Too Good to Keep
Champion raceboat designers Carkeek Design Partners thought they were drawing a new one-off world cruising cat for an experienced yachtbuilder’s personal use. Things didn’t quite turn out that way…
Some of the best yachts are created when a raceboat builder wants to go off cruising with his family and has a boat designed for personal use. Thus it was (initially at least) for the Carkeek-designed Seaquest 46, which has exactly the right sort of pedigree. It’s built by Mike Eaton, whose highly regarded racing monohulls such as the Prima 38 and RP36 have proven themselves to be excellent all-rounders. Shaun Carkeek’s wide-ranging successes across many strands of highperformance sailing are already well-known to most…
However, instead of going off cruising himself, Eaton has put those plans on hold and put the Seaquest 46 into production. It’s the first model in a new range of catamarans, built in Dubai where his shipyard has been based for most of the last 20 years. Before he’d even started, the first two Seaquest 46s had already been sold off plan.
An Eaton-Carkeek collaboration is bound to produce an interesting, innovative and refreshingly different boat. Sure enough, the Seaquest 46 looks distinctly unlike a typical cruising cat, both above the waterline and below. It’s sleeker than most, with cleverly concealed davits and no need for an unsightly gantry mounted aft. And it breaks some of the multihull industry’s basic rules, like the one that says all hulls must be fat enough to fit queen size island beds fore and aft.
The Seaquest 46 does offer queen size berths in up to four cabins, but by not having walkways on both sides of them you get hulls that are much more hydrodynamically efficient. While the volume inside the hulls is a bit smaller than average, the above-average size of the saloon more than makes up for it. As Eaton says, in this sort of boat most people spend very little time down below. Saloon size is what really matters.
Another defining feature of the Seaquest 46 is that it’s designed from the outset as an all-electric boat (a diesel-electric version is also available). Both versions have enough regeneration capacity via the twin propellers at seven knots of boatspeed to be self-sustaining on passage, even when running the air conditioning and other hotel systems. There’s additional power from a huge expanse of solar panels on the roof, which has a long aft overhang to maximise the size of the solar array, plus a small diesel generator for backup and emergency use.
The silent running of the electric drives is a big boost to quality of life on board and their immense low-end torque is a real boon for manoeuvring in port. Another advantage, which isn’t so obvious, is that the propulsion system has a fixed weight so the hull design doesn’t need to allow for the large fluctuation in loaded displacement – about 800kg on a 14-metre ocean cruising cat – between full and empty tanks of fuel.
