In about an hour I’ll be touring Amels’ shipyard, where among other things four of its 171s and one of its new 212 series yachts are underway. In the meantime, I thought I’d share my thoughts on a recent captains’ conference (see photo) the yard held. While the weather then clearly looks pretty miserable, trust me when I say the captains’ dispositions were a lot sunnier.
In and of itself, the conference wouldn’t normally be a news item I’d write up; after all, plenty of megayacht yards host these meetings, where often the captains are wined and dined. The difference this time is that the captains’ opinions were actively solicited for how to ideally design a yacht. The captains sat down with the yard’s design and marketing staffs and voiced what they liked and didn’t like about everything from engine-room configurations to the locations of helipads; they even debated the merits of diesel-electric versus traditional diesel propulsion. Of course, thy were also asked how crew’s quarters should be arranged, something far too few owners take into consideration. (Usually the room left over after spelling out where to put saloons, gyms, and other owner and guest areas gets relegated to crew, when really crew and technical areas should be the first things chosen: Without a happy crew or accessible systems, the ownership experience is guaranteed to be miserable.)
The part I really like about the Amels’ captains’ conference, however, is that they were given a blank outline of a yacht’s decks and to-scale cutouts of rooms so that they could plan out their ideal general arrangement. Imagine being able to improve not only your own ability to do your job (after all, some of these captains will likely run future Amels’ launches) but also the yard’s ability to delivery high-quality yachts.
As you can imagine, the captains greatly appreciated being asked for their opinions. Here’s hoping Amels commits the comments to memory and applies them with future series-builds (no doubt the yard is already planning some). And here’s hoping other yards borrow a page from Amels’ play book. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of the concept being applied, but it certainly is a rarity.
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