27. Designing the Boat You Want to Sail: Steve Dashew on Becoming a Yacht Designer

How do you become a yacht designer when your starting point isn't a drawing board, but thousands of miles at sea?

In this chapter of the Dashew Talking Books, Sue Grant sits down with Steve Dashew to explore how decades of sailing, cruising, building and maintaining boats shaped an entirely different approach to yacht design.

The story begins long before the FPBs, with Steve and Linda Dashew's early high-performance multihulls and their move aboard the 50-foot Intermezzo. Going from fast cats to a conventional cruising yacht proved frustrating, but it also provided an education that would influence everything Steve designed afterwards.

Experiences offshore reinforced one lesson in particular: performance wasn't simply about going faster. It could be an important part of safety. Steve recalls difficult passages, navigating by dead reckoning, close encounters with reefs and the realisation that reducing passage times could dramatically reduce exposure to weather, navigational uncertainty and risk. 

Those experiences led to a deceptively simple question: what would we do differently next time?

Steve explains how conversations between cruising sailors gradually developed into ideas for a new generation of offshore yachts. Materials, hull shape, engine rooms, ground tackle, refrigeration, maintenance and accessibility all became part of the same problem. As Steve puts it, when designing a yacht, "everything is related, and nothing is for free." 

The conversation follows the evolution of that thinking through the early Deerfoot yachts, collaborations with designers and shipyards, and eventually the arrival of computer-aided design. Technology allowed Steve to take greater control of the process, not only drawing hull shapes but considering virtually every component, system, plumbing run and maintenance requirement before construction began.

That attention to detail came from living with the boats. Equipment had to be accessible. Systems had to be repairable at sea. Structures had to survive the realities of offshore cruising. Even decisions that seemed excessive at the time, oversized anchors, additional access or apparently unnecessary conduits, were based on situations Steve and Linda had experienced themselves.

Eventually, the same philosophy would lead from the Deerfoot sailing yachts to Wind Horse and the FPB series.

This episode is the story of how Steve Dashew became a yacht designer, but more importantly, it's an exploration of why his boats were designed the way they were: not around convention, fashion or what had always been done, but around the realities of crossing oceans, maintaining a yacht far from home and keeping the people aboard safe.

As Steve explains, "The way that you get trained in how to make the right decisions is by living with your product."

Host: Sue Grant
Guest: Steve Dashew

About This Series

The Dashew Talking Books is a special podcast series exploring the life, experiences and ideas of Steve Dashew. Across these conversations, Steve reflects on decades of innovation, offshore cruising, yacht design, business, adventure and the many unexpected stories that shaped his remarkable career.

To explore more of Steve and Linda Dashew's work, visit SetSail for articles, owner stories and technical resources.

You can also watch more conversations and videos on the Dashew Offshore YouTube channel, and explore FPB Motor Yachts at Berthon International to learn more about the cruising yachts that grew from Steve's pioneering design philosophy.

To explore more of Steve's writing, technical articles and cruising knowledge, visit:

SetSail:
SetSail.com

Dashew Offshore YouTube Channel:
YouTube

To learn more about FPB Motor Yachts:

Berthon FPB Motor Yachts:
FPB Motor Yachts

Steve Dashew - Dashew Offshore
Iconic yacht designer and one of the true legends of modern ocean cruising.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Steve Dashew - Dashew Offshore
Iconic yacht designer and one of the true legends of modern ocean cruising.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to a series of chat podcasts featuring the designs, experiences, stories about cruising, business and lots of other subjects that are all to do with Dashu offshore, Steve and Linda Dashew. We thought it would be fun, Steve and I, to spend some time going through some of the milestones and we're going to dash backwards and forwards in time. And these books will be called the Dashu Talking Books. They will come in chapters and they will be available for you to enjoy, we hope.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Yes, it sounds like it'd be fun. Not many things I would do enjoy more than to talk about boats.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

There's going to be no schedule and we're going to uh put these uh podcasts, these chapters out, as and when we think of them, and I hope that you will join us. Hi everybody, uh this is uh Steve Dashu and uh Sue Grant uh with uh um a new chapter for the uh Dashew Talking Book. And this time we are going to talk about becoming a yacht designer. We were going to talk about shipyards, but we realized that there was a big gap in between, and there are quite a few chapters here. So uh we thought we'd start at the beginning with um Steve and Linda coming back um having sailed um a long way on Interlude and uh deciding that uh uh they wanted to go a bit faster. So, Steve, can you take it up from there?

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Uh yeah, it's um first of all, it's intermeso.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Intermeso.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Yeah, uh so we had had originally done a uh 38-foot cat as a model of a 60-footer, and um that was kind of our thinking. We were used to going fast and couldn't get our head around the idea of going as slow as you go on a lead by them. Uh, and then we realized we did not understand really very much about cruising, we knew a lot about racing boats and flying the home, that sort of thing. But we needed to get some experience in it. We didn't really have the time to do that, and so uh we found a a deal of the century. Um, somebody that had a seller that had a cash call on Monday, and we were in a position to buy the boat, and we we um ended up with a a boat which we sold after almost circumnavigating on our for two and a half times what we paid for. So that that was the incentive to go. And we took a three-week cruise uh down to uh Mexico just to kind of check things out over the winter time, and coming back, I'm thinking this is terrible. We're going six and a half or seven knots, we should be going 20, we're gonna come back, sell this turkey, and build a proper cruising yacht. And we were anchored off Cedros Island, uh, which is a large island offshore of Baja California, and um it was one of those nights where the lights are twinkling and clear, and and I knew enough about weather at that point that no, we had to keep our eyes open. And there were four or five uh Mexican trawlers anchored about a mile north of us and waiting to go out for the evening. And um, when they went out and came back, I thought, what's going on? And so uh about an hour later it was starting to get a swell, uh wrapping into the anchorage, and and we can't have this. So we picked up the hook and go the night, started up the coast under power, and nothing. Well, okay, that's still we'll go back and re-anchor. So we went back and re-anchored. About an hour after that, it's blown 50 knots in the anchorage. And what it this was called a Santa Ana condition, uh, where you get high pressure inland and it pumps out of the valleys, and um it was really honking, and so um we we're at the north end of the north end of Cedros Island, which it's all uh barren, uh no no anchorages, no protection uh from the east. And so we ran off down the uh down the the island, and at the bottom of the island is a huge bay called Bahia Sur, which would be perfectly protected in these conditions. But we were trying down, and and uh we had uh third three reefs in the main, the deepest reef, and a storm stesal up. And we're going along, and I'm thinking, um, okay, if we were in the cap, you know, we would be just going faster, no big deal. And at the bottom of the island, the island was shaped so it was a wind acceleration zone. I knew that was the case, and so I had Linda um put the kids and get herself into the uh pilot burst, pilot birth of midships, put the leeboards up so if anything happened, everybody, everybody safe in their bugs. We put the washboards in the car, in the and I'm sitting there thinking, no problem with the camera. And we went around the island, went from about 50 to I don't know what, 80, 90, 100 knots, knocked us flat instantly, just boom, spreadered in the water. Literally spreaders in the water. And so we're on a lead mine, no big deal. You know, boat has good stability curve. Came back up, and that was the end of thinking about catamaran. Because had had we capsized, we would have all been dead quickly, because it that was the days before you know there were there weren't such a thing as emergency beacons, and and we would have been even if we'd gotten into a dinghy life rack, we would you know, we we would have been towed quickly. So um we came back from that, and after at that point, we were probably one of the most experienced multi-hull sailors in the in the in the on the planet, and uh a lot of time with um all of our boats we sailed on one hull. We even trap pee sometimes to lower, get the weather hull up because it was so much faster. Um and this 38-foot um machine that we built as a model weighed a ton full up in full cruising gear. And she was designed to fly a hull in eight knots through wind speed. Um and you never you never she just had a big mane and headsholds were used off the wind. You never cleated anything. I mean, you always always had a sheet in your hand or a traveler control in your hand. And we used to take the kids to occasionally to Catalina Island, which is a 19-20-mile trip, it's open ocean. You're flying a hull the whole way. Um we didn't I didn't think anything about it. Today, I think we were crazy. But um that's sort of the the position we came from performance-wise, and we didn't consider that a major risk. Uh Lise and Sarah were three, three and six, I think it was three and six, when we started cruising on on um Beowulf number six. And um, and they were four and seven, I think, when we ended up going on on Intermezzo. Um, so the safety of everybody involved was was really the driving factor in. Um we knew so little about cruising. I mean, I I had grown up on round boats. Well, my family got to California on a 76-foot John Alden schooner via the St. Lawrence River. What was she called? And uh which before the uh Constellation. Constellation, right. She my dad, my my dad bought her from uh from I think it was from the Navy. Well, I mean no, it was from an individual buyer who had purchased her. She was part of the of the patrol fleet that looked for German submarines during World War II. And I think he I think he paid $7,000 for her. And she was she was a traditional John Alden um schooner. She was very quick in light airs, very quick in a breeze, uh easily handled for boats in that era. Uh, but she drew 10 feet and she had a hundred stat uh a controllable uh feathering propeller.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

A hundred-stat, right, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

That uh didn't always work the did did not always work the way it was supposed to, and um it was a it we had four people uh in the crew at all times, because she's a handful to sail. Um and that was sort of that's my mother figure, the constellation. I love that boat. And one of the cool things that when we were cruising, when we first got to Morea, um about a day after we anchored uh uh down in the south uh part of the island, uh in comes the constellation and anchors not too far away. So I was able to take the kids on board to show them where my cabin was, uh, which is off off the galley, and it was that was really great fun.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Um So you bought this slow cruising boat, didn't you, to run away to sea?

SPEAKER_00 8:35

As adults, yes. Um actually the way it's really a strange way that happens, too. I I we had only made the decision uh a few weeks before to to sell the business and and get on with life. And um um I let the business get too big. Um there's some benefits to that, but there are also a lot of negatives. And I I'm I'm I wasn't and I I was never never a good manager and and never enjoyed the management part of the business. I enjoyed the building part. Anyway, the um I was flying back from early from a meeting in Washington, D.C. And I got to the house, and there was a new Sea magazine, which at that time was a the big rag on the West Coast, and in it there was an ad for a particular type of boat, and I called and it was not anywhere near what was advertised. But the broker said, I've I got a deal for you, and described Internet Somewhere. This was a boat that was the second boat, it was a second 50-foot y'all. The fellow who she was built for was like one of the factory racing team owners, which they had in those days, and um and uh she had been built speci F this was the second Billship Columbia 50 that he had owned, and it was really interesting comparing the first and the second boats because everything was bigger, taller, heavier on the second boat. Um and he the boat they did they did no work on the boat if he wasn't in the factory. So she was pretty well detailed. Uh and when we looked at the boat, uh the owner came out and he said, What do you think? I said, Well, she's a lovely yacht. She was sitting behind a um a house on Linda Isle in the most expensive real estate in the United States at that point. Um, and she was exquisite and almost foreign deck, which actually had to come off of. Um, and we said, She's a wonderful looking boat, but but we can't afford it, it's not in our budget price range. He said, What can you afford? I said, I don't want I don't want to embarrass you and embarrass ourselves. I need I need to sell the boat. I need cash uh Tuesday, Monday. And so we said $43,000. I thought after thinking about it for a few minutes. Um that was that was the money we had had set aside to buy something like a 40-footer, like an Ingrid 40, the double-ended good cruising boat those days. Um he said, if you can have the money here Monday, she's yours. Um so I said, Well, I want to survey the boat, I'll survey her myself, and I'll have I'll have you a check as once I have two hours with a boat outside the uh when she's hauled out. So we hauled her out Monday morning and and uh hit Newport Harbor Shipyard and and um took a good look at it. She'd been raced hard, and it turned out that a friend of mine, Swede Johnson, who was the head sailmaker at Baxter and Cicero, uh, Swede had helped design the rig and designed all the sails and had raced on her. So he knew she'd been pushed hard. And we, you know, I looked at all the bulkheads and everything taped in place and and uh she was well built. So uh it was it was a no-brainer for us, and uh we were just we were fortunate. And we ended up selling um she had 24 bags of sales. We sold about two-thirds of the inventory, and we didn't have use for it. Um and and she had some electronics and all that stuff went. Um and there we were sitting with a 50-foot lead mine with a 34-foot water line. Stupid design.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

So so then you took her off, and then you started to think you needed a faster boat, having been cruising.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

Yeah, yes. So one the one of the things I should relate is that when we looked at her, she looked so big to us. I mean, you know, we were we were we were coming from uh brightweight, high-performance catamarans, and it was this massive 50-foot boat, which when we looked at her a few years later, we thought, how could we call it short on that tiny little thing? But um and John Luminier, who was then the West Coast editor of Yachting Magazine and was a good friend of ours, uh, John is kind of helping us look at the boat and think about it. And if John hadn't been there, I we would not have pulled the trigger. Well, we would not have had the nerve to do that. And I said, John, how can the two of us handle this huge boat? He said, Don't worry about it. The worst worst will happen is you'll sail around the world with a double reef main and a storm stasel, and you'll still be faster than the boat you're gonna buy, and you've got the boat speed potential. And of course he was right, and so um a few years later we're we've upped the game a little bit in terms of power and sail area, what have you. Um but she was she was she was what I would call a leaner. She was uh an R O R O R C waterline rule type of design, long overhangs, very graceful look at, uh pig to steer because she developed development with her helm. Her lines were unbalanced, which not unusual for that period. Um and uh it was all the bad characteristics of that design era. I mean, some people fondly remember it because of the aesthetics, but I I can tell you, having pushed that boat for many thousands of miles in many adverse conditions, it was it was not not anybody's choice if they were knew what they were doing. Uh we would have bought a Cal 48 at the time, which is totally the opposite of the design spectrum, but it was three times the money, which we didn't have.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

Okay, so we've done that. There are other chapters for that, and so we're looking at design, so we're looking at you coming back and thinking about the next boat.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

So we started thinking about the next boat the minute we had the we we we had uh intermezzo under command because we're running into all these things that are that are not right and that just don't work properly. Yeah, um and when you start cruising, you know, the the weather has you know pushed you into into like fleets and you there there's certain herds that go from place to place to place more or less together because they sort of arrive together and they go in the next weather window, etc. And when you get together, what all the guys talk about is the next boat or what they're gonna do to repair their boat. And so I uh being sort of interested in you know, actual exercise of that nature, uh, we and several of our good friends we made, we just sat around, we were just uh bullshitting our way through what we do the next time, and how about this, what about that, and what about steel, what about aluminum, what about fiberglass, you know, where you put the engine room, how big an engine do you have, what kind of ground tackle, what kind of refrigeration, do you have air conditioning, awnings, etc. And and we were we were we we were all going from a a a base of no knowledge to a very hard learning curve. And and that that was kind of the base of the way we were putting our our our uh our heads together coming up with a theoretical spec for this pie in the sky boat.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

But wasn't the most important thing the number of miles run? Again, getting to two wasn't the important thing getting to 200 miles in 24 hours?

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Uh we did four or five 200 mile days in on intermezzo, and um we really paid for that. I mean we it was it was pushing the boat. We pushed our boat harder than anyway, because we enjoyed doing that, but um to get 200 miles out of her, you you had to you had to really work and it was not comfortable on board. 185 was the easy limit. But we all we I had no idea how how important speed was to safety because in those days we didn't we we we had we navigated uh by dead reckoning and with a sexcent, that was it. And maybe maybe Q-boats had radar, which is good in some situations. Um and if if you you you take off on a passage and all of a sudden it's overcast, um you're you're you're guessing on DR dead reckoning for where you are, and we've had some very close calls uh as a result of that, um, all of which we survived, but um it gave us a very healthy uh uh respect for anything that would improve that situation. And if you're if you're cruising at seven and a half knots, let's say down one of the trades, and you're on a passage for 40 hours, like from Tonga to Fiji, spreading away from the reefs, that's one thing. If you're going 11 or 12 knots and you're only on a passage for 30, 30 or 28 hours, your risk factors are are reduced enormously because you have less time for the current to throw you off, of course. Um we we came we came as close to losing a boat as you could come, and probably losing our lives with it. With we were our uh we waited on the passage from from Tonga to Fiji is very difficult because you're not you weren't allowed to stop in the outer islands in those days in Fiji. So you had to go through these riffs, you had to just pick what reefs you want to thread your way through in the dark, but there was no way around that. And we we were sailing in company with an Australian yacht that was somewhere behind us that had some kids on board, so we hung out together. And um we I hadn't had a sight for a day, and we left with clear, it was full moon, uh, clear sky, and half a dozen hours uh after we left, overcast comes in, and we did not have a clear sky again until we got to Suba, Fiji. Um the second night, uh I of course I had sex on the on the uh cock seat next to me and and uh and because at the moon we sometimes you can see the lower limit just popping through the clouds at night. And here comes the I thought I uh you know I I I I thought I got a a a good sight, which you know, the big sea running and blown blowing 25, 30 knots dead behind us. And I wasn't really sure, but I had Linda come up, uh take the watch down below, work the site. Site showed me about 80 miles north of where we've our dead reckoning track, which I didn't really believe, but I called Brian, uh our Australian friend behind us on the on Ham Radio, and just told him what I'd got and I said, we're gonna keep keep our eyes open more carefully. And about half an hour later, we come up on a wave and there's a white line ahead of us. And it's like, what? Um and when we were in Tonga, we had just taken the four guy on the on the spinnaker pole and the and the the the at the uh preventer on the main boom and taken them to cleats which I lashed to the belt to uh turning blocks, which I lash lashed to the the the bell cleats and brought them back to cockpit so we could adjust them without going forward. So I saw the the white line uh it startled me for a moment, and then we came up another way with the white line, the question what it was, breakers. And uh we jibed, we we had uh she had a uh running back safe, and I just jibed all standing and we should we're on the uh on the wind vane at that time. Um main boom came across, the the main boom hit the running back say, and that drove us into the wind. Okay, well anyway, uh the that's where the speed comes in. Um anyway, by the by the time we we got to New Zealand, um one out of ten boats that we that we went across the Pacific with didn't make it because of encounters with reef. Um that was a real mind open eye opener. And uh uh one of the attractions to New Zealand was the fact that we apparently could but you theoretically could buy a uh uh a uh Hershoff 57 hull, um uh like Circe, probably one of the prettiest yachts ever been designed, uh, for $14,000 and fitted out in New Zealand where the US dollar was really strong. Um that turned out to be true, but it was a terrible, they made an awful mess out of the extent that made freeboard to the boat. So we ski we s we kissed that off and and we were just sort of hanging out, and then we had a large maintenance project to do to get the some construction projects we wanted to do with a boat before we took her across the Indian Ocean. And we took her up to Salthouse Brothers up the uh the creek and met and watched the yard operation. And it wasn't long before we got to thinking, well, maybe we should think about doing a boat. And but we hadn't talked to anybody. And then the the thing that really pushed us was there was a a New Zealand home-built home designed yacht called Innesmara. She was 60 feet long, roughly, 10 feet wide, had a trunk cabin up maybe a couple of feet of freeboard, um, and she just this long, lean, balanced off rocket. And we got to know the owner, Bernie Bernie Schmidt, I think. And he invited us to go sailing, the whole family one day. And we're out there with a main and a club uh club foot stasel up, and we're going ten knots down the harbor, and it couldn't be more than ten or twelve knots of breeze. And I I started thinking, boy, if we added a floor to a beam to this and a little bit of freeboard and got rid of the trunk cabinet, this would be radical. And that's what got me thinking. Um I should backtrack to say that when we when we um got were serious about about getting a cruising boat and and going off, I had met Bill Lee, who was one of the pioneers of ULB uh yachts, and and um yeah, he was he was had a Santa Cruz 27 in the Long Beach boat show. And I got the chatting with him and I ended up uh having Bill do a preliminary design on a on a a 60 some foot by 10 or 12 foot wide um cruising boat. Um we quickly realized that there were way too many questions to answer, and and we didn't know the questions to ask, how to fit the boat out and where the trade offs were, etc. So we passed on the opportunity of building with Bill. That boat became early. Eventually, and uh which was a record breaking. What what did she become? She was her name? Merlin. Merlin. As in Merlin the Magician, yeah. She was the I think I think the first Trans pact, she blew the doors off the race record. Anyway, so we're in New Zealand, we've gone sailing on Innesmara, and that it the sail on Innesmara what really got my juices flowing. I could just see it happening. And so we talked to uh John Salthouse about, you know, we just worked them through some budget numbers, and it looked like a really attractive thing to do. So uh I talked to my dad, who was at the time looking for a boat, and and a good friend of ours, uh Jim and Cheryl Schmidt, uh, who were we we met in the Marquesas and more or less cruised together. They liked playing with their kids, and they had a dog and a cat on board. Our kids loved playing with them and their and their dog and cat. And Jim was coming, Jim was coming from a a really interesting Sparkman's and Stevens 70-foot motor sailor with a double-ender. It was really an interesting design. Big Jimmy 671 Diesel and um flush that except for a very small raised pilot house on from the deck up. Um interesting looking, and she couldn't get out rolling away with a huge big fixed propeller. We we we regularly beat her on all of our passages, unless it unless they used their their 671 Jimmy Diesel, which was way quicker than we were under power. Um so Jim was really interested. So we we were coming up, and the the mix of people ended up agreeing to build this boat with my dad, who had his many years of experience in in uh in lead mines, you know, both consolation and Cherokee was the next boat we had, which was a 60-foot John Hogan uh catch, uh, which my dad bought out of a out of an estate. Um, and then and then and Jim and Cheryl who were who had small boat experience, and then they had they had taken uh Winson, this the 670-foot uh double ender, uh in lieu of a debt that was owed to them. She was sitting on the bottom of Nassau Harbor, and nobody thought she was worth anything. And and Jim and his brother raised the boat, they were divers with with with uh airbags, and found that there was a through home fitting that had failed, and got the boat pumped out and got it to Georgia running on that on the Jimmy diesel. So um, and they they had they had then stripped it and outfitted it as as needed, because she had been in the water about a month or two. And so he was coming from a three-eighths, 10 millimeter thick cord and steel hull. And um, and we all had great respect for reefs, etc. So that the first thing it drove was we we wanted bulletproof boats. And we started out in in fiberglass because that seemed like the material of choice. And the the boat, the wackerow, which is the boat we built for Jimmy Cheryl, was a flush deck version of uh of the the um of Deerfoot, which was the boat we built for my dad. Uh my dad's boat was a was a kind of traditional trunk cabin boat. Um so she had a different look and a different arrangement. Um I much preferred Wacaroa. I thought she had a much cleaner cruising boat, but anyway, the the uh the it Jim's influence was heavy in that boat, and of course he was in the yard most of the time when she was built. So that was kind of the beginning of everything, and we learned a lot of lessons on on uh on her.

SPEAKER_02 25:25

Didn't you go to Europe for some yacht supervision uh contract and meet?

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Yeah, that was that was afterwards. Right. So when um when um when we got back to Fort Lauderdale, uh, well this intermediate step. Um so we we got this project going in New Zealand and we were we were going to get the this third vote and we had had sorted out all the specification details when it was time to leave. And so we said, well, we'll call you from Australia and we'll sort it out then. And so we got to Australia and there was a general communication union workers' strike, no communications. And so, okay, we'll we'll we'll call from Bally, no communication with Bally, we'll come at Christmas and we'll so we go across the Indian Ocean and we're in in um Mauritius and we met Eve Betchwell, who was running the Taylor Smith shipyard, which had been uh good dated back several centuries. It had been a prize of war when to meet them whether the French or the English held the island and had original graving docks. They used to bring the bring the big ships of line haul on it, etc. So I I had I had some a spreader base that needed to be welded. And Eve said, well come on, come with me, I'll take you to the ship, take you into the welding shop and we'll get welded for you. So we're walking through his boatyard and this big shipyard, and I see them well that they're building a steel tongue and building a steel barge. And I said, Eve, what would it cost to do a uh like a 60-65-foot steel hardshine design? And he he's a he was a sailor, so he sort of knew what I was thinking about. And and he he gave him a number off the top of his head. I said, let me let me let me make some sketches. So I went back to the boat and very roughly drew up uh a 65-foot version of what we had uh decided to build in in fiberglass. And the number came back, it was astonishing. So I said, okay, we'll we'll we'll have you build a hull. And then they didn't really have the capability of fitting it out the way we wanted, so we'll put the rig in it, we'll sail it back to New Zealand, fit it out in New Zealand. Um he said, well, that's only a great plan, but you can buy the steel cheaper in South Africa because that's where raw materials come from. Okay, well, we'll check that out. So that led us to um a meeting with uh uh uh the the the step back a moment. So when we were in South Africa, as you can normally do when you're cruising, we met some of the locals, one of whom was an accountant, and we were talking about various things, and and said we were thinking about building a boat there, at least investigating it. Did he have any any yards he knew about? And he said, well, what you should do first is get permission, get a um a permit to start a business for export. In which case, if if you get that, the the the South African, uh Central South African Reserve Bank will allow you to buy uh financial land, which is a discounted currency. And in so doing it, you get a big discount on what you're buying. So we how do you do that? Well, a lot of this paperwork and Senate appeal, and so we did that and we got approval. It stunned us. Anyway, so we we got this really good deal to build yachts in in South Africa, which is actually the base of their the people that worked with us, some of the people formed the base of the the industry that came along the after track. So that worked out really well. We we're back in Fort Lauderdale now, and and um uh I I had I I was on a five-year non-compete from selling our business, and so we were did it we were looking around for something to do, and one of the people we had met was having a boat built in Europe and showed me what he was doing, and it was it was silly mistakes that a neo a neo fight would make. And so I said, Well, this is this. They said, Well, would you help us? I said, Well, I I don't do that. Well, anyway, they m they made it made made me an offer that was worthwhile taking our time, and so I got on the airplane and flew with him to to uh Denmark, and I met um uh Paul Elmstrom's design partners, uh Jan Kiroff and and uh um Of Rogerberg, who were doing the the the the design work um for him. And while we were there, I said, Well there I asked uh Paul and Sven, have you got any other good builders that uh we could talk to just to see what what they can do? Cost point uh. And they said we've got this this new builder in in uh in Nikarla B, um Finland, and uh which is way up north and and um the the this couple that they were they were one of the five people that left Swan to to uh start Baltic. And when they this is their own business that they started after they sold Baltic. So was this the Baltic Yard or was this another yard? Uh no, it was it was a y it was a yard that it was called I think it's called Scandi Yacht. Right. And it was uh very small and and um didn't do a lot of work and they were um I was very impressed with Nice. Uh he was he turned out to be one of the very few people I've ever known in the in the marine business who could think forward. And if if if if if he needed to get something done today so we didn't have a bottleneck in six weeks, he'd be on it. And so I said to Nice, well let's let's sit out run through some numbers. If you want to take the time, we'll we'll uh we'll put together a sort of a theoretical vote. And with off Rogerberg sitting there with the three of us, we kind of sketched out what ended up becoming the what we call the Deerfoot 262, which was my approach uh towards the getting towards the perfect yacht after having built the two versions in in New Zealand with Salt House, and then uh looking hard at uh what we would do uh uh the next time.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

Just so that we can be clear, where where you come from is the cat experience, the blue water experience, and at this time, when you're drawing boats and when you're actually designing boats, you're using a designer to do the lines plans and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 31:43

You aren't doing the whole process.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

So what what what we ended up doing, I I came from the construction business, that's where we sort of learned our learned our chops. And and um it's a very tough business in the states. And if you're gonna be successful at it, you have to be very detail-oriented. Cross your T's, dot your I's and and um um just be really attentive to details. And that was sort of my nature. And when when we started working on this, I I didn't um I I knew about all shapes and prismatic coefficients and all that sort of thing from catamaran design stuff. Um and I knew in theory how it worked on on monols. But what I didn't have any experience in was all the systems, and what I quickly found out is nobody else had experience with that, and that the people who were making the design decisions, where does the engine room go and how much space you have, and how do you get at the pumps, and what kind of refrigeration to use. None of those people had any real experience. And the um so the the it was sort of a case of the blind leading the blind, and we quickly determined that in most cases our our the decisions that we would make would be often different than what the what the quote-unquote professionals would would choose because they hadn't lived with, they were used to their experience was you get on the boat, you sail up to Fiji, or you go to the the down the West Indies, whatever, you spend a a month or two uh on the passage and getting down, and then you bring your boat back and you give it to somebody to fix. Well, that experience is not the same as somebody that's gonna go cruising and has to live with their boat and maintain it and want to have good reliability.

SPEAKER_02 33:24

So at this time, would you have said you were a yacht designer, or would you have said you was a you were a project manager with the concept? Because people like Doug Peterson and other guys helped you, didn't they, with lines plans?

SPEAKER_00 33:36

Yeah, so we we went to um it was way more efficient for me to pay somebody to draw the lines plan than it was for me to do it. I mean they they do a a a neater job of fair of fairing them. I knew how to fare them on the loft floor, but uh what the what we do what we look at hole shape wise. But doing that at the 1 in 20 scale or 1 in 25 scale uh was not my cup of tea. So I I up until we started using a computer to just design hole shapes, uh, we always had somebody else draw the lines for us.

SPEAKER_02 34:10

So the reality was that technology coming along and computers and CAD and all of those things enabled you to make the step. Whereas they were drafts people, you were coming at it from the real lived experience and yachting and multi-hull and mono-hull, and actually delivering a boat that would do blue water.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Yeah, our our the the the difference to I think in our approach overall is that is that um there were there were a lot of areas that we did not have the expertise in. But one thing I've always been good at is asking questions. Like sometimes I drive people crazy asking questions. Um I I wanted I I always want to know the what what's the underlying basis for making a decision. And many things, even today, in yacht design and construction and spec, uh, the decision don't make any sense. What what I've quickly learned, once I got sort of at the pointy end, is that what I quickly learned that that when you when you're designing and building a yacht, you're working in an environment where everything is related and and nothing is for free. So if you if you change a fridge refrigeration compressor here, it impacts your batteries, it impacts your wiring size, it impacts the center of gravity of the boat, etc. So everything is related to everything else. And and whenever you do make a decision or you think about how you're gonna how you're gonna do this, whether it's with this shaping the hull or doing the rudder or the keel or or systems, the interior, you have to ask and continually look at how does this affect everything else in the boat? How does it affect the trim? How does it affect the boat when it's uh capsized resistance, how does it affect the s the sailing capability, the boat speed, how does it affect maintenance? Do you have access? If you put this bigger thing in here, this chair in here that the owner really wants, what happens to the air conditioning that's what it's like.

SPEAKER_02 36:05

Well, one of the things that you said to me yesterday that I really engaged with was you said, of course, I have to think when I design a boat about now she's seven years old and she's having her first big refit. I have to be sure that the design is good enough, that the access is good enough that she can actually have that refit and sail on without people having to rip the boat to bits to get things out and all that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

And nobody's going to make those decisions on the shop floor unless they've lived with the unless the management have lived with the results of doing it otherwise. Yeah. A good example of that is when we were doing a Sunday 64, the TPI, and we I had specified that all the refrigeration tubing that came from the compressor in the engine room ran through a 50 millimeter diameter PVC pipe. It was that maybe it cost a couple hundred dollars for them to do that. And and they were they were complaining about it. What's the purpose of doing that? It doesn't do any good, and et cetera. And they couldn't, they could not understand why anybody would would do a detail like that. Because I knew that in six or seven or eight years that tubing's got to be replaced. If you had to if it went through a PVC pipe, it's it's a half-day job for two people. Otherwise, it's like days and it's hundreds of hours to try and go through the room.

SPEAKER_02 37:21

Well, thousands of dollars. And so then you then, Steve, you stopped being a sort of project manager and understanding all of that, and you had a computer, and then you started to do all of the calculations. So which was the first boat you made this switch to full-on yacht designer?

SPEAKER_00 37:44

The first hull shape that we that we drew, where we did everything on a boat, um, uh was um the Deerfoot 61, three of which were built at Salthouse. Um the um the guys that that that well I I probably should take it. I was gonna tell you the story of how so we were the we there there was some some folks in in a in the Annapolis area that that had uh one particular fellow um and he had um he had worked uh for the MIT professor that that came up with the first Americap um handicap system for the U.S. Sailing Association. And um and he went on his own and had taken some software that that he had done to digitize hull shapes or digitize lines plans. So they could check it, check the theoretical performance, uh, and adapted it for a friend of ours, Steve Davis, who was an artist and uh really, really quick talented guy in. 90% of all the of all the art she saw in the in the magazine, Yani magazines was from Steve Davis in. So he would he would he would digitize using George Hayes and software, he would digitize the line splendid that you gave him, and he and then he would take that framework and use his uh airbrush to to fill it in. So it was very accurate. So George they started a service bureau business where uh he and a couple of his friends were, you could send them a set of lines and and specifications, and they would run, do velocity crude velocity prediction to give you an idea of how things performed. And he came up with a package of that was the hardware, a week's training, and printer and and all this really clunky stuff. At that point, it was it was Hewlett-Packard Engineering Works Station, it was state of the art, and $25,000, and which is a huge amount of money. It was about 19 probably 84, 85, I think, or maybe 86. But what it did is it freed me from having to be dependent on somebody outside for the for the drawing lines plan. And the negative was because we had that capability of so easily changing the center of buoyancy on the hull, that we could track the design up until the very last minute when we had to release the line to the to the yard to start lofting. Um, so it cut it took a lot more work for me. It was would have been way better for me to use the old system and just hire the guy to say, here's the here's the displacement I want the prismatic, and I want this, that kind of thing in the battle entry area, and somebody would draw it. Um, because once they once once that was finished, that was it. You never change that, and you just put a lot of trimming balance in the boat to get it to float the way you want. Um so that that was probably around 85 or 86.

SPEAKER_02 40:37

But don't you think as things have come forward and as technology has become so much more advanced with Rhino and all the other systems that you used, your level of input as you know you went through the sailing boat fleet and then went on to the motorboats, um, you did more and more and more because you could do more. And actually, the level of detail and the level of the number of hours going into each boat from you became exponentially greater. So technology did the reverse of freeing you from um you know uh the the problems of lack of technology.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

What what what it did so it was a it was um it was a form of leveraging where my skills lay and where my interests lay, and that it allowed me to to uh I mean it was it was the learning curve and evolved evolved over time, but but far more important to me than the than the the actual the lines plan, the lines plan fairly simple from my perspective, um, it's how you laid the systems out. And uh because that that's the heart of the boat. And at the stage when you're by the time you're you you draw the lines plan, you've got a preliminary construction plan where the bulkheads go and what how deep the frames are and floors, what have you. Um that drives the drive line and it and everything that goes in the boat, whether it's a keel or or two motors or whatever it is, is is in fact a function of what that structure is. And nobody, people just put the structure in and they make everything fit. That's crazy. So we we were able to take these boats and towards the end, we have because we now have an inventory of parts that we like to use, we could we would literally put uh an entire yacht together, ever almost every 95% of all the equipment that had a had a had a place assigned to it where you could look at it and check either on the computer or visualize in your mind what the plumbing runs were, what the wiring runs looked like, what the access was, how how did you get a pump? How did you pull a pump out without you know in in in 20 minutes?

SPEAKER_02 42:49

And so and so how did that work with the relationship with the yards? Because I'm guessing they didn't have very much wriggle room because you were providing them with exactly how this boat was to be.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

Well, what we we we never did anything that was 100%. We always said, if you have a better way, show us, tell us, but bring it up in front. What we did not want to do is get locked into a corner because somebody did something here and there, and that affects everything downstream. What you have remember this boat is a anything you do, you push here, it bulges there. So um you always have to think with every single decision, whether it's the size of the steering wheel or how much air conditioning it has or what the uh what the bilge pumps look like or where the bunks go. All that has to be looked at. There are a dozen different aspects of each decision that you have to consider, and then and there's some are going to be a conflict, and you have to weigh them. And when you weigh them, you have to give priority to the things which are which are which you are driving your design. In our case, it's reliability and access, because what we're know from observing many us over many years and and and doing uh work on uh uh researching uh bad accidents that have occurred in almost all cases it's lack of access because you don't have you don't have access it's hard to fix something so you wait till you get home and then you get hit by a blow on your toast or the something fails and you're at when you're at sea and and you know it was a bolt if you had if you would have tightened it beforehand it would you would have had the problem in the first place and my approach is very anal on the details because I'm I I do my own maintenance or used to do my own maintenance um and it when I had to work on something that that repeatedly failed because it was a poor choice that would drive me nuts and spending half a day at replacing water pump it should be replaceable in half an hour used to drive me nuts. So those those are things which that drove our interest in the boats. But you you never we never locked everything in we we said what we do in the beginning is we say here's the here's the gear that's going to go in the boat we think plus or minus um and then we would do a preliminary design of that gear uh and where everything went and we said no and then we would make sure that we had allocated sufficient space to do the job and then we would say to the art okay if you have a better way of arranging this this exhaust system tell us you know we're we're we're open to changing any of these details as long as it doesn't impact the overall uh concept of the the of the boat in a negative way and so there there there's the thing that design and build don't build and design yeah and so but what we did was we we we we found that we couldn't afford to give the the boat yards um any leeway we we had to be very tight on the specification of on what things had to do and and how they had to perform because um the too many b too many negative choices were being would be made by people who didn't have the experience and people were buying our boats because we had the experience to identify what the negative issues were and deal with those uh design wise in front so um it was a it made for a a difficult relationship with the boat yard because they weren't used to people coming in and telling them these are the these are the parameters you have to meet and and if they don't meet those um we would o every time we built a new yard there there would come a time when they ignored something some very clear specifications and I I was I had I had to be in every yard with I felt every six to eight weeks maximum to between uh uh visits and and just to stay uh on top of all this stuff and um the the first time that they had something that looked to them perfectly good but for various reasons we didn't find acceptable they had problems and I said you have to change it they said we've done it we've always done it this way we have to change it and they would get a little upset with that but they would learn um and then so um we f I found it was in order for me to achieve the kind of boats that I wanted um that I I had to spend a lot of time traveling um which was not my choice I mean I enjoyed working with boat yards but I didn't like being on the airplanes a lot.

SPEAKER_02 47:17

So just to give everybody an idea when you had this mad idea about um an FPB and you did the design of Windhorse so that boat was born on your computer system in Tucson how how how long did that take? And can you just explain how Linda didn't see you for all that time and the hours?

SPEAKER_00 47:43

Um so the way that I worked on these projects is that when you you when you you have this design you've got all these balls in here eventually you've got the hull shape and the systems and access and boat speed and and heavy weather steering and range of stability and a capsize all kinds of things. And they're all in f they're on flux. You can't really tie anything down until because if you if you if you push over here it bulges over there. So you were I was constantly um constantly reworking all the detail just until I got to the end massaging massaging trying this trying that and uh from the way I worked best was to was to stay focused on what I was doing and any interruption would would it was sort of like I guess if I stop I have to make notes on everything I'm doing why am I pursuing this why am I pursuing that very inefficient and uh so I would work our office was above the garage and we had a really nice beautiful view out the windows and I would work uh usually from 6 30 in the morning and until about nine or ten at night Linda would bring the meals up to the the the office I mean I I would not leave I didn't go to movies I didn't watch TV I didn't talk to anybody I just focused um and the the newer the boat was the the more that took so with wind horse was really a difficult time for everybody that was related with me because we were we were we were so far from the norm. We were breaking so much new ground uh and there was a lot of stress with that because it's I we and and and you didn't want a motorboat well that that yes exactly apart from all that the the um it was uh I I I was sort of being my normal uh anal self and was just obsessing about these details and those details and talking to specialists and interviewing people who were expert in lots of miles of power boats and I couldn't I I never could get my head around the concept of of a of a trawler yacht for going offshore. It just never made any sense to me. Still doesn't and but at that point in time um you know that that was that was what was done and sometimes there are reasons for that sometimes they're not um the the uh a good uh Bruce Bruce Kessler was a good friend of ours he's one of the pioneers and and uh with um Delta yachts and then northern marine and had early yachts from them and and and Bruce couldn't explain it to me just said Steve these are it's a good way to build a fishing platform inexpensive answer. And and we we we Lynn and I went on we did some sea trials with on some of these power boats and the motion was terrible by our standards and they were noisy and well and we knew we could do better on that.

SPEAKER_02 50:27

When you stray from the pack like we tend to do most of the time um sometimes there's a reason people do things sometimes they're not so what I just wanted us to do was to kind of talk about this this move from cat sailor performance or blue water cruising guys then to supervision design with help to using the technology to doing the full design yourselves to having the technology to half kill yourselves to actually deliver these boats um in a way that holistically suited you or you felt was correct or nothing is perfect but as correct as it could be because then of course what we should probably do is in another chapter we should talk about the shipyards because there were lots of them they were all over the world there was you know Finland there was Denmark there was um TPI in the States there was Circa in New Zealand there was I mean there were stacks of them I've got a list of them but for all of them you provided not just the design that but the methodology and you also delivered for the owners because you knew who you were building for. You weren't just building something that was going to roll off the line and um one of the things that has always struck me in dealing with you is how seriously you take the responsibility of delivering a yacht that is able to deal with heavy weather and keep people safe well and carry on doing all those all those aspects of what we do come from experience.

SPEAKER_00 52:21

I mean it like if you take if you take ground tackle um everybody laughs at our you know a lot of the engineering goes into these things but when it comes to anchors uh people say well how do you define the anchors we put the biggest anchor we can fit on there and it we know when people are laughing at us in the marina that it's because the size of our anchor we're getting into the right category you only have to spend one night on a on a foul coral bottom with a with a brief breaking behind you and in 40 to 50 knots of breeze and no navigation marks to know how how important that big anchor is. So we would we that's what drove us these huge anchors that everybody kind of laughs at but not you don't laugh at them after if you use them. And there are a whole series of aspects of the design I don't like that and the problem that that anybody faces in the marine business I'm sure you know it particularly on your end um is that there's very little real world experience uh in the sitting behind the desks of the guys designing this stuff well and or fabricating it and um by real world I mean uh it's going out doing sea trials on a boat and going across the the Atlantic or the Pacific whatever for a passage and then spending it three or four weeks cruising.

SPEAKER_02 53:38

I think to be fair that's you know the the difference between Dashew offshore because when you finally did this motorboat you know she was built she was fitted out by the um amazing Kelly Archer and then you and Linda went off and did 6000 nautical miles on her and then you brought her back and uh and whilst you were doing that you were talking to people about the 64 and saying guys these are quite good you should have one look at what we've done and that's kind of not how it normally works and and that impacts the um the design build and use of the boat the owners who are to come and um the whole way that it works so I think we've done this chapter now and but I do want us to talk about the boat yards next time because the relationship for me is fascinating is how many there were and how this the the Dashew methodology is woven through them all. So it's not the place of build it's the methodology which made the difference does that sound very grand well I I think that's probably realistic.

SPEAKER_00 54:53

The interesting part of this too is that is that the nature what I started saying is that the the it uh sailing across an ocean cruising for three or four weeks uh and then coming back to the office that's not really living with your product the the way that you get that you get trained in how to make the right decisions is by living with your product and that is cruising it day in day out for a year or two and uh or longer and and and that when that forms the basis of your decision making process everything will be different. And there the details start in the in this that you that you work on the structure the fiberglass bullets how your chain plates are attached and uh just there's literally thousands of details and decisions that have to be made and if the people making those decisions don't understand the hassle that comes from a from a different approach they they never see it. And the the owners are are when the owners have had the boat well they they if they hit um you're out out cruising and you've got your fin keel and you and it's done to normal specifications or what used to be normal specifications then you run into something at five or six knots you expect to go to the boat yard. I don't want to go to the boyard when I hit something at five or six knots.

SPEAKER_02 56:11

I want to cuss and be upset that that I I put a nick in my the leading edge of my keel but I don't want to have to go to the boat yard and remove my vacation so so that's there there's a whole different yeah and and and and yeah check it and sail on yeah okay so here is so here is our design chapter hope you've enjoyed it and uh we'll be back with um something else um really soon thank you so much Steve for indulging you do you do a really good job of trying to manage me but it's a hopeless task all right rock on bye Sue