Boatbuilding and the market

Once more into the breach!

The only way to be sure a boat is really robust and well-built enough for long-term use is to put it to long-term use – or break it trying… However the typical year for most seafarers yet to shed the shackles of the rat race amounts in total to no more than a few weeks under sail in a good year and less than a hundred hours on the engine in a bad year: most boats spend most of their time turning silent, solitary circles around a mooring buoy or staring at an empty car park in the vain hope that today, at long last, the skipper will finally put in an appearance and let them off the leash.
I wouldn’t want to put an exact figure on the number of nautical miles required to reach a verdict, but I do think considering the relative merits of different boats in long-term use is a good way of establishing the criteria that really count in practice. It is self-evident that yachts used for bluewater voyaging have to withstand far greater loads than fair-weather weekenders. Strongly tidal waters and the higher latitudes also have their challenges I concede, but we cannot penetrate to the heart of the matter without considering proper long-term offshore exposure.
A design’s ability to hold its value over time is a key indicator here: any owner whose boat is known to have come up short in the moment of truth can expect to see its resale value evaporate like sea spray on a hot day in the Canaries. Boats become permanently unsalable if the nautical community gets wind of any serious weaknesses.
Obviously the yachts we turn to as the vehicle of our sailing fantasies in generally show far more endurance than their crew. When conditions deteriorate, the great majority of sailors head straight for the nearest port, teeth clenched, without ever giving the storm sails a chance to shine. The more unpleasant memories tend to fade quickly, especially away from the water, and soon enough bad times have been reborn as great stories and it’s time to get back afloat. This, of course, is all part of the charm of our sport, but it does nothing to alter the fact that most boats are only very seldom really put to the test. While this may be good for the manufacturers (nobody likes complaints), it does increase the risk of sailors only discovering the true limitations – and absolute limits – of their vessel once it is too late to find an easy way out.
We could of course turn a blind eye to stories of trouble at sea, keep our thoughts within our comfort zone and specifically avoid learning just what can happen in extreme conditions. This approach, I would suggest, is likely to be more popular among those who have reason to fear their own judgment: it cannot be a nice feeling to buy a boat for one set of reasons and then fall out of love with it on other, far more compelling grounds.
The matter of hull strength we have already done to death and there is nothing to be gained be revisiting it. But what about keel, rudder and engine? A saildrive, for example, which leaves the crew parted from the fishes by just a few millimetres of gasket, can prove the Achilles’ heel of an otherwise robust yacht. Saildrives have insidiously worked their way aboard all kinds of designs now thanks to the fact that they are much quicker for the yards to install, but they remain a matter of concern among insurers and have proven by and large to be a retrograde step in the long run for us sailors.
Here too the new ‘solution’ fails to measure up to the older ideas it has replaced: commercial shaft drive systems always include a thrust block to pass on the thrust from the shaft, but force transmission in a saildrive system is inherently unfavourable because of the way thrust generated in the basement has to be tamed and transferred a whole level higher up in the structure. This is quite different to the situation with a conventional drive, which transmits its propulsive force to the backbone of the vessel in a straight line and, of course, enjoys a protected location tucked in at the trailing edge of the keel. The difference in terms of the work involved in installation and alignment between a conventional shaft system and a saildrive amounts to many hours – too many hours for the major production boatbuilders to ignore. For sailors, however, the case is not so clear cut: while a leaking stern tube is certainly annoying, it is nothing compared to some of the problems encountered with a saildrive.

Class association publications and resources can be an excellent point of reference when trying to assess the long-term qualities of production yachts, as they describe known weaknesses and solutions and can provide useful tips to help owners make the most of their investment (here are some links to well-known owners’ associations, some of which enjoy almost legendary status among the cognoscenti:
Contessa 26; Contessa 32; Westerly; Sadler; Hans Christian; Hurley; Moody; Island Packet; Valiant; Cape Dory; Westsail; Bristol; Cheoy Lee; Passport; Corbin; Hallberg Rassy; Najad; OVNI). Just about every reputable brand operates an Owners’ Association (albeit a few find the temptation to use it mainly as a marketing platform for new models hard to resist).
The Contessa 32 occupies a special niche in the used boat market thanks to its exceptional build quality. Take an example with a lifetime of use (30 to 40 years in many cases) already behind it, send it for a full refit with the original builder and you have a boat as good as new ready for another lifetime of adventures. Yachts like this hold their value and represent a good investment for their owners. The same cannot be said at the moment for many of the more common modern production yachts, whose resale prices are seriously compromised by the sheer volume of options available in the second-hand market. As elsewhere, market activity and prices depend on the balance of supply and demand, with excess demand pushing up prices and enabling sellers of the most coveted models to walk that little bit taller on the way to the bank. If there are more sellers than buyers (say, for example, the market becomes flooded with retired charter yachts), however, boats will only sell, if at all, at a substantial discount.

A few minutes in the company of Google and the usual portals can give a pretty good idea of the market value of used yachts (although it should not be forgotten that there can be a big gap between asking price and actual selling price and selling prices hardly ever become public knowledge). That today’s market is a difficult place even for high-quality yachts from respected yards is evident from the way so many pre-owned examples take such a long time to find a new home. The classifieds pages of leading sailing magazines contain innumerable repeat ads, with boats commonly taking several years to sell despite being advertised with good photos and plenty of detail. Brokers have no magic power to speed up the process either – in fact there is often little they can do other than add yachts to their own listings and advertisements.

And yet craft from certain yards still seem to sell with ease. Second-hand KOOPMANS yachts, for example, regularly command excellent prices – irrespective of hull material – and are commonly snapped up almost as soon as they become available. OVNI, GARCIA, BESTEVAER, VAN DE STADT, HUTTING and other aluminium yachts also often seem to change hands quickly with little fanfare at a price strong enough to spare seller’s blushes. The stand-out performer among the GRP builders meanwhile is BREEHORN, whose Koopmans-designed boats are purchased almost exclusively by private buyers and are in most cases used for long-distance and offshore sailing. Their seakeeping, construction and robustness have elevated Koopmans yachts in the European market to a position similar to that once occupied by Sparkman & Stephens.
A good reputation, which boosts resale value immeasurably, can only be earned through satisfied customers. Word of mouth recommendations are becoming increasingly important for manufacturers today: full-page glossy adverts carry little weight if the people who actually sail the boats featured are left unimpressed.

As for the special qualities of aluminium yachts, that is a subject to which I intend to return another time…

Peter Foerthmann

Few topics are as controversial among sailors as the quality of the boats we invest in to help realise our dreams of a life afloat. Obviously, choosing a boat ranks as one of the key decisions for any sailor: a choice that proves to have been a poor one can have serious and far-reaching consequences – and is by no means straightforward (or inexpensive) to rectify. Take on too much of a financial burden, leave yourself too much to learn or trust too much to your own handiwork and you could end up in trouble, especially if the press-ganged family, left at the mercy of your orders from the bridge, also has to live with your misjudgements as immortalised in composite, aluminium or steel. A wise choice right at the beginning can make all the difference in the world to the fun to be had under sail, so it seems astonishing that so many of the issues involved are so seldom properly discussed.
Polarised debates of the traditional = better/modern = worse type might be very effective at filling pages on internet forums (in the process bringing out the intransigence, entrenched positions, rapid loss of perspective and ruthless jump to character assassination that seem to have become the staple fare of this platform), but they fall well short of the level of insight required. The issues involved are more complex: expect rough seas ahead!
It is quite extraordinary that these matters receive so little consideration in the sailing press, although the fact that our press has become, willingly or unwillingly, so dependent on its advertisers might perhaps have something to do with it. Our would-be critics have simply washed their hands of the whole notion of quality, with any criticism limited to fairly trivial points such as headroom, berth length and interior furnishing. The fundamental properties of a product as a seagoing vessel are seldom even considered, let alone subjected to a rigorous comparative investigation.
The transformation of boat building from a craft into an industrial process and, in particular, the implications of this change in terms of the quality and price of the product seem to me to be fundamental issues for our sport and yet they are hardly eating up the column inches. Nothing sets the opinions flying like an open debate on then versus now, but there are a number of distinct aspects to consider if we are to do the subject justice:

– How boat building has changed from a craft into an industrial process
– Materials and their use
– Speed and seakeeping ability
– Intended and actual purpose
– Lifetime and maintenance requirements
– Marketing and its costs
– Value and resale

Clearly sailing could never have become widely accessible as a sport without the introduction of mass production in GRP. The smaller the boat, the bigger the potential market open to it and hence the more units to be sold. Optimists and Lasers have been churned out in their millions, or least hundreds of thousands, and while yachts have never shifted in these numbers, their extra features – everything from heads to an engine – make them much more interesting in terms of the value to be extracted per unit.

When yacht production first began to move onto something approaching an industrial scale, the small number of manufacturers offering boats at shows in Europe could have sold dozens of each model every time they exhibited. The Seventies and Eighties were gold rush time as sailors beat a path to the boatyard gates and demand soared. Brian Meerlow and his team in England built thousands of their Leisure yachts, for example, back when nobody worried about breathing in styrene vapour and extractors were unheard of.
Coincidentally it was to Brian that the founder of my company, John Adam, turned in 1968 in his search for something small and seaworthy to win him some respite from excessive strife on the domestic front. Armed with a Leisure 17, he headed West and eventually found himself on the beach in Cuba having fallen asleep and run aground. It was while cooling his heels in one of Castro’s prisons that he made the decision to set up Windpilot: the first vane gear had after all passed its test with flying colours (keeping watch – then as now – not being a part of its remit).

John’s story created a sensation at the time in Germany so that all the marketing professionals in the world could not have coordinated a better market launch for Leisure yachts. The brand retains a special aura to this day, with over 4000 Leisures sold and almost all of them still in existence. But I digress…

The number of people eager to get afloat was simply too high for traditional production methods and craftsmanship to cope. Consumers were no more patient then than they are now: once they felt the itch, they wanted deck beneath their feet and pronto. When it comes to impatience, children on Christmas Eve have nothing on grown men and women waiting for a new boat to arrive. The transformation in the nature of boat building precipitated by these pressures was dramatic. The process was – almost literally – turned upside down (or inside out, depending on your point of view) and ever since, boats have been built the wrong way around: today everything starts with the skin and not the bones.

Henry Ford started exploring the possibilities of assembly line production a century ago, but it would be another 60 years before boat builders first sat up and took notice.
Originally the hull of a boat was a very complex assembly: to keel and keelson, stem, sternpost, stringers, deck beams and ribs were added planks as thick as a seaman’s thumb and the whole thing was bolted, nailed and glued together, sealed, sealed and sealed again and then finally treated to several coats of paint to create a thoroughly robust and watertight structure. All of which took some time…
A finished hull of this nature came ready to sail; there was no need for extra interior structures or fittings to help spread and absorb the working loads. To keep the weight down, racing yachts often started life with nothing below but pipe berths and were only fully furnished at a later date if and when racing gave way to luxury cruising. Whether to hit the race course with a crack crew or embark family and friends and concentrate on seeing and being seen was a matter for the owner: the yachts were tough enough for both lives – in fact they still are. In those days the cost of the hull made up an eye-watering proportion of the overall price of the boat. Boat builders were craftsmen, not magicians, and bending wood takes time (although of course man hours were not at all expensive in that era).

Rationalizing hull construction was the logical way to go – and it is here that the rot set in! Once a female mould had been engineered, ready-made boat shells could be turned out one after the other like so many bread rolls in a process that suddenly no longer needed the expertise of skilled boat builders.

It is characteristic of the modern classics that although they have a GRP hull, they were still fitted out by craftspeople, that is to say skilled boat builders still had a hand – and earned a crust – in their production. Also no secret is the fact that older GRP boats tend to be considerably more solid, because stringers, bearers and wooden interior components are all laminated into the hull. The resulting structure is very stable, especially since the stringers and bearers are bonded face-on and the interior components edge-on.
Take my Hanseat boats, of which I have had three, for example. They were always perfectly quiet to sail even in a good breeze and the deck never creaked even when the summer hoards stampeded across on their way from the far end of the raft to the bar. In those days sailing boats were still seen and not heard.

Modern classics enjoy great popularity today because of the way they combine the beautiful lines and traditional craftsmanship of old with modern materials. And, at a more basic level, because of the way they allow families – even those members with a more sensitive nose – to take to the sea without the damp reek of stale air and musty socks that tends to pervade the more traditional of traditional craft.
There is more to boat building than right angles; indeed their very curvaceousness accounts for a big part of the appeal of those striking little ships whose lines alone set hearts pounding and bank accounts quaking. On a more practical level, it also makes sure that no matter how soundly you slept, you quickly remember that you are on the boat and not in the house. Rights angles really were an unusual sight in this era, which for me explains much of its charm and elegance.
The visual language of traditional design was emotional: function followed form and not vice versa. Today the mainstream marches to the beat of a different drummer, with aesthetic concept and product shaped by marketing diktats and design vocabulary serving only to ensure brand recognition and distinctiveness.
The boats of the past were undoubtedly more robust. They had a backbone and ribs, meaning they were better armed against ramming, stranding, grounding and other extreme encounters, and carried their rudder firmly mounted and safely tucked away in the sweet spot at the trailing edge of the keel. Modern yacht design specifies no such backbone. It has been spirited away to be replaced, here and there, with other structural members in much the same way that many car manufacturers have done away with any distinct chassis to leave each individual component apparently supported only by the parts around it.

Interior shells and moulded parts have increasingly driven traditional boat building out of interior construction too on the basis that separate units and components can be mass-produced rapidly and installed inside a bare hull equally quickly. Boats today are built in a modular fashion, which simplifies customizing and cuts costs. Moulded components can also incorporate rounded edges and corners at no extra cost to suggest at least a token element of design flair.
This video clip of a guided tour of a well-known yard illustrates the modern process. The commentary is in German, but the images really speak for themselves.

Today hulls are reinforced in critical areas with bulkheads, interior shells, longitudinal stringers and space frames to make sure that when the boat is lifted out, the keel comes too, that the engine doesn’t slowly make its way up the boat while motoring and that the pressure transmitted from the mast above when sailing close-hauled does not leave hapless crewmembers marooned in the heads. The most extreme designs include additional metal structures to distribute the loads.

Some would have us believe that modern boats are more solid than ever, but can we really believe that? Space has become a more compelling argument and the obvious response has been to do away with the traditional foundation of a strong hull – its frame and ribs – without putting anything obvious in its place. Sailors flock to the resulting space(ous) ships like moths to a candle, for it seems the number of berths has become the measure of all things (and has a not insignificant effect on the price). And who ever stops to consider how this wonder came to pass? Who seriously spends any time thinking about how much – if any – effective load-bearing structure there is behind that smart interior shell?
Perhaps it’s all a matter of perspective. After all, what we don’t know might not hurt us. Although … once I saw a sailing boat at one of the big boat shows that had been sliced in half longitudinally and I couldn’t help noticing just how little substance there would be between the sailor asleep in a bunk of a heeling yacht and the fish swimming past outside. Did that strike a chord with anyone else?

It is no secret that mast, rigging, sails, engine, keel and rudder pull and push the boat in different directions and that hydraulic systems can put a bend in the hull as well as the mast. Only a stiff hull can endure such loads in the long term; once flexing sets in, serious problems are sure to follow. Signs of fatigue on the hull, keel and rudder, soon our constant companions, auger well for the repair and restoration business.

Everyone understands that the half-life of a new stripped-out racing machine is short, that at some none-too-distant point in the future that once proud and resolute bow will begin to acquiesce a little as the sea builds. Life is a compromise – and when it comes to rig tension, it can be a fine line between just right and ever so slightly too much.
We should also note that thanks to cheap materials and labour – and the fact that in those days nobody realised just how thin they could go – laminated hulls on older boats and those built in the Far East are often extremely thick.

Today it’s a different story altogether!

The greatest secret in the increasing industrialization of modern boat building is probably the sharp reduction in production times and concomitant increase in value added. Or, to put it another way, why do international investors and the pin-striped locusts suddenly have yacht manufacturers in their sights?

I know of one sailor who, out of love for his wife and in preparation for the big retirement cruise, decided to swap his dark cavern of a steel yacht for a new – and much brighter – alternative. Keen to be, as it were, in the delivery room to witness the arrival of his new home from home, he cheerfully turned up one Monday morning at the yard appointed to realise his dreams expecting to witness the final stages of fitting out. What he saw instead was a bare hull that, like him, had only just come into the building. He was astonished – and never more so than when the finished boat was handed over right on time just a few days later.
I have seen similar myself in Les Sables d’Olonnes: the project concerned, an imposing new catamaran, was just a week away from delivery and yet there it stood in the middle of the hall, deckless, looking more like a building site than a boat.
Neither I, nor the owner and his wife sitting at home in Bavaria with their sea bags packed and poised, could believe everything would be ready on schedule. But it was – no sweat!

I always seem to end up comparing money invested in yachts with money spent on property (albeit houses too have their weaknesses with the wind on the nose). In Germany, a new family house in a pleasant setting costs in the region of €200,000 and represents thousands of man hours at a moderate level of value added for all of the companies involved. A production GRP yacht costing a similar amount takes a fraction of the time to create – and is then very often compared in price terms to boats whose construction involves a much larger element of craftsmanship.
It is hardly surprising then that terms like “quality yacht” always seem to be applied to more expensive vessels. Obviously, one-offs assembled by craftspeople are going to consume more money in the shed.

It may be interesting – perhaps shocking – to reflect a little on the hours of work that go into producing a finished yacht. The conclusions in terms of the inherent value of any given boat soon become perfectly clear: you do indeed get what you pay for (in more ways than one). It can also be interesting to look at the second-hand market and see how perceptions of quality and value change once long-term use has had a chance to expose weaknesses not apparent on the boat show floor. True quality reveals itself only in long-term use and it is no surprise the sailor’s brain spends a long time quietly accumulating information before eventually coming to a judgment for or against a particular brand.

We are honoured almost every week with the launch of some or other new boat, just about all of them production GRP designs. This speaks of serious rationalization on a scale unknown – perhaps even inconceivable – to ordinary sailors. In fact producers have found ways to rationalize their business in all kinds of areas:

– in design, which is entrusted to powerful computers running sophisticated software,
– in mould making, in which robotic systems capable of five-axis CNC machining do all the work without human involvement (with no lunch break and no desire to go home at night),
– in the construction of the bare hull, which is produced using prepreg materials and vacuum bagging,
– with interior shells, which make it possible to reinforce and partition the hull simultaneously,
– with interior fixtures, which are produced as modules on a separate line and can then be installed into boats as required,
– in the production of the deck, which has the fittings installed prior to being dropped onto the fitted-out hull to seal the finished yacht like the lid on a jar.

That such rapid changes of model are even possible is, without exception, down to the enormous rationalization and acceleration of all processes. Even small production runs can be profitable now. Nevertheless even the biggest yards with global marketing and a lively charter supply business still achieve only modest output when compared with the producers of other high-priced goods, which probably explains the breathless pace of competition: production yachts have to be introduced, promoted and phased out again faster than cars just to keep up the pressure on the other big players in the market. A design lasts just a few hundred units before the focus moves on and the next contender sets sail. In a saturated market, however, there is only limited scope to keep sales volumes rising. We do not (yet) have a scrappage programme for old yachts!
Building a metal yacht remains a time-consuming business and the preserve mainly of one-offs. A high-quality 45-foot custom boat in aluminium might take around 5000 hours to build; a GRP equivalent of the same size would almost certainly be ready to hit the water in a fraction of this time. The GRP version would surely be significantly cheaper too, so it wins hands down – unless, perhaps, other factors like seaworthiness, safety, reliability, suitability for bluewater sailing, performance in use, value-holding ability and ease of resale also come into the equation. But that is a discussion for another time.

Peter Förthmann