The first new offering is the Seakeeper 10.5, which is for boats 50 to 62 feet long. Compared to the Seakeeper 9, it has 50 percent more gyroscopic power per cubic inch in 23 percent less volume, according to the company.

With a retail price of $124,900, the Seakeeper 10.5 has a new flywheel design that lets the motor be tucked inside the flywheel. That’s what reduces the unit’s overall height. The unit’s weight is 1,246 pounds.

The other new model is the Seakeeper 14, which is for boats 55 to 68 feet long and has a retail price of $149,900. The company says it is 43 percent smaller and 33 percent lighter than the Seakeeper 18. It, too, has the new flywheel design. Weight on this model is 1,650 pounds.

Both new models have ConnectBox integration, which means the system integrates with onboard multifunction displays (No need for yet another display at the helm.) Boat owners can control the Seakeeper either from the display or directly on the unit.

Also on both new models are field replaceable bearings. This helps with service needs.

News of these new models follows the August 2022 introduction of the Seakeeper Ride, which reduces pitch and roll on vessels 35 feet and smaller. With that product, too, company CEO Andrew Semprevivo said maximizing efficiency in a smaller package was a key goal for the brand.

“We’ve worked very hard to scale our technology down,” Semprevivo said at the time. “We needed a product that got down to 18-foot and 19-foot entry-level boats, at a price point that everyone can afford.”

The Seakeeper Ride, which helps to minimize pitch and roll, can be installed in addition to the original Seakeeper, which works to minimize only roll. The company says the dual setup enhances the Ride’s performance by 10 to 20 percent.

Overall in the company’s lineup, there are now a dozen Seakeeper models for boats of various sizes, along with three versions of the Seakeeper Ride. The Seakeepers are available for boats as large as 110 feet length overall, while the Seakeeper Rides are for boats up to 35 feet long.

What’s the biggest Seakeeper model that’s available? The Seakeeper 40. It’s for boats from 85 feet and up, with a max-out of 115 tons. Its price is $337,000.

Take the next step: go to seakeeper.com

The post Seakeeper Unveils Two New Models appeared first on Yachting.

If Mother Nature had been less obstinate, Miles Cherkasky might have continued to sail.

“I’ve been sailing since I was probably 14 years old, almost half a century of sailing,” he says, now in his 60s. “One day, I was doing a delivery from Baltimore down to Miami Beach where we have a slip, and there was no wind, and I was sitting there listening to my engine run, and I couldn’t go anywhere, and I thought, ‘This is stupid. Time to get a trawler.’”

But what kind of trawler? He and his wife, Laureen, knew they liked longer-distance, offshore cruising—after Miles retired back in 2007, they bought a 47-foot high-performance sailboat and cruised it from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas a few times—but they weren’t quite sure how to achieve a good cruising experience in a powerboat. That is, until the day Miles helped with the delivery of an Outer Reef.

“When they came out of the inlet, Miles was putting away his cup of coffee, getting ready, thinking there were going to be all these waves and it would be sloppy, but nobody around him was moving or getting prepared for these big seas,” Laureen recalls. “The ride was like glass. When he came home that day, he said, ‘We have to get an Outer Reef.’”

Just like that, the Cherkaskys became members of a club that has grown almost exponentially in recent years, as an increasing number of boaters realize they can live their long-distance cruising dreams with the kinds of creature comforts that used to be limited to land. Today’s offshore-capable power yachts for cruising couples and families, built by companies such as Outer Reef, Nordhavn and Kadey-Krogen, are being built for go-anywhere adventure. They’re also being outfitted for the specific types of adventures that owners want to undertake.

“These boats are not marina queens,” says Jeff Druek, president and CEO of Outer Reef. “We talk a lot about equipment on board, things like inverters, solar panels, how many generators, what size generators, what type of air conditioning—things of that nature. Every piece of equipment in the boat is talked about, in terms of how they plan to use their boat, how far they’re going to go afield, how long they’re going to be away from the dock and where they’re going to be cruising.”

Nordhavn President Dan Streech says the way today’s bluewater hulls are being built and outfitted is making adventure cruising a real option for people who just a couple of decades ago would have feared it. The kinds of discomfort and danger that used to be part and parcel of crossing oceans are now minimized by modern construction, communication tools and redundant systems, so much so that all kinds of people feel comfortable cruising far and wide.

“You’re seeing normal people who in no way would’ve been sailboat material 35 years ago,” Streech says. “They have the chart plotters and Starlink. They’re sitting on the open ocean doing Facetime with their grandchildren. They’re not disconnecting from the world. It’s not necessary to have physical sacrifices or the emotional trauma of cutting themselves off. They have washers and dryers, wine coolers, TV, communication as they’re heading down to the South Pacific, and they are part of a huge social network, even just inside the Nordhavn world. We have 600 boats. The owners’ group—there are probably 20, 30, 40 posts a day with people who have a question. That feeling of isolation is gone.”

John Ellis took delivery of his Nordhavn 68, Dragon, in 2021 with a vision of following in his parents’ wake, only in a less-stressful way.

“I have a lot of sailing experience. My parents were cruisers,” Ellis says. “I spent time on board with them in the South Pacific. I’ve been on long passages with slanted decks. That wasn’t really what I was looking for. I loved those years—they were wonderful—but I’m looking for a different experience.”

A big part of the offshore powerboat experience for Ellis is fishing, so he customized his Nordhavn with extra bait tanks and rod stowage, along with two Seakeepers: an SK9 and an SK16. “When we stop and we’re fishing in the open ocean, we need to keep the motion down on the boat,” Ellis says. “The ocean has a tendency to want to rearrange the furniture on these big boats. Now, we tap a button, and it’s just as solid and stable as it can be. Nobody’s mad at me, and nothing’s breaking. No plates are crashing inside.”

That change in the way bluewater boats are built, Streech says, is also changing the profile of offshore cruisers. Back in the day, the typical Nordhavn customer was a husband who wanted to point the bow offshore and a wife being dragged along for the white-knuckle ride. Not so today, Streech says: “Just a shower alone was a luxury 35 years ago, and now you’re standing in a stone shower with gorgeous fixtures and a heated towel bar. What we’re seeing more and more is teamwork. A couple comes in, and she’s not looking at her phone half-mad because they just had a fight in the car. Not at all. She’s right there on the team and leading it sometimes. She has deduced that this is a path where they can share something, have an adventure and travel the world.”

Ellis says that’s exactly the plan that he and his wife share, now that both their kids are off to college. Their intent is to complete a 10-year circumnavigation.

“We’re going to go to the Caribbean and then come up the Eastern Seaboard, then go up to Nova Scotia, then back down to Florida after hurricane season next year, then Bermuda to the Azores, then get to Portugal and figure out whether we want to go up the Thames for fish and chips or whether we want to go around the corner to France,” he says. “It’s inevitable that we’re going to do both. My wife wants to do all the things, and we’re super happy with all the confidence we’ve been able to build aboard the boat so far.”

Sandy Peretsman says it was actually his wife’s idea to buy the Kadey-Krogen 48 that they named Third Child. She’s still winding down her career, but he retired this past January and started thinking harder about what comes next. They’d always had smaller boats and chartered larger ones in destinations such as the British Virgin Islands; he wanted them to have a bluewater-capable boat of their own, one that would let them do more as owner-operators. “My wife pushed me to do this a few years ago when I was turning 60,” Peretsman recalls, adding that his wife told him, “You don’t want to be one of those people who say, ‘I’m going to do it,’ and you don’t.”

So, they’re doing it. They base Third Child out of Charleston, South Carolina. So far, they’ve gone as far south as the Bahamas, and they’re thinking about heading up to New England, as well as cruising farther south into the Caribbean, as they become more comfortable aboard. “You can island-hop your way all the way to the Virgin Islands without ever driving more than 200 miles at a time, and we already drive that along the East Coast,” he says. “My personal preference is offshore because there’s a lot less traffic. It’s more relaxing. You don’t have to worry about how deep the ocean is or running aground, or boats passing you and crossing you. It’s just a big, blue patch, so you can go where you want, as you want.”

The more time he spends running his Kadey-Krogen, Peretsman says, the more he’s thinking about increasing his cruising distances. “I can go from Charleston to Europe and most of the way back on one tank of gas,” he says. “These boats will go 4,000 or 5,000 miles on a single tank of fuel. It doesn’t suit everybody, but if you want to be out there, it’s a wonderful boat for it.”

Streech says that for Nordhavn owners, ocean crossings aren’t even big news anymore. The company has had 13 boats complete circumnavigations so far; one of them did it three times. Over at Outer Reef, Druek says, so many people want to cruise off the beaten track that the resale value of the bluewater-capable boats stays high. Some of them, he says, he’s resold eight or 10 times.

It’s a testament to how far powerboat building has come that adventures so impressive are increasingly common. “To the Marquesas, that’s 3,000 miles,” Streech says. “It’s shocking, it’s mind-numbing that if you looked down from an airplane, you probably couldn’t even see the boat, and these boats make it. They do it over and over and over again.”

The Core Elements

Nordhavn President Dan Streech says that for distance cruising, “there are basics that have to be adhered to in terms of stability, structure, fuel capacity, fuel handling. All those things need to be there. They don’t get talked about that much anymore. They’re a given for us now at Nordhavn.”

Having It All on Board

Production Manager Fran Morey says Kadey-Krogen owners typically stay on board at least six months each year. “They want everything that’s the latest and greatest, and they also want the creature comforts of home,” he says.

The post Building Bluewater Cruising Yachts appeared first on Yachting.

It took nearly 20 years from the day Seakeeper was founded in 2003, but the company has just introduced the product that president and CEO Andrew Semprevivo calls “our entire company’s dream since day one—to impact boating for everyone.”

This new product is the Seakeeper Ride, and it differs from previous Seakeeper models in several ways. For starters, while the original gyrostabilizers reduce roll, the Seakeeper Ride reduces roll and pitch. And whereas earlier Seakeeper models started out being available for larger yachts before scaling down, the Seakeeper Ride is being introduced on boats no bigger than 35 feet long, with models for larger boats coming later.

“We’ve worked very hard to scale our technology down,” Semprevivo says. “We needed a product that got down to 18-foot and 19-foot entry-level boats, at a price point that everyone can afford.”

For now, the Seakeeper Ride is available only on new boats, with the first builders including Sportsman, Scout and Chris-Craft. Going forward—probably in a year or two, Semprevivo says—there will be aftermarket versions for do-it-yourselfers, along with versions for larger vessels.

The big technological challenge in creating the Seakeeper Ride was figuring out how to make the device fast enough to compensate for all the forces constantly affecting a boat on the water. The Seakeeper Ride’s rotary blades make 100 adjustments every second to combat wave motions.

“Once we understood how fast it had to be, then we realized it was way too expensive to be on small boats,” Semprevivo says. “It took a lot of work and mechanical breakthroughs to create a device at that size and speed at the price that we wanted.”

The Seakeeper Ride can be installed in addition to the original Seakeeper; the company says the dual setup enhances the Ride’s performance by 10 to 20 percent.

“Now you get on a boat, you turn the key, and you have to worry about steering and throttle, but that’s it,” Semprevivo says. “There’s no more adjusting tabs. You forget about what it was like to have to operate tabs. It’s like going from a manual transmission to an automatic one.”

The post Seakeeper’s Smaller-Boat Stability appeared first on Yachting.

Revolutionary. That’s the word that Andrew Semprevivo, president and CEO of Seakeeper, uses to describe the company’s Seakeeper 1—the smallest model yet and one built entirely from the ground up.

“All of our other models are very much the same,” he says. “We just kind of sized them down. They get smaller and lighter, but the overall geometry and mechanical makeup are the same.”

The Seakeeper 1, on the other hand, had to be designed differently because the 23- to 30-foot boats it’s intended to go aboard are radically different from larger vessels. The unit had to be quieter because it will physically be closer to the skipper. It had to be flush-mounted, to lower the time and cost of installation for the smaller end of the market. It had to be made of plastic and look nicer because people other than crew would see it. And it had to be no more than 17 inches high, so it could fit inside a leaning post instead of forcing boat owners to give up the aft-facing seat that’s popular aboard today’s center-console boats.

“Every other unit, we’d have our engineers design it to get it small and light, and then we would do our best to wrap the mechanical elements of it to make it look as aesthetically pleasing as possible,” Semprevivo says. “This time, we designed it how we wanted it to look first.”

One of the most significant changes that emerged from the design process is the Seakeeeper 1′s flywheel, which spins at a maximum rpm of 9,750. The faster the flywheel spins, the less it weighs and the smaller the unit can be. A new motor helped make the design work and had the bonus of reducing spool-up time. Larger Seakeepers take 25 to 45 minutes until they are spooled up for stabilization, Semprevivo says. The Seakeeper 1 knocks that wait down to 15 minutes.

The new model is expected to be available to manufacturers and the public this month, even taking into account the global slowdowns associated with the novel coronavirus. More than a dozen boat manufacturers including Jupiter, Regal, Cobia and SeaVee are planning to include it in new models, Semprevivo says. Retail price is $14,900.

The post Seakeeper’s Smallest Gyro appeared first on Yachting.

Andrew semprevivo knows boaters are a little confused. While some of Seakeeper’s competitors describe gyrostabilizers in terms of torque, he prefers to discuss angular momentum because he thinks it’s ultimately more important for comfort on the water. The problem is, a lot of people have no idea what angular momentum is.

So, a quick lesson: A gyro moves fore and aft and releases torque. The faster the gyro moves, the higher the amount of torque, but it has less time to apply that torque because the motion is going so fast. The goal is to allow the torque to be applied for as long as the boat’s roll motion is happening—which is where angular momentum comes in.

“Let’s say the boat rolls four seconds; you don’t want to apply all that torque in one second,” Semprevivo says. “You want to time the gyro to match the roll rate of the boat. The higher the angular momentum, the more torque you can apply over that time period.”

Put another way, more angular momentum means a Seakeeper unit will work better for longer, which is what Semprevivo says the company has achieved with the Seakeeper 18 for boats from 65 to 75 feet long.

“What it really means is that we can put this gyro on a bigger boat and get the same level of roll reduction we were getting with the Seakeeper 16,” he says. “Or you can get the same amount of stabilization on the original boat in rougher conditions.”

Which, apparently, boaters want to do. Semprevivo says that when Seakeeper was founded in 2002, owners were thrilled to reduce roll by 50 percent. Then, yachtsmen wanted 60 percent. Then 70 and 80.

“Now, people want to go on the boat and have no roll,” he says. That’s not currently possible—today’s systems need a little motion to follow wave contours—but the Seakeeper 18, he says, can reduce roll by as much as 95 percent. To most people, that feels like being tied up at the dock.

Semprevivo says Seakeeper tested the new units in the North Sea in 6- to 8-foot waves. The units, he says, reduced about 80 percent of roll. “But if you put in a big enough gyro with enough angular momentum, you could reduce it by 95 percent, even in those conditions,” he says.

As recreational boaters continue to ask for more stabilization, he adds, Seakeeper will keep working to provide it: “It’s pushing this product to levels that even we didn’t think were possible. We were thrilled at 60 percent. We thought that was the bar—that was 10 years ago.”

The post Seakeeper’s Latest appeared first on Yachting.

Heinrich Hertz: Spark of Knowledge

As mariners, we can’t claim Heinrich Hertz all to ourselves. His discovery of radio waves has had an impact far beyond the watery world. Still, his work has played a key role in maritime communications and navigation that is, perhaps, unmatched by any other scientist’s.

When he constructed his “oscillator” and then used it to jump sparks between a gap, creating pulses of electromagnetic waves that were detectable several feet away through thin air, Hertz wrote: “I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application.”

Within a decade, radio signals would be broadcast across the Atlantic Ocean.

To one degree or another, we owe Hertz credit for our VHF radios, radar, satellite communications, GPS, cellphones and even the microwave ovens in our galleys. Hertz also discovered the photoelectric effect, which formed the base of knowledge that led to our modern concept of solar power. He advanced experimentation with cathode rays and contributed to the field of theoretical mechanics — all before dying at age 36, in 1894. And yes, the frequencies we call hertz are named after him.

Russell Slayter: The Weaver

As vice president of research and development at Owens Corning, Russell Games Slayter was credited with inventing fibers of glass in the form of individual strands that were long and flexible enough to be woven.

Of all the past century’s inventions, it’s hard to argue that any has been more impactful on the marine industry than fiberglass.

Yet when Slayter (along with employee Dale Kleist) developed a process for creating glass wool and applied for the patent in 1933, boats were probably the furthest thing from his mind. The first commercial use of fiberglass was as insulation. It wasn’t until 1941 that Owens Corning produced fiberglass-reinforced plastics, or FRP, which the U.S. military used to replace some of its aluminum.

A builder of small wooden sailboats named Ray Green is often credited as being the first, in 1942, to build an FRP boat: an 8-foot dinghy.

Today, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Association, 57 percent of all mechanically propelled boats are built from fiberglass — a reality that wouldn’t be possible without Slayter’s contribution.

Seakeeper: Balanced Behavior

Seakeeper’s gyroscopic stabilization units are transforming boating and yachting as we speak. These moment-control gyroscopes — utilizing the same technology that stabilizes the International Space Station — reduce a boat’s rocking and rolling by as much as 95 percent.

The concept behind Seakeeper is to do away with the seasickness, anxiety and fatigue associated with rocking and rolling on board. Anyone who’s been on a Seakeeper-equipped boat can confirm that the results are quite real, and shockingly evident from the moment you leave the slip.

“When John Adams and I started Seakeeper, we didn’t just want to create a new toy,” says co-founder Shep McKenney. “We wanted to change the entire boating experience at its core. Seakeeper is now something that boat owners expect, and we’re working every day to continue to make that expectation a reality, even for smaller and smaller boats.”

Seakeeper: How it Works

1. That’s Fast: Inside the ­Seakeeper’s housing is what looks likean aluminum orb, and inside that vaccum-sealed orb is a flywheel.

The flywheel sits on a vertical axis with upper and lower bearings supporting it as it spins at 557 miles per hour. For perspective, that’s about the average air speed of most commercial jets.

2. Keep Cool: For the flywheel to spin at 0.75 mach, it needs to stay cool. The manufacturer uses a cooling system mix of seawater and glycol.

3. Steady Eddie: Each Seakeeper has a computer-based active control function that is always adjusting for the sea state in real time, applying the required anti-roll torque to keep a vessel on even keel. The gyro moves fore and aft, providing the stopping motion to port and starboard.

4. Product Lineup: Seakeeper’s current product range works on boats and yachts as small as 27 feet length overall and as large as 85-plus feet length overall.

Don Blount: Designed for Destiny

Naval architect Donald L. Blount’s fascination with hydrodynamics began when he was a student at Virginia Tech. It turned into a 20-year career designing small craft for the U.S. Navy, and culminated with serving as the head of the Department of the Navy Combatant Craft Division.

He founded Donald L. Blount and Associates in 1988, and ever since has played a role in boat designs ranging from Rybovich convertible sport-fishers to Jupiter center-consoles to the (former) Spanish royal yacht Fortuna — at least 500 designs in all, as near as he can figure.

Under his leadership, the firm has perform­ed groundbreaking research in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, including the use of test tanks, wind tunnels and computational fluid dynamics, all to make boats ride as quickly, efficiently and comfortably as possible through rough water.

And yet it’s not his designs and engineering that Blount sees as his greatest achievements. He instead cites his written works, including Performance by Design: Hydrodynamics for High-Speed Vessels.

“It’s the books and papers I’ve published that have meant the most to me and, I think, to the boating and boatbuilding community,” Blount says. “I love taking marine technology and putting it into street language. Making it understandable, so it’s useful to a wider range of people.”

Dick Fisher: The Unsinkable Legend

Few companies have enjoyed long-term success as smashing as Boston Whaler’s, and few boatbuilders have attained the status of Dick Fisher and his “unsinkable” boats. Fisher’s construction method, the basic concept of which is still being used to create Boston Whalers today, results in a boat that truly cannot sink.

In 1957, Fisher, a Harvard graduate, filed for patents protecting his process of injecting liquid foam into a boat’s hull, creating a one-piece glass-foam-glass sandwich. A year later, the Boston Whaler 13 was introduced at the New York Boat Show. Today, the tools and the foam are more advanced, but the concept remains the same — and Boston Whalers remain unsinkable.

“Dick Fisher launched a concept of unsinkability that continues to define us as a company and a community,” says Boston Whaler President Nick Stickler. “More than a trait or a tagline, unsinkability is a way of approaching the world: excited to grow, eager to push the envelope, invested in the process and our team, and enjoying the journey.”

The post Yachting Innovators appeared first on Yachting.

Seakeeper has introduced the Seakeeper 2 gyrostabilizer system. It’s for boats 27 to 34 feet length overall.

According to Seakeeper, the new model weighs 414 pounds, making it 25 percent lighter and 22 percent smaller than the next-smallest model, the Seakeeper 3.

The Seakeeper 2 runs on 12-volt DC power and is designed to be installed inside a leaning post without major structural modifications.

Base price for the Seakeeper 2: At retail, it’s $22,700.

Where to learn more: Visit Seakeeper.

The post Seakeeper 2 Available for Boats 27 to 34 Feet LOA appeared first on Yachting.

Seakeeper usually unveils new stabilizer models for yachts that previous models don’t cover. The Seakeeper 6 is different in that respect; it’s for 40- to 49-foot hulls, the same as the Seakeeper 5, but with upgrades.

“Though the Seakeeper 6 offers 20 percent more stabilizing force than the Seakeeper 5, it takes up less space and is more efficient in terms of weight, power draw and cost,” says COO Andrew Semprevivo.

It also works faster. The Seakeeper 5’s spool-up to stabilization time is 35 minutes, while the Seakeeper 6 reportedly takes 24 minutes. In rough seas, that’s a lot of belly-saving time.

New Screen

Compatible Design

The post Balancing Act appeared first on Yachting.

Seakeeper says that 2016 was its best year yet, the first time the company shipped more than 1,000 gyrostabilizing units to boat owners.

Sales were driven in part by high demand from owners of yachts 50 feet and smaller, with demand in that segment increasing 95 percent compared with 2015.

Refits, too, were a driver, with more than 25 percent of Seakeepers going to yacht owners working on refits.

The newest Seakeeper: It’s the Seakeeper 3, designed for boats 30 to 39 feet length overall.

Click here to see all the available Seakeeper models.

The post Seakeeper Ships 1,000 Units in One Year appeared first on Yachting.

Andrew Semprevivo, vice president of sales and marketing for Seakeeper, says trickle-down stabilization technology has been part of the plan from the start. Seakeeper debuted at the end of 2008 with a system for midrange yachts and intended to go smaller, but requests pushed the technology up instead.

“What moved us from 50- to 60-foot boats to the bigger boats was the market,” he says. “We had a lot of demand from boats above 60 feet that had used fin stabilizers and were looking for an internal solution.”

By the end of 2014, the company was offering its Seakeeper 5 unit for 30- to 40-foot boats, but, as Semprevivo says, “It was bigger and heavier than it should have been for those size boats, and most of those boats don’t have generators that were needed to power it.”

Hence the new Seakeeper 3, a stabilizer that runs on 12-volt power and can be installed on center consoles by replacing the leaning post. The unit comes with a replacement post manufactured by Nautical Design in Pennsylvania. The bottom pan in the post is the size of a cooler, and the gyro fits inside. The design can be installed as a refit or spec’d on a new build.

“And we’re not stopping there,” Semprevivo says. “Our vision is to bring this technology down to 20-foot boats. We compare it often to air conditioning in cars. In the ’30s, air conditioning was a luxury item. Very few cars had it. It was very expensive and took up the entire trunk. Today you just expect the cars to have air conditioning.”

The post Smaller Stabilizers appeared first on Yachting.