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The
name Sunseeker means many things to many people: style, performance, affluence,
and (if you’re a fan of the recent movie The World Is Not Enough)
James Bond. But to those who have dealt with the U.K. boatbuilder directly—especially
if they’re the builder’s customers—Sunseeker is Robert
Braithwaite. Little wonder. Whether at boat shows, at owners’ rendezvous,
at media events, or on the factory floor, Braithwaite is omnipresent.
In fact, he seems to know every specification of every model and every
owner of every boat.
So it
is also little surprise that the biggest—by a margin of more than
20 feet— Sunseeker ever is very much the child of Sunseeker’s
founder, joint owner, and managing director. This is not to diminish the
work of Robert’s brother John, who is largely responsible for the
engineering and exterior styling of all Sunseekers, Don Shead, who has
drawn all of Sunseeker’s hulls, Ken Freivokh, who has crafted all
of the current Sunseeker interiors, or the hundreds of dedicated Sunseeker
employees. But there is no doubt that the Sunseeker 105 is Robert’s
dream realized.
He can’t
say for sure just when the dream began. Certainly he never conceived of
such a yacht when he started Sunseeker in 1968 with a 17-footer. On the
other hand, he grudgingly admits that when he introduced the 84 five years
ago and told everyone that he wouldn’t build anything larger, he
was already working on preliminary drawings for a larger yacht. By that
time he may or may not have known it would be a 105—only he knows,
and he’s not telling—but he did have a clear vision. He says
he wanted to build “a pure yacht,” which is why he made such
a large leap in length. He wanted her to appeal to owners seeking to avoid
the hassles of hiring a naval architect and stylist, shopping plans around
to various builders, and overseeing a two-year build process, but who
still wanted to create a yacht with no restrictions other than a few structural
bulkheads. Most important, he wanted this vessel to embody all of the
things Sunseekers are known for: style, comfort, and performance.
That
last requirement was a prodigious one. Sunseekers are universally fast,
and Robert wanted to build a fully found yacht that could keep pace with
them. To accomplish this feat, he again turned to Shead, who lofted a
hull with a length-to-beam ratio of roughly four to one, aggressive for
a yacht of this size. He also gave it a true planing configuration with
sufficient deadrise to make it seakindly in deteriorated conditions but
not so deep a V that it required excessive horsepower to plane. John Braithwaite
was given the hard job: a target weight of 75 tons. To meet it, he employed
a variety of advanced materials, including powder-bound mat, multiaxis
fabrics, balsa coring in the superstructure, which is supported by costly
foam-and-carbon fiber stiffeners, and also costly foam-cored bulkheads
and floors. All furniture was built by Sunseeker out of the boat in a
full-size mock-up and using special adhesives that allowed for thinner,
lighter woods. John nearly hit his target: On launch day the 105 tipped
the scales at 76 tons.
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Sunseeker 105 continued > Page 1, 2,
3, 4, 5
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