Luxury Yacht & Speed Boat

Sunseeker’s latest 37M Trideck Yacht, all 121 feet and 180 tons of her. This is a yacht with  four big en suite guest cabins, an improbably large, full-beam owner’s suite, and an upper lounge/bar that seems almost as generously proportioned as the main saloon below. The sheer quantity of internal volume available for the accommodation seems to be the result of some cunning sleight of hand, as if it has been borrowed from a bigger boat.

Although there has been some clever lateral thinking, the idea has come not from bigger boats, but from the smaller sport cruisers that have been Sunseeker’s stock in trade for decades. At a stroke, simply raising the foredeck has given the owner’s suite the best of both worlds: the width of the yacht’s full beam, combined with the light and window area of the main deck. In spite of first impressions from outside, the fore­deck slopes upward from the bow to the wheelhouse windows and is reached from each side deck via a set of steps just for­ward of midships.

Not content with that, the designers then took the idea upstairs and stretched the upper lounge and its attendant “balcony” across the full beam, too, giving the upper deck the sort of floor space you’d normally expect only on the main deck of a yacht this size.

Space: Like oxygen, you take it for granted until you find yourself without quite enough of it. Which is why on boats it’s the ultimate luxury—particularly boats designed with the charter market in mind. The Sunseeker 37M satisfies both RINA and MCA regulations, and with two doubles on the low­er deck plus two min en suites with fold-down Pullman berths, this is a yacht that can accommodate up to 12 guests. Even with the option of a full-beam VIP suite instead of the two doubles, she still sleeps ten.

But, with its restful scheme of cream and beige, walnut ve­neers, and solid -walnut journey, there is nowhere in the guest accommodation that feels at all cramped. The guest cabins be­low are arranged symmetrically around a central lobby, which is reached down a spiral staircase on the starboard side, and each has an unusually spacious head and plenty of stowage. The crew quarters, three cabins with six berths plus a com­fortable dinette and auxiliary galley, occupy the forward sec­tions, accessed via the main galley.

The piece de resistance, though, is the master suite in the bow, which you find down the starboard corridor from the saloon, past the day heads. Here you enter full-beans territory, with huge superstructure windows that flood the space with light. The bed is offset slightly to port, making way for a pair of free­standing armchairs and a coffee table. The walk-in wardrobe on the port side forward does, for once, fully deserve that description, while the MSD and bidet have their own com­partment with a basin to starboard. Down four steps leading forward, you find yourself in a domestic-size bathroom, with a pair of sinks, a big shower on the port side, a bath to starboard, and plenty of floors between them.

In fact, deck area throughout the accommodations is always adequate or better, and no obvious compromises appear to have been forced on the design team. The main-deck saloon is a rational, light, and well-ordered space with squared-off sofas and chairs facing each other, a bar at the cockpit door, and the dining table amidships, close to the galley. This is just one of the tables onboard that can seat 12—there is another upstairs on the aft deck, partly shaded by the flying-bridge overhang, with its attendant lounge and bar. The cockpit, meanwhile, has seating for up to nine and a pair of coffee tables.

It is thanks largely to that dominating, split-level owner’s suite that the 37M has a world-heating interior. But for a marque as deeply rooted in offshore performance culture as Sunseeker, it was never going to be enough just to build a big, pointy yacht with plenty of internal volume. She had to per- form as well.

The hull shape is a typically Sunseeker deep-V, with a 20-de­gree deadrise at the transom and flat-top propeller tunnels to keep the shaft angle to a minimal 10 degrees. But there, in na­val architecture terms at least, the family resemblances cease. A yacht as large and heavy as this, with close to 1,000 hp between the smallest power option and the largest—there are three MTU engine options, from twin 2,335-hp V-12s to the 2,812-hp motors installed in this first boat—had to be de­signed for comfort and efficiency at speeds ranging from 12 knots for passage making all the way up to the high 20s. So as well as building in plenty of lift along the full length of the planning surfaces (dead rise amidships is a shade more than 20 degrees, and at the forefoot it’s just 30), key to the plan was putting the center of gravity far enough forward to eliminate any planning “hump” as the yacht gathered speed. The result, according to Ewen Foster of the Don Shead design office at Sunseeker, is “a non planning, hard-chine, planing hull. It just rises up and goes as speed increases. It’s more efficient and rolls less than a round-bilge hull, and it banks into turns— which is what people expect of a Sunseeker!”

Apart from Foster, who confesses to being “never satisfied,” the design and build teams are delighted with the perfor­mance of the 37M. During the 500-mile round-trip from the shipyard to the London Boat Show, the trials team recorded a best two-way average of more than 27 knots.

“We knew from the outset that this was never going to be a 30-knot boat,” adds Foster. He explains that so far over the model lifetime of the Sunseeker 105, the company has seen how much extra weight goes into a boat that has to satisfy var­ious new classification society rules for charter. There also seems to be more demand for increased fuel capacity and greater range. So with the 37M designed to fulfill both RINA and MCA requirements for large charter yachts, and with a bunker capacity of some 20 tons, her design displacement was calculated at 180 tons at half load—about double that of the 105. The initial estimate of top speed was around 24 knots with the largest engine option—a figure that everyone in­volved is now delighted to acknowledge as rather conservative. And while these 4000 Series MTUs are die largest engines that the machinery space has been designed to accommodate, the hull has been designed to cope with the extra power and speed of any future performance upgrade without modifica­tion.

The first 37M was sold off the drawing board—to Formula One team owner Eddie Jordan, who was also the launch cus­tomer of the 105—and the next two are already tinder con­struction. Build time is 40 weeks, and Sunseeker claims to have orders for three more.

The yard already seems to be looking further ahead. There’s talk of a 112-foot (34-meter), two-decker- but for that you might have to wait a little.