Sailing I

Nilaya Rises

WORDS: SAMUEL JEFFERSON | IMAGES: CARLO BORLENGHI & COREY SILKEN

Imagine cruising at 18 knots, hard pressed under sail, in total silence. For most of us fortunate enough to have ever sailed at this speed, we know this is a pipe dream; the boat will be groaning, screaming, juddering and slamming as she careers through the seas. Not so, for the owner of Nilaya. His elegant, seductive Superyacht slices silently through the seas at pace, like a knife through butter.

“She’s a joy to sail,” says Skipper Romke Loopik. “The owner has sailed since he was a child: dinghies, small yachts, you name it, he is crazy to sail, and now he has the boat that’s made for it. She’s sensitive on the helm, fast and quiet, unbelievably quiet.”

Nilaya is the 47m realisation of one owner’s vision of a yacht that both performs beautifully while looking exquisite and being supremely comfortable both on deck and below. Under sail, she may look effortless but behind her almost casual elegance are many hours of painstaking work: the design team strained every nerve to push the barriers of what is possible.

The Superyacht is the fruit of a collaboration between design house Reichel/Pugh, which drew up her lines, Nauta Design, which styled both the interior and exterior, and Royal Huisman, which built the boat.

The brief presented to this team was unbelievably tough. As an experienced sailor, the owner had campaigned the previous Nilaya, a 34m all-carbon maxi racer built by Baltic Yachts, successfully on the racing circuit. Now he was after something different. “I was previously Skipper of the old Nilaya and she was fast but, being all carbon, not that quiet,” Loopik explains. “The owner wanted to focus on cruising for his new yacht, so he wanted a boat that was less noisy at sea. At the same time, he wanted it to be two knots faster on every point of sail.”

This requirement for silence ruled carbon fibre out and presented her design team with something of a dilemma. “I started thinking that an aluminium hull weighs 60-70 per cent more than a carbon boat, but the weight of the hull and deck is only about 15 per cent of the total weight of a sailing yacht,” Nauta’s co-founder and designer Mario Pedol explains. “Our early intuition was that an aluminium construction sailing yacht could be much lighter than the existing aluminium fleet. Royal Huisman supported this vision with enthusiasm and accepted the challenging target of building a light displacement yacht.”

Having accepted the weight gain of building in aluminium, the team now went to great lengths to invert the pyramid. Royal Huisman turned to the European Space Agency to achieve its goal, adopting the same techniques in order to maximise weight saving. Known as Featherlight construction, this approach employs Finite Element Analysis or FEA, to allow the team at Royal Huisman to choose the ideal materials and thicknesses for exact stresses and loads on every part of the hull and deck. This meant the boat used composite construction in a far more wide-reaching way than ever before.

As an example, the team used Alustar, a composite aluminium alloy of greater strength to minimise the thickness of hull construction, while bonding carbon fibre to the aluminium to increase stiffness and strength in key areas while saving weight. Marry that to an obsessive approach to weight saving in the interior fit out and you have a yacht which, according to Pedol, has a hull 15 per cent lighter than a standard aluminium build. It’s a game changer; bringing the robustness of aluminium construction into the world of light displacement yachts.

In the meantime, the design team at Reichel/Pugh were far from idle, and adopted an incredibly exacting technique to ensure that the boat was entirely tailored to their client’s needs; spending many hours analysing prevailing wind and sea states in the owner’s favoured cruising grounds around Greece and the Caribbean checking that the hull could take full advantage of the conditions in these areas.

No stone was left unturned as they sought for the right hull shape: 15 prototypes were drawn up. It was at this point that the expertise of Mario Caponnetto and Francis Hueber was called upon. This pairing first came to prominence during the 1992 America’s Cup where their testing work on the Italian challenger Il Moro di Venezia won them great respect. Times have changed and the duo, still involved in the America’s Cup foiling boats, used their powerful Computational Fluid Dynamics software to develop the ideal hydrodynamic hull shape for Nilaya, which, beneath the waterline, features twin rudders, relatively broad aft sections with a double chine, plus a lifting keel which gives a draft of between 15-23ft.

Simultaneously, the ‘working’ area of the boat was put in the hands of Whitbread and Volvo Ocean Race legend Bouwe Bekking, whose expertise ensured that the running rigging setup was spot on. “Having Bouwe involved from the start was really important; he was very clear about what we needed – lots of hydraulic power for one thing – and he was also involved in the deck layout,” explains Loopik. “I was amazed at how he got all of it right in terms of the positioning of the kit. It was impressive and a joy to see – everything was right from the start and we didn’t have to move anything.”

On deck she features three distinct and separate lounging spaces. At the bow there is recessed seating which can also accommodate Nilaya’s tender, with a section of deck sliding back into place if the boat is in racing mode or on passage. The main seating area is in the cockpit aft of the carbon composite coachroof and features a targa top that can also be removed for racing. Head aft towards the transom and there is another lounging area based around the bathing platform, which folds out to reveal a broad teak stairway down to the water’s edge.The interior of the boat was designed by Nauta, with decor and styling by May Vervoodt.

The basic layout is set around the main hub of the wonderfully light deck saloon, which is the main social hub of the boat. Aft of this is the galley and accommodation for a crew of eight. Forward are the guest cabins and owner’s stateroom. Here again, silence and weight saving are the key, with sound attenuation studies leading to the use of sophisticated composite insulation panels of cork, foam, honeycomb and other materials.

So what’s she like to sail? Few know better than her Captain. “Since the build I have spent the last year and a half on the boat and she has been a joy to sail. We took her across the Atlantic last year and the owner liked it so much that we are going to do it again this year.

“She’s very sensitive: when you’re at the helm it feels like you’re sailing a much smaller yacht,” Loopik continues. “Upwind we’ve hit 18kn and downwind 22kn, but I reckon we can get up to 26kn in the future. She’s a proper sailing boat and the owner wants her to be properly sailed. We’re trimming constantly to get the last knot out of the boat – we need proper sailors because we are doing everything we can do to make her go fast – and the crew all enjoy it, which makes for a great atmosphere on board.”

In terms of long-term cruising plans, Nilaya has a wide-ranging itinerary for 2024-25. After crossing the Atlantic and enjoying the Caribbean season, she will head through the Panama Canal into the Pacific, and on to New Zealand.

It’s clear that Skipper Loopik is looking forward to it. “Nilaya is good for a long voyage – we’ve got everything on board that you need: paddleboards, mountain bikes, you name it – but she still sails like a dream. We’ve also got an owner who loves sailing, and a boat that’s made for it.”