Hello and welcome to Part Four in our series about expedition yachts.
In this part I was going to dive right into new build expedition yachts, but in talking to people
that I get comments from on The Yacht Channel and my own clients and even some of my friends in the
marine business - I think that we need to talk about the real fundamentals about why people get
onto a boat and head off over the horizon, out of sight of land, to go someplace and what it is they
plan to do. This invites a broader discussion about what the MISSION is. That mission defines
the vessel, and there are classes of vessels for different missions. And once we've had,
hopefully, a brief discussion about that this, it will frame the conversation back to
what vessels are appropriate for converting into expedition yachts. Some years ago i was
tasked with creating an 85 meter yacht design that was being done by Rolls-Royce Marine in Alesund,
Norway. At that time, Rolls-Royce Marine was designing, building and managing hundreds of
naval warships and commercial vessels all around the globe. But they had not done a yacht before;
and so we had to get down to the basics of what a yacht's mission was. So we talked
about the fact that the yacht would probably be in the marina 25 to 35 weeks of the year.
When it would go to sea, it would have probably a maximum of 16 guests on board. Twice a year,
the vessel would be expected to cross the Atlantic to transit to the Caribbean and back
and that was a 4 000 nautical mile trip. The kind of endurance that it would need would probably be
two or three weeks at the absolute maximum in terms of food supplies and waste and
fuel on board the vessel. Most of the people in the meeting came out of commercial or
military marine. Basically the group just started laughing. They were laughing because
the mission of an 85 meter yacht is so low in terms of their standards of endurance, range,
number of people on board, the kind of sea conditions that would be expected. I told them
that if there was severe weather the vessel would normally not be leaving the port,
particularly with guests or owners on board. And that in terms of doing a transatlantic,
they probably also would not undertake that in any kind of severe weather conditions.
So let me show you the sort of vessel that they were used to designing. Here i am standing on the
helipad that sits atop an offshore construction vessel that was designed by Ulstein in Norway and
built in the United States. This helipad I assume is well over a hundred feet wide. Pulling back a
little bit, you can see we're actually about 10 decks up - over 100 feet up from the water line.
This sort of vessel crosses oceans. It is DP3. It has three separate engine rooms. Any of those
can be knocked out and it's still completely functional. The crew is on board for months
at a time at sea so it has to a hospital and gyms. Not only would it have spares but there
are workshops on board to make major repairs and stay on station and get the job done. So indulge
me here, as we have a little macro discussion - You've probably seen these sorts of graphics for
airlines going all around the world. Well this is one is marine traffic and they track all the
significant sized vessels including yachts and fishing boats and tug boats all around the world.
The green ones are cargo ships. The red ones are tankers. The brown ones are fishing vessels. So
right here is where you can see the massing of the fishing fleets that are harvesting all the
fish out of the South Pacific Ocean - however, we're not going to worry about that today. You get
further down on the planet and you get around the rim of Antarctica and suddenly it thins out a lot,
even though it's summer down there. Shackleton made it on his ship Endurance about this far down
when he got trapped in the ice. So this is pretty far down. And you go over here. the
expedition yachts, the expedition cruise ships are generally going to be working this turf here. Now
the furthest south of these I just zeroed in on is a pleasure craft that was down here so you would
expect that that might be Legend or one of the really rugged expedition vessels. Let me show
you what it is. It's the 60-foot Rusarc Aurora which is registered as a whale watching boat
and they take guests down into the ice and into Antarctica. It's a steel hulled vessel, very rugged
but perhaps surprising to see a boat like that that far south and with that hull shape - should
they be caught in the ice like Endurance and Shackleton, it has a wine glass hull shape
and in fact it would pop out of the ice and survive being trapped in the ice. There may be
some other circumstances that would cause them not to survive however, let's get back on task here,
And so if you look at all the fleets in the world and see what their mission is and what
they're doing, the commercial ships are crossing oceans. And they're doing that 15 or
20 times a year - they are crossing major oceans. The yachts, on the other hand, traditionally are
going to be in the Mediterranean and on the East Coast of the United States and in the Caribbean
Europe and the
Caribbean that the yachts are passing on. If you look at the migratory patterns of large yachts,
they'll spend the summer in the Med or Northern Europe and they are probably no more than 100
kilometers... 200 kilometers between any ports. Their big passage, twice a year is down here
to sprint across the Atlantic. That's a passage just with crew on board, not with owners and guests.
Then once they hit the Caribbean you have the string of islands, so they're never very far away
from a safe port or an island or a water hookup, an electrical hookup. So the bulk of yachting
activities, even for the largest yachts, is short distance cruising and it's not what we
now consider expedition cruising or ocean voyaging. This is not to say that state-of-the-art luxury
mega yachts are not superb vessels for the mission that they were built for. They eliminate all
sorts of motion from the sea with zero speed stabilizers. They have swimming pools so that you
don't have to go and actually dip into the ocean. They have lots of large screen TVs to entertain
you day and night. They have lots of power to get you there in a hurry - if it's a short distance.
And on top of that, if you watch Below Decks - the crew also provides all kinds of entertainment.
An expedition yacht, on the other hand, clearly has a different mission.
It should be capable of making a five to ten thousand mile passage and still carry enough fuel
and supplies to endure for 30 to 60 days at sea. It will have redundant systems but also have plenty
of spares and workshops to be making repairs while on the mission. The crew will be well trained
in passage-making and taking care of their ship and not focus so much on entertaining the guests.
The larger expedition yachts will not just have a helipad but they'll have a hangar with refueling
capabilities and the capacity to bring along pilots, along with submersibles and four-wheel
drive vehicles and landing craft. These vessels also will often have moon pools and facilities for
complex diving including decompression chambers and nitrox equipped. Mega yachts are always shown
in sunny weather and calm seas, but the ocean is not always so kind and you may not have the
option of staying in the marina and watching a movie. Out here zero speed stabilizers, luxury
and sumptuousness will not be your friend. Out here you need a seaworthy ocean-tested vessel For
the last 30 years the commercial shipping industry has been building offshore vessels
that size-wise overlap the largest yachts coming out of Oceanco, Lurssen, Blohm+Voss and and Amels, to
name a few. A great number of the vessels in the commercial fleet built during this time
fulfill the mission of what we expect today in a long-range expedition yacht and I'm going to cite
a few examples and in the links below you'll be able to access some information on some of the
vessels that I'm talking about. In particular Im going to show some of the ones that were chosen
by Icon yachts in Holland, who are leading the pack in terms of shipyards that are doing exemplary
conversions. This 85-meter survey ship became Ocean Explorer. This 77-meter Russian-built icebreaker
became the yacht Giant and then was later transformed into the expedition yacht Legend.
Icon's latest conversion project is this one the Ocean Tess, which is a 63 meter Ulstein designed
anchor handler that operates in the north sea. And here's a preliminary conversion rendering from
Espen Oeino, who also did Octopus and the 600 foot REV project in Norway. So there are basically two
styles of commercial vessels that are ideal for conversion one is the OSV, which has got a large
heavy load bearing open aft deck. The bridge and all the crew accommodations are up forward. We
might look at it as the equivalent of a flatbed truck. Naval architects like it because they can
build aft of the main pilot house and construct the new guest accommodations, the helicopter hangar any
other customizations that the new owner requires for his or her mission. Another popular platform
for conversion, and you can find some of these that have ice-class are the Ulstein designed
anchor handling tugs. This particular one the UT 722, is a big sister to the UT 719 R that Icon
is currently doing. The anchor handlers tend to have more horsepower and more speed and if
they're ice class, they may have six to eight thousand horsepower, but the conversion process is
similar. You can see here that they build aft from the existing pilot house and bridge and
there's plenty of options on the configurations. Here you see it with two helipads one of them
with a hangar. So that wraps up Part Four and I hope that was useful. In part five, I will get to
these new builds of expedition yacht. I'm just going to leave with a parting shot of the Rusarc
Aurora. This is the 60-foot steel hull Russian expedition yacht and that is also
an example of the right boat for the mission. This week they were further south than any of
the large expedition yachts or the expedition special cruise ships that were plying that
trade into the Antarctica. So - congratulations to Rusarc Aurora and there's a link to them
in the notes below - so go check it out and i'll see you again in part five here on The Yacht Channel