Designing a Boat For Our Personal Use

Why We Chose to Design Our Own Boat

I’ll begin with the best piece of broker’s advice I ever received: “If you truly want to go sailing, don’t leave it too late.”

Two years later and still about 18 months from launch, that message rings louder than ever. If your hair is grey and your teeth are… negotiable, then perhaps it’s time to stop dreaming and start building.

For us, one truth became clear: I only get to play if my family gets to play and enjoy it. My wife, Sebrina, is claustrophobic, which ruled out monohulls immediately. She likes space, openness, and airflow. So we turned to catamarans.

Exploring Catamarans… and Their Limitations

We chartered a few cats, went to boat shows, and completed several deliveries. They were enjoyably stable at anchor and comfortable underway, but if the destination is your priority, you end up motoring far more than expected.

Add my age into the equation (I’m in my 60s), and the practicality of leaping across wide catamaran decks began to fade. That pushed us toward motorboats.

Searching for the Right Philosophy

Growing up in the UK, I watched Gilligan’s Island on a black-and-white television. Much of American recreational yacht design seems to lean toward that “down east cottage” style—big, wide, and heavy on interior volume. Lovely for island-hopping on a perfect day, but the sea is rarely kind and almost never predictable.

So we kept searching:

• Converted fishing boats

• Trawler yachts

• Commercial hulls with yacht conversions

We traveled extensively (Covid restrictions and all) to inspect likely candidates. I managed to show Sebrina some absolute eye candy—beautiful, shiny, and elegant but with questionable stability. Then, on the same trip, we toured a homely, purely functional design with impeccable stability.

A lightbulb moment. The stage was set.

Form Follows Function: Finding the Right Design Language

I’ve always admired the philosophy pioneered by Steve and Linda Dashew and their FPB series. Circa Marine no longer builds FPBs, but the idea has become its own genre: efficient, long-range, low-resistance hulls that prioritize safety and performance over gloss.

We wanted:

• A stable hull whose motions could be softened

• Excellent fuel economy and truly global range

• A yacht economical to build, own, and operate

• Something we could specify ourselves—not someone else’s dream

• A vessel safe, robust, and capable of reaching remote, rarely visited coasts

• A boat that looked like a working vessel outside but felt like Aladdin’s Cave inside

Choosing the XPM78 Platform

That search led us to the Artnautica XPM78 design, built by Naval Yachts in Turkey.

The Vanguardour boat is Hull No. 2 in the XPM78 line. She’s a 78-foot, 60-ton aluminum-hulled explorer yacht built for long-distance passage making with a small crew. Every component reflects decades of lessons learned on and around boats.

This is her story: a yacht designed not to impress a marina, but to cross oceans safely, efficiently, and comfortably. A boat created for our personal needs, for the life we want to live, and for the voyages still ahead of us.