By SELWYN PARKER
Five hire vans pull up on the Viaduct and disgorge 40 mainly middle-aged Americans wearing blue yachtie caps sporting the word Avalon. Clearly excited to be in Auckland on a sparkling sunny day, they gather on the wharf and stare admiringly at a sleek midnight-blue ketch where a professional crew is racing about getting ready for a cruise up the harbour.
This is the Avalon, and the yacht's multi-millionaire owners, an American couple, are also pitching into the work.
From the wharf, yacht designer Ron Holland watches this burst of activity with interest. He designed this yacht a decade earlier for a different owner and, after the Americans bought it, they asked him to completely redo the interior.
The job was done at the McMullen and Wing yard and, one year and a couple of million dollars later, Avalon is going sailing again.
"See all these people," Holland says, indicating the blue-capped Americans milling around excitedly. "They're the owners' parents and their relatives. They've flown the lot down here to celebrate the re-launch."
Aside from the relatives, the owners have brought quite a team with them. There's the crew (the owner flew the skipper's mum and dad out too as a surprise) and sundry technical experts including a favourite sound man who has installed a system that can apparently disfigure your eardrums. (The owners made their money in the music business.)
Meet the booming, money-no-object world of superyachts where the owners are just, well, owners. There's a convention willingly embraced by the superyacht industry that they who hold the pursestrings remain anonymous if they wish.
Anonymity is written into everybody's contract. The origin of this convention is reputedly because the owners, reasonably enough, fear the unwelcome attention of extortionists, kidnappers and the merely envious if their names get in the paper
for owning yachts whose more modest versions wouldn't leave any change out of $5 million.
Apart from their insistence on anonymity, in other respects superyacht owners are much like the people pottering around the harbour in their Hartley trailer-sailers. They are sailing-mad and they adore their, er, slightly larger vessels.
Paid for mostly by new-technology-generated, highly international wealth, superyachts are the apotheosis of the yacht designer's art.
Aside from the wealth that funds them, the main reason why so many superyachts will tie up in the Viaduct during the America's Cup is that it's now possible to build them.
It wasn't so long ago that the very notion of a 100ft yacht filled designers, sailmakers, rig-builders and boatyards with trepidation because of the frightening loads that sheer size generated on the hull, rig and sails.
These days Avalon only just makes superyacht status. It is 33.5m, or 110ft in the old measure. That's half the length of the 67m yacht Holland is now working on - a $55 million project for an American industrialist. The dimensions are awe-inspiring.
The winches must take loads of 20 tonnes. The mast will soar 20 stories high and will only just fit under the lowest bridge in the Panama Canal. Just about everything has to be custom-made.
There are probably half a dozen designers in the world who do superyachts and two of them are New Zealanders - Holland and Bruce Farr. Plenty of contenders are knocking on the door, but few owners will risk $10 million to $55 million on a superyacht novice.
Running a superyacht can easily cost $900,000 a year, but some owners get some of their outlay back by chartering the boats. For a 37.5m yacht with a crew of seven, the going rate in the Carribbean is about $90,000 a week, not counting gratuities for the crew, which can easily run to $20,000, expensive wines, phone calls and so on.
It's hard to imagine that Holland made his name with a home-built quarter-tonner which would fit on the foredeck of most superyachts with plenty of space to spare.
Holland was born in Auckland to a Torbay family with no interest whatsoever in the sea. But he was always sailing-mad and haunted the waterfront for berths on anything that floated. He was a self-taught designer whose sole formal training was a year-long night course at the Auckland Institute of Technology.
He began to make his name in the early 1970s after basing himself near the Atlantic in County Cork, Ireland, with a string of championship-winning and often radically innovative yachts. With each passing year, Holland's clients became wealthier and his commissions bigger.
One was the 31.5m Whirlwind, commissioned 14 years ago by a British furniture manufacturer. At that time it was the biggest sloop (single-masted yacht) ever built and, despite general apprehension about the hull cracking under the huge loads from sails that towered above the deck like the White Cliffs of Dover, Whirlwind not only went fast but stayed in one piece.
Next came the 33.5m Gleam, bought by an American fund manager. Gleam has now become the refurbished Avalon and clearly has a lot of life left.
In quick succession, always seeking the advice of other experts, Holland shaped on his drawing board a string of ever-longer superyachts - the 43m Juliet for the founder of the Rockport shoe empire, the 49m Thalia for an American shipping magnate, and now the industrialist's 67m yacht whose mast would tower over many of Auckland's commercial buildings.
Doesn't Holland ever worry about calamities like the mast collapsing in the middle of an ocean crossing? "Not really," he says. "They're really like ships, and Lloyds of London surveys them. It's a safety net with which builders, designers and sparmakers have to comply. Mind you, the engineering in the masts is horrendous."
For his latest creation Holland is drawing on the skill of New Zealanders, as indeed he does for a lot of his boats, and says: "The work the yacht industry does here is tremendously impressive."
America's Cup fever has also lured another of his yachts, the 34m Charlatan, and it's time to get reacquainted.
With Holland at the wheel it makes stately progress past North Head with the wind abeam and the mainsail and jib up. Royal blue with a varnished caprail, it's a classic-looking ketch with a low, sleek freeboard.
Built by Auckland's Alloy Yachts for an (anonymous, of course) member of Lloyds, it was launched last summer.
The impressive mainmast has a base as thick as the trunk of a decent-sized kauri. Though superyacht masts are built with a lot of tolerance they are rarely loaded to more than half their designed strength.
Aft, the mizzenmast sports not only a sail but radar, two satnavs, downlights, a piercing fog airhorn, loud-hailer, man overboard aerial, weatherfax, and antennae for vhf, television and cellphone.
The sails are an expanse of pin-striped Vectran, which is made from liquid crystal polymers. Sailmakers say it's like "turning your calculator into a sail."
When it comes to manoeuvring, retractable bow and stern-thrusters turn the yacht like a dinghy and the 490hp engine can push the Charlatan for 4400km at 11 knots.
The push of a button on a hydraulic console in the helmsman's station unfurls the fully battened mainsail, which rattles up the mast in little over a minute. The jib goes up even faster. Push another button and the sheets haul in the working sails and the Charlatan bounds away down harbour, sailing in much less time than it would take in a single-handed dinghy.
"It used to take 10 guys half an hour to get a boat this size organised," observes Holland, a student of easy-handling systems.
Before technology made superyachts much easier to sail, a crew needed to drag the bags containing the working sails onto the deck, hook the sails on and winch them bodily up the mast.
Also, with in-boom furling, you don't have to contend with 620 sq m of wet and angry canvas thrashing around the deck in a blow, threatening to rip off your fingernails.
Charlatan's interior resembles an exclusive London club. Designed by the London firm of Redman Whiteley, it features handsome teak panelling, gilt-framed 19th-century seascapes on the walls and hand-carved dining chairs.
You almost expect to see leather armchairs and a waiter bearing a bottle of port and a copy of the Times. And the two Britsh owners can enjoy an atmosphere that really is just about as quiet as a gentleman's club. To reduce noise and vibration the interior is virtually suspended within the aluminium hull and surrounded by insulating pads. And brackets separate the cabin from the metal beams below deck.
We round up under full sail, harden the sheets until we're on the wind, and head back up harbour. The transformation is astonishing. With Charlatan's lee rail under, the water boils down the deck.
There's only 22 knots of apparent wind sweeping across the deck, but the ketch thunders along. The wire sheets are drum-tight, the rod rigging quivers and groans, and the sails make a sound like ice breaking.
Braced against the mast, Holland yells against the wind: "You never get used to the power. She'll take another 15 knots apparent without reefing."
Holland's own yacht is the classic and easily handled 22m Golden Opus, which he shares with a director of the Reserve Bank of Ireland and an interior designer. Golden Opus spends a lot of time in Auckland, where it was built, and whenever he can Holland goes cruising.
At 22m it's no superyacht. But for somebody like Holland, a superyacht would probably be like having a busman's holiday.
Money, ahoy!
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