T
erry Disdale didn’t set out to design the biggest
superyacht in the world. “No one ever said to me,
‘I want a 160 metre boat’,” he says over breakfast
near his office in Richmond, London. “When the
yacht was still on the drawing board, there was
a rumour going round that someone was building
an even bigger boat, and the owner was asked
if he knew about it. He said he didn’t, and that
he didn’t care. Breaking records was the farthest
thing from his mind.”
What he did care about was helicopters – he
wanted to carry more than one; and the pool
- it had to be big. There were also some early
discussions about low bulwarks and big windows,
and that was the totality of the brief for what
would become Eclipse. “To be given free rein
is actually a dreadful thing,” says Disdale.
“I asked myself what I wanted: something
timeless. How do you design something timeless
that’s still going to look good and not be anaemic?
It’s so easy to get carried away, but you’ve got to
be able to look at it in 20 years and decide
it still looks OK.” But that’s the trick, isn’t it? And
the measure of a designer.
At least Disdale had some hooks on which
to hang the design. “Part of what creates the yacht
looking like that is you’ve got to land this huge
helicopter on the front, so the superstructure
is pushed back. The formation of the boat is built
around helicopter usage. And we didn’t want the
boat to look unbalanced when the helicopter is
on the foredeck. Some boats have a foredeck that
looks wrong whenever a helicopter sits there.”
The lines of the boat were dictated by another
prerequisite: the two significant lifeboats
demanded by Solas. The sheerline runs straight
aft from the bow and steps up amidships, the
high freeboard created giving visual support
to the lifeboats. “If you’d had a different sheerline,
the lifeboats wouldn’t have looked comfortable,”
the designer says. This, plus the addition of
a 15 metre pool aft on the main deck, meant that
the overall length of Eclipse – 162.5 metres – was
defined not by ego but by practicality.
“Everyone thinks that a boat starts with
a sketch, some glamorous visual of the outside
of the boat. But that’s not how things work
in my office – we start with a plan, a general
arrangement.” The project, from this first design
stage to the boat’s launch at Blohm+Voss’shttp://www.boatinternational.com | April 201684