an amazing view.
Above: Sea Eagle II is one of the 10 largest sailing yachts ever built and the biggest one yet from the Royal Huisman shipyard. With up to eight sails on three masts, a very wide range of sailing load cases had to be modelled in the design process
Doyle supplied the sails and worked closely with Rondal, Dykstra and others to ensure optimum fluid and structural interaction between all three masts across an extensive variety of sailing load cases – a complex task given this yacht’s ability to set any combination of up to eight different sails, fully hoisted or partially furled, on her three masts at any time.
Carbo-Link supplied a bespoke CL Solid: Round rigging package including two forestays, three sets of continuous lateral rigging and two triatics. The backstays were supplied in Kevlar at the client’s request. ‘The rigging for Sea Eagle II’s foremast is among the largest continuous lateral yacht rigging solutions we have built with cable diameters up to 55mm,’ says James Wilkinson, business development manager at Carbo-Link. ‘But that’s still a relatively small cable cross-section given the stiffness requirements.’ Indeed, the design engineers had specified stiffness of up to 435MN and working loads of up to 125 tons. ‘That’s more than enough load capacity to easily carry 10 double decker buses, or a blue whale!’ Wilkinson explains.
An important part of continuous rigging at this size is the vertical/ diagonal intersection. Titanium spreader bends are fully integrated
TOMVANOOSSANEN
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