Flowing exterior styling and a dearth of details that might act as size references (as well as disguised anchor pockets) help conceal the yacht’s size.
“When you see her from a distance and no person is visible, you can’t really judge how big she is,” says Andreas Hering, project manager for Abeking & Rasmussen
he’s big – let’s get that out of the
way. At 98.4 metres, Aviva became
the 46th longest yacht in the world
when she was delivered by Abeking
& Rasmussen last year. Measured by
her 4,966 gross tonnes rather than length,
she shoots up the chart to number 30. There is no
other boat of her length that can match her for volume. Her 17.24
metre beam is so generous that the designers pulled in the bridge
deck superstructure to add side decks – improving crew
circulation and refining the profile – because “we just didn’t need
that much beam”. They were right: spaces on board are
magnificently expansive, from guest suites the size of the master
suite on a 50 metre to an owner’s wardrobe that is, designer
Andrew Langton notes quite seriously, “bigger than my house in
France”. The fact that scale sits fairly low down on the list of
Aviva’s extraordinary features speaks to the imagination and
belief-beggaring ambition of this project.
Aviva is the third yacht of her name delivered to owner Joe
Lewis, British businessman and major shareholder in Tottenham
Hotspur Football Club. The first, a 62 metre Winch design, was
built at Feadship in the Netherlands; the second, a 68 metre
Reymond Langton design, at Abeking & Rasmussen on the
banks of the Weser river in Lemwerder, near Bremen. For his
grandest project yet Lewis returned to Abeking. “They were,
surprisingly, much less conservative than other people. Maybe
it’s because of the military stuf they do,” says Toby Silverton,
head of design on the project, working with Reymond Langton,
and who was also involved in Lewis’s two previous projects.
The yard’s biggest project had been 82.48 metre Secret and to
take on Aviva it extended its build shed to accommodate yachts
of up to 125 metres – a bold move into a larger size category. And
its courage didn’t end there.
“Build a big yacht around a padel tennis court was the main
brief, I guess,” says the yard’s project manager Andreas Hering,
with admirable understatement. “In three years.”
A project of this size might easily take five years, even if the
yard already had a shed big enough for the purpose. And this wasa highly unusual project (we’ll come back to that padel tennis court, but it’s
quite something). Design was accelerated too: the complex interior was
penned in six months, when they would have liked a year; and the exterior
in just one month, when it might more comfortably have taken six.
Knowing that makes Aviva’s elegant profile even more impressive.
“There was a lot of work to [visually] break up the mass, using facets,” says
Langton. “We also tried to keep the lines long, so the sheer line is very long
and jumps up forward with a clean line.”
They also minimised the details that act as size references, to disguise
the scale. Rub rails are eliminated, stanchions replaced with glass, crew
quarters windows are grouped to create long lines of glazing and even the
anchor pocket has been elongated and disguised, lest a little square of
gleaming stainless gives the game away. Some upright elements of the silver
superstructure were also picked out in a darker shade. “They disappear a
bit, which makes the slope of the boat more raked,” says Langton.
The long bow adds to the efect, but the aesthetic is the beneficiary of a
practical decision: this boat will roam far and the long covered bow makes
it likely to survive the kind of rogue waves that have battered a few cruise
ships over the years. “I talked to the captain of the QE2 who went through
a wave, and what happens is all the wheelhouse windows smash, they had
four foot of water, you then lose all your instruments and they had no ability
to control the boat, communicate or navigate,” says Silverton. To strengthen
Aviva he added extra watertight doors and armoured the two forward VIP
cabins and wheelhouse so that they could be sealed of to save the boat. “You
can lose everything on the bridge and you can still navigate and control the
boat from the engine room,” he says.
Apart from safety, the main aim of the naval architecture was stability.
Before the build of Lewis’s second Aviva, Silverton had been frustrated by
a lack of data on how rolling motion afects passengers, so he put 36 people
in a motion simulator for three days. “There’s two things: one is the period
of roll and the second is the way it rolls,” he says. “The typical roll period of
the 62 metre would be around 7.5-7.8 seconds, one of two roll periods people
were particularly upset by. And we found that if it was a soft stop and then
a soft movement away again, people were much more tolerant of it.”
The design of the second boat addressed those concerns and the new
Aviva’s hull – patent pending – is an evolution of that. It has a nipped in
“waist” which bulges back out below the waterline. This both slows and
softens the roll. Her near-vertical bow and narrow sailing boat-like stern
(which helps reduce pitching) also aid eiciency. So much so that they were
able to go down two engine sizes from the original spec (she has two MTU
16V 4,000 M73Ls, which put out 2,880kW each) and still hit 20.3 knots in
sea trials. Silverton notes that she runs most comfortably at a zippy
16.5 knots, despite an oicial cruising speed of 14 knots. Supplementary
electric motors ofer smooth manoeuvring and silent 11 knot running at
night, while extra solidity comes from MAGLift stabilisers aft and one pair
of fin stabilisers forward.
But it is the padel tennis court that lies literally and metaphorically at
the heart of this project. This high intensity squash-tennis hybrid is a daily
routine for Lewis and his explorations with his previous yachts had been
limited to destinations with courts. “The original idea I had was to put it on