Message board

To make communication with designers and other stakeholders easier, I've created a bulletin board in which we discuss specific topics. Registration is required.

Tender design & engine

We like diving and as a true expedition vessel, we'll be set up for serious diving. We'll also go with aluminium tenders. They simply last longer, give us more design choices and are more affordable then fancy looking RIBS.


This is our aluminium dive tender, a Van Vossen Engineering design. Rugged, built-to-last and with some very unique extras to make boarding a piece of cake.

We plan a 235 HP Yanmar engine with a stern drive. While doing our reseach we ran into some folks in Auckland, New Zealand, a company called Q-SPD International. It's a so-called surface drive.

Supposedly it would bring less maintainance than a stern drive, more speed, less vibration thanks to its Python drive (another Dutch design).

More information on surface drives can be found at this site, also from New Zealand. How come those Kiwi's are so into surface drives?

After several days of waiting for the manufacturer to get back to me on this promising alternative we learned these drive or not very effective at low speeds so we plan to stay away from them. But, for informational purposes, we share the sites we found while surfing the Internet to learn more about 'surface drive' principles. We came accross another manufacturer, Levi Drives. Their page on design issues is informative and worth reading. And here' another list of surface drive manufacturers we ran into. In the US you will find Arneson Industries. The image below, comparing propulsion systems, is theirs. Pulse Drive Systems Intn'l is another company from the US.

New crane solution

Since we eventually would like to be able to carry a 7 ton sub, we need a pretty strong crane.

We've been looking at hydraulic cranes but they are not cheap and the location, while acceptable, did leave us with kind of a big ugly object in the line of sight forward.

Since we have a pretty strong forward mast anyway, our designers at Herman Jansen made this suggestion - a boom - and we like it a lot. It's a lot more affordable while able to carry higher loads. It also looks a lot better we think.

Now we're going to find a way to do the same for the tenders on the platform aft.

We can't use the same set up behind the mast because it would reduce the safe area to land a helicopter. Maybe a small hydraulic low profile (stiff) boom crane after all? We'll figure something out.

Tenders

We plan to carry two tenders and would carry them on the aft deck during longer voyages.

Now that I received an AutoCAD drawing of this deck, I started to play around with the location of the tenders and it looks like the setu shown here works best.

The aft ends of the tenders will extend a little beyond the deck to allow walking space around the funnel superstructure and allow people to come up the stairs without hitting their heads against the bow of a tender!

Alternatively, we can also keep a tender at the top deck near the bow. Or simply keep or tow them in the water. We'll probably put a small tender crane at the port side of the funnel superstructure. The one that would also puts the float plane onboard, remember ? :-) .

If this isn't the ultimate explorer vessel, then what is?

Engine room pictures

When reading reviews of trawlers in Passage Maker magazine the big issue is always the engineroom. Does it have standing room or not. Is there room to work.

Well, my engine room is an engineer's dream. It's not just big, it's huge. It even has a pretty big workshop in the back.

What you see is a 9 cylinder Deutz 628 engine that delivers full power at 750 rpm. Since we don't need full power, we'll run it at about 600 rpm and still go 10 knots.

The oversized Reintjes 5:1 reduction gear movs a slow moving 3.6 m. Van Voorden prop.

Latest drawings

We are really getting in the final design stage now. The remaining areas are the top deck (fly bridge and aft. top deck deck).
This is where we'll store the tenders during longer voyages (on short trips, we may just tow them behind us).
It can also serve as the helipad or may store a float plane (in which case of course at least one tender has to be kept on the front top deck.

Here's a link to two PDF files with top views and side views. These are 800 KB files so you may want to 'right-click' them and use 'save target'.

Let us hear your comments at thorwald@ilisa.com.

Interior design

Probably the hardest part of all!

Here are a few images of what we like for the interior and exterior of our vessel. We plan to be in touch soon with an interior designer who also know the rules about material use.

Basically we like simple, clean lines. Not too much wood but teak (or imitation) on the floor is preferred due to maintainance). Forget about white or beige colored leather or carpet which seems to be so popular on bigger yachts.

We just need to fix that white leather...