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
66 SEAHORSE
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
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