http://www.boatinternational.com | July 2018PHOTOGRAPHY: KLAAS EISSENS/AV PRODUCTIES‘the gigantic party room
obert Wattam, sweeping
his arm across the upper saloon. “When the boat was
in Morocco, the owner brought a group of five
traditional musicians back to the boat and two
ladies to cook lamb couscous up here. There was a
great atmosphere.” This feels like the heart of
Sandalphon, the 31 metre explorer yacht that has
drawn me to Limassol in Cyprus, and on whose
top-most deck I’m now standing, watching the sun
go down over the marina with the smell of orange
blossom in the air. It’s the perfect scene – but an
unlikely one, because at one point it looked like
Sandalphonwould never hit the water at all.
Work began on her (then) 27 metre hull at a
shipyard in Brazil in 2014, but the project soon ran
into problems. “They were running late and not to
the timetable,” the owner explains. When he and
other owners tried to take their
boats elsewhere, they hit legal
problems. “The law was on the
shipyard’s side, so it made it very
hard to remove the boats.”
The half-finished hull of
Project Gisele, as she was then
known, was left to rust in the
humid, tropical air of Fortaleza.
This could have been the
graveyard of the owner’s
yachting ambitions too – at least
one sister boat was never
completed. But he didn’t
consider backing away from theproject. “Never!” he tells me. “It was a big dream to have an explorer yacht.
I am retiring to my yacht.”
Rescue came in the form of Daan Balk, the owner of Balk Shipyard in
the Netherlands. He was at the yard for another explorer boat client when
he spotted Project Gisele in distress and took a closer look. “Wow, this is
really something,” he remembers thinking. “When you come to a project
like that, the problems you see in the first couple of hours just increase. The
first day I just absorbed what I saw, then I had my serious thoughts about
it overnight and the next day I could see how we could tackle this one.”
He rang the owner from Brazil to ofer his services, shrewdly ofering
free berthing in Holland while the owner decided on a yard. “It wasn’t easy,
but I was able to convince him, so he took the decision to bring the boat
over to Holland,” says Balk. A series of diferent teams were brought in to
quote for the work but, in the end, Balk’s persistence paid of and it won
the contract. “The Dutch are the best at this size of yacht, and Balk is very
good at this type of work with high standards,” the owner explains.
And so a two-year project began. “From our perspective it was only 20 to
30 per cent finished,” says project manager Wim Mooiweer. “Basically, the
whole boat had to be ripped apart, except for the furniture.”
Captain Wattam joined the boat shortly before her completion in
Holland, and got to know the Balk team well. “They worked out very
quickly that she was listing 10 to 15 degrees to one side,” he tells me in
Limassol, where the boat is floating perfectly. The original Brazilian
design was based on a larger boat, he explains. When they shortened it, they
kept the superstructure dimensions the same, skewing the boat’s
proportions. “Balk could either make her ugly or add four metres to the
length to fix the problem.”
Balk opted to extend and, with input from naval architects Azure, the
yard extended the bathing platform by one metre and sawed the hull in half
just forward of the main superstructure to add three more metres.
Technically, the challenge was to weld in new plates and structural parts
without the heat distorting the existing hull. Practically, it gave them more
space to play with internally, creating an additional twin crew cabin and a“
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