PMY - Power&Motoryacht

If you’re headed to Miami this week to buy a boat, you know everybody and their brother has plenty of advice on how to spend your hard-earned money. We say: Why bother? All that planning and careful consideration don’t sound like fun. Just go—it will all work out for the best. Here are five ways to waste your time at a boat show:

It's not surprising that the owner of Abeking & Rasmussen's 134-foot SWATH is willing to go to great lengths for stability.

photo courtesy of Riva Yacht           

To answer this blog’s titular question in short: Of course it does. The real question, masked by that rhetorical one, is “How much does yacht design matter?” It matters to boaters, and to those who are thoughtful enough to understand the importance of boat design in the greater context of how it represents and reminds us of our collective past, and how its halo affects other kinds of design.

I was going to write about that norovirus outbreak on all the cruise ships that's been going but then I remembered that next week is theYacht and Brokerage Show in Miami and I got all excited. First off, I need some sun like the desert needs the rain. The New York City winter has made my complexion go from its normal cream-cheese hue to what I would now describe as translucent pink.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle across the pond recently when (as my colleague Alyssa Haak noted a few weeks back) British Education Minister Michael Gove reportedly proposed that the recession-stricken country build Queen Elizabeth II a brand-new $90 million megayacht to celebrate her 60th anniversary on the throne.

There’s more to after-dark navigation than having high-falutin’ electronics onboard.

In the past two years, I've gotten to see quite a few shipyards where megayachts get built, but most have been in Europe. (I'd name them but fear I'd leave one off.) In the process, I've learned a lot about construction methods and how projects reach completion.

But I can most clearly see the impact of a yard's success in Northeastern Wisconsin for no other reason than I used to live there and I have family that still does. My grandpa knows people who have worked in local yards, the builders and welders and other skilled craftsmen.

Intrepid 390 Sport Yacht with Stabilizer from Mike Plante on Vimeo.

You've probably heard about the Seakeeper gyro that's showing up in all kinds of yachts 50 feet and larger. Well, now the company has come out with a less power version that's suitable for boats under 50 feet. It's actually a prototype for a new, small mode; that Seakeeper will introduce at the Miami boat show. Its compact size not only means it doesn't take up a lot of space, but also that it doesn't require a lot of electricity. Does the small unit work as well as the big one? For the answer, check out this video.

In a development that can only be described as disturbing, traditionally water-based sources of nightmare fuel are now trending towards exiting the water in search of new elements to terrorize. Sharks are learning how to fly and lately Somali pirates have been plundering, pillaging, and kidnapping on land.