Design
Too good to keep
Champion raceboat designers Carkeek Design Partners thought they were drawing a new one-off world cruising cat for an experienced yachtbuilder’s personal use. Things didn’t quite turn out that way...
Some of the best yachts are created when a raceboat builder wants to go off cruising with his family and has a boat designed for personal use. Thus it was (initially at least) for the Carkeek-designed Seaquest 46, which has exactly the right sort of pedigree. It’s built by Mike Eaton, whose highly regarded racing monohulls such as the Prima 38 and RP36 have proven themselves to be excellent all-rounders. Shaun Carkeek’s wide-ranging successes across many strands of high- performance sailing are already well-known to most…
However, instead of going off cruising himself, Eaton has put those plans on hold and put the Seaquest 46 into production. It’s the first model in a new range of catamarans, built in Dubai where his shipyard has been based for most of the last 20 years. Before he’d even started, the first two Seaquest 46s had already been sold off plan.
An Eaton-Carkeek collaboration is bound to produce an interesting, innovative and refreshingly different boat. Sure enough, the Seaquest 46 looks distinctly unlike a typical cruising cat, both above the waterline and below. It’s sleeker than most,
66 SEAHORSE
with cleverly concealed davits and no need for an unsightly gantry mounted aft. And it breaks some of the multihull industry’s basic rules, like the one that says all hulls must be fat enough to fit queen size island beds fore and aft.
The Seaquest 46 does offer queen size berths in up to four cabins, but by not having walkways on both sides of them you get hulls that are much more hydrodynamically efficient. While the volume inside the hulls is a bit smaller than average, the above-average size of the saloon more than makes up for it. As Eaton says, in this sort of boat most people spend very little time down below. Saloon size is what really matters. Another defining feature of the Seaquest 46 is that it’s designed from the outset as an all-electric boat (a diesel-electric version is also available). Both versions have enough regeneration capacity via the twin propellers at seven knots of boatspeed to be self-sustaining on passage, even when running the air conditioning and other hotel systems. There’s additional power from a huge expanse of solar panels on the roof, which has a long aft overhang to maximise the size of the solar array,
Above: It’s a cruising cat but not as we know it... The first multihull from Eaton Marine, the Carkeek designed Seaquest 46, is packed with
innovation. The curved daggerboards generate lift that allows much finer bows and high-volume stern sections
plus a small diesel generator for backup and emergency use. The silent running of the electric drives is a big boost to quality of life on board and their immense low-end torque is a real boon for manoeuvring in port. Another advantage, which isn’t so obvious, is that the propulsion system has a fixed weight so the hull design doesn’t need to allow for the large fluctuation in loaded displacement – about 800kg on a 14-metre ocean cruising cat – between full and empty tanks of fuel.
One of the boat’s stand-out features (literally when they’re raised) is the pair of gracefully curved, high-aspect daggerboards sticking up out of the deck, which will give the Seaquest 46 a much tighter tacking angle and far better upwind VMG than any cat with fixed keels. But these boards have another function too, which explains the unusual shape of the hulls. Located a little way forward of the boat’s centre of gravity, they generate dynamic lift as well as lateral resistance, raising the bows when the boat is powered up. The daggerboards’ lift allows the bows to have very fine entries
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112
