Stephens Waring Yacht Design

Spirit of Tradition Yachts Designed In Maine

Dreadnaught

and filed under SoT Registry

Dreadnaught, as a word, is all about “fearing nothing. ” But as a boat, she’s tells a kinder, more subtle Spirit-of-Tradition story. This 49-footer is a Jim Taylor design daysailer lovingly assembled at Brooklyn Boat Yard back in 2014. This boat is all about equilibrium. She balances a traditional, near classic, hull of just 35.1 feet of waterline with long overhangs that extend the boat’s sailing length under way, just as legendary designer William Fife might have used a century earlier. As is the way with Spirit-of-Tradition vessels, the old-school story above the water is balanced by modern technologies below. […]

WallyNano

and filed under SoT Registry

If the Spirit-of-Tradition has a Web star, it is the WallyNano. People gape at this all-modern classic, as she tacks, sails and blast reaches.  Can you blame them? For not a ton of money, just about anybody can have this 21st-century re-imagining of the Spirit-of-Tradition narrative, via Hoek Design and originally built by Nedship in Turkey. Note: An updated version is now available from Doomernik Yachts. It is pictured below. Described by critics as “painfully good-looking,” the WallyNano is so spare on deck that its sheer is interesting to the eye, both on the leeward and windward sides. Notice how […]

Rebecca

and filed under SoT Registry

Rebecca is a big beautiful, Spirit-of-Tradition girl. At nearly 140 feet (!) long overall, her fore-deck is longer than most boats. No wonder, builder Pendennis claims she is one of the largest ketches the yard has ever assembled. But what’s truly remarkable about Rebecca is how delicate she is. German Frers mined out a masterful sheer with this design, that’s long and elegant, yet surprisingly restrained for a 172-ton ship. These clean main lines open Frers to all sorts of great design choices. He minimizes the boat’s mass with a single, rather low deckhouse, that uses tumble-home to further lighten […]

Boats Now Cheaper than Homes.

and filed under Construction, Marine Engineering, Spirit of Tradition

Here’s a scoop about marine living that surprised us: Living on the water is probably a better deal than living near the water. During the past 60 days or so, our little yacht design world has invested serious time in exploring how to live on marine environments. We’ve been digging deep into costs and benefits of various marine residence concepts from floating homes to houseboats to live-aboard yachts. And one of the biggest puzzles of living on the water are the values involved: What’s a better deal? A residence on real land near the coast. Or a residence floating on […]

Dasher: The Un-revolution in Electric Boats.

and filed under Boat Nerd Tech, Construction, Design, Marine Engineering

When it comes to boats, the revolutions seem to happen when they’re not that revolutionary. Take all-electric runabouts. Our shop has spent nearly 10 years exploring electric propulsion in smaller craft. And earlier this year, the once impossible quietly happened: A major, high-quality American production boat builder began shipping an all-electric powerboat. Branded as the “world’s first all electric luxury yacht,” the svelte 28-foot Hinckley Dasher features twin 80hp inboard Torqeedo all-electric motors, BMW’s i3 waterproof lithium-ion batteries, and high capacity, dual 50-amp charging cables that can repower this boat in less than 4 hours. We’re sure that electrical pioneers, […]

On Powering Anna

and filed under Boat Nerd Tech, Construction, Design, Spirit of Tradition

Sailboats are just that: Boats that move because they have sails. So while we spend lots of our time figuring how out how slick mechanical systems operate winches and cool the air below, at the end of the day a boat like our new 66-footer Anna, just finishing up at Lyman Morse Boatbuilding, is a sailboat: Her central role is to provide her owners and crew the delightful experience of cajoling the wind into pushing or pulling all through the water — in more or less the direction the crew wants to go. Since Anna’s chief propulsive force is the […]

Spirit of Tradition Sailing Yacht

Pleione

and filed under SoT Registry

The build of Pleione is a story of how the Spirit-of-Tradition genre feeds into narratives of modern racing embodied by sailboats built to a meter rule. In this case, the all-world International Rule, started all the way back the dawn of the 20th Century. These so-called 8-Meter boats have stayed at the cutting edge of the design world ever since, innovating by keeping what’s new logic mixed with old guidelines. Designer Jim Taylor was careful to incorporate the Spirit-of-Tradition themes in Pleione from the 1930’s iterations of the International Rule: She’s long and narrow and flashes gaudy overhangs at stem […]

Petrel

and filed under SoT Registry

Petrel comes from a longstanding dream of her owner/designer, and she is a result of Spirit of Tradition attitude done at the behest of one man’s time. The hull is a sexily-engineered wood-epoxy-over-Airex core, built by Walter Greene way back in 1983. After which the owner and designer Jay Paris slowly finished off some of the rest of the boat over the next 30 years. Quality sometimes takes that long. Petrel was finally made sea-ready with a recent reboot at Lyman-Morse Boatbuilding. The result is a fast and  weatherly modern classic that works both in coastal waters and in the open […]

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