I remember the moment that Mark Cavendish,
our sales director, asked me if we could build...
a full aluminium yacht of 80 metres,
capable of doing 29 knots.
Obviously the answer is yes...
but you know as an organisation
you need to tick all the boxes...
which we can from our experience.
Most of the challenges come from building an
aluminium yacht of 80 metres.
It’s enormous.
If you look at the size and the thickness of the plate...
it’s a lot of welding to connect all the parts together.
We can’t compare it to any other yachts we have built before.
We used to build 50-55-metre boats...
we did of course the 70-metre Galactica Super Nova.
But this one is not only 10 metres longer,
it’s completely different.
There are a few highlights on the yacht.
Besides the hull construction we have for Heesen
quite a new propulsion system...
where we have four engines with two gearboxes.
A beach club with a pool has been done before...
the helideck is new...
we have a lift,
we introduced that a couple of boats ago.
The challenge with this one is that it goes
all the way up to the sun deck...
so it needs to be removable when we
bring the boat to the sea.
This week we worked on the middle and top mast...
and the weight of it was almost 4 tonnes.
It has a dimension of 7.5 times 10 metres.
That’s 5 times the size of a standard mid and top mast.
So it’s enormous.
You need a lot of longitudinal strength,
because when you are in the waves...
you need to have a safe journey.
That’s why we introduced the backbone.
That’s to increase the moment of inertia and
to insure that the stresses in the hull won’t become too big.
At the moment we are in the construction phase,
so we are assembling the hull and superstructure.
We are almost halfway in that process.
As you can see here on the aft side
we are now building section 4 and 5...
that’s the engine room and the beach club.
And we are also now connecting section 3 to it
with the guest area.
The next phase is a few months later
with the joining of the superstructure and the hull.
That’s when you see the real size of the project.
