Stairway to Heaven

I. Stairway to Heaven…

Last week my regular tennis partner returned one of my better top-spin forehands with an uncharacteristically (for him) short ball. Ah, I thought, time to rush the net! Now, in my mind I ran up on it like a cheetah at full throttle. But a friend (sic) recorded my approach on his cell phone, and all I saw was a lumbering water buffalo, slow and late. They say over the age of 45 that it’s “knees and speed” that go first. This is one reason why over the last few years I’ve taken a personal interest in how builders can improve cockpit access to their yachts. Very recently, J Craft’s tack, one fully consistent with that I call their   “no-compromises” approach to yacht building, has been firmly toward this goal. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the overall industry approach.

Nineteen out of the twenty builders that have chosen to improve cockpit access have done it this way, with inward-opening cockpit side doors:

Inward-opening doors are easier to engineer and cheaper to build (I would say the cost is in the low five figures). Personally, Safety Dave is not a fan.  These doors just seem too vulnerable to breaching in a collision with another boat (or even a dock piling). Putting a 24″ wide hole in the side of your cockpit, inches above the waterline,  is my unhappy thought for the day.

Alternative approaches, while safer, are harder to find. They require a kind of engineering and build quality that is expensive, complicated, and prone to misalignment. This runs up against one of my guiding principles in yacht evaluation:

KISS – More than a rock band, a best practice!  

 

Zeelander’s approach is with massively engineered, double-cantilevered stainless hardware (a work of art, really) on their Z55, and my guess is the cost is 5X the inward-opening approach:

Now, truth be told, the very first time I ever docked the above boat I put an nice scratch in the cockpit door (it’s flawless Volvo IPS Drive joystick not withstanding). That expensive mistake (repairs to metallic paint jobs are very costly) taught me that outward opening doors present two complications:

• When folded open, flat and outward, the door protrudes from the side of the hull about five inches. Coming into a dock, carefully placed fenders are especially critical because the door will touch the dock before the hull. That was my sad experience; But,

 

• If you want to open the door after you are tied up, usually you are too close to the dock to swing the the door out to its fully open position. It takes some jockeying of boat and lines to get everything functional again. No system is perfect, clearly. As we used to say back in the 70’s,  TANSTAAFL:

 

 

Hinckley’s approach is to use a complicated sliding arrangement that I will peg at 7X the development cost over inward-opening designs:

I haven’t used it myself, but it appears to be an elegant solution (albeit one with internal, hard-to-service-and-access hardware). This tradeoff leads me, once again to ….

 

 

 

So, your promised J Craft solutions? First, for stern-to docking  most clients opt for the remotely operable, retractable passerelle option. “Passerelle,” as in French for bridge:

 

 

Here is a clip from the factory a few days ago, showing the passerelle’s seamless operation:

 

 

You can find the price of the passerelle option when you “build” your own J Craft using the wonderful Configurator program, by clicking on this stunning creation:

For side-to docking, J Craft is now providing as standard equipment a lifting stairway entry to the cockpit (shown here in an earlier incarnation):

One railing is shown in this photo. J Craft is adding a second railing, adjacent to the cockpit sofa. The whole stairway will be hinged at the top, and when easily swung upward on high-power pneumatic struts it will provide access to the technical spaces down below. And finally, an elegant  matching [folding] step-stool will be provided dockside.

IMHO, no muss, no fuss and your Stairway to Heaven. I expect applause from knees everywhere.

 

II. Your Sea Trial Opportunities

To see and operate the passerelle (and all other “no compromises” features) with your own eyes and hands, our summer schedule has now locked in. So lock in yours, s’il vous plait!

J Craft’s Torpedo demonstrator yacht, Natalia, arrives in NY on June 21^st. You will find her, and us, as follows:

From June 21st through July 2nd J Craft Natalia will be docked along the lower edge of The Sag Harbor Town Dock:

 

 

From July 2nd through July 6th she will be in Nantucket, on the outermost dock (outlined in Black):

From there she goes to Martha’s Vineyard from July 6th through the 10th, docked on “ego alley,” i.e. the Mad Max Marina in Edgartown. Natalia will be docked where the yellow sportfish is shown here:

 

Then, from the 10th of July straight through the end of August J Craft will be entertaining their clients on Shelter Island, J Craft’s home away from home in the Hamptons.  J Craft’s amazing house, complete with private dock, will showcase Natalia just yards from Shelter’s #1 hotspot, Sunset Beach:

 

J Craft’s Hampton’s home will offer a St. Tropez vibe befitting Natalia’s prior homeport:

 

And her dock offers all waterborne visitors a low-tide draft of 7 full feet:

 

In early September J Craft will head to The Newport Boat Show, from September 14th through the 17th. If you would like to reserve your time with J Craft, by all means launch a flare. I genuinely expect it will be a highlight of your summer.

See ya there!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Safety Dave