The largest boat currently racing in the Sovereigns Cup series at Kinsale is Conor Doyle's locally-based Xp50 Freya. For most of us, she's a biggy, and an elegant one at that. But if you were to exit Kinsale Yacht Club through its venerable original front door and amble town-wards along O'Connell Street, you'd soon reach the office of Rob Doyle Design, and find yourself grappling with decidedly abstruse concepts of big boat size several multiples of Freya.
For if you could inveigle your way therein, you'd find that one of the ideas they're working on is Project Fury, a concept 63-metre sloop-rigged superyacht which they're developing in tandem with Van Geest Design, with whom they're already working on two 52 metre sailboats under construction in The Netherlands.
He's used to dealing with big numbers – Rob Doyle in his Kinsale design office.
It boggles the mind as to why they've selected a name like Project Fury, but to get a notion of the proposed boat's size, there's some basis in the fact that 63 metres is 206ft, and therefore simple souls will latch onto the fact that she's more than four times longer than Freya. But that's only a distraction. Boat size increases volumetrically, and the figures zoom up exponentially.
It all looks clean and simple, but there's an enormous design challenge in having all sail controls effective yet invisible, while incorporating features whereby the stern area opens up to become an on-board lido.
Thus as Project Furey's beam is envisaged as being 43ft, while her substantial and several-decked hull depth is augmented by a large multi-storey coachroof, it could be argued that she's all of twenty-fives times larger than Freya, and it wouldn't surprise us at all to hear that the factor is much greater then that.
Either way, it's an awful lot of boat. Yet the two design teams are determined to optimise her performance, so there's a certain creative dynamic tension between the Kinsale team's tradition of elegance and comfort, and the Dutch group's fondness for lightweight yet hyper-strong austerity. Either way, some very advanced construction techniques and special materials are involved at every level.
For the rest of us, it all looks entirely off the wall. But in this even-more-crazy-than-usual world of ours, Superyachts are currently one of the happening areas of economic activity and realisation.
But whether we'll ever see her in Kinsale is another matter. Even if the draft can be adjusted to suit the available depths, the masthead will be scraping expensively against the cloud-base……
Imagine being on the helm of a machine like this – even the Masters of the Universe will have to form an orderly queue…..
