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Earlier this year
I made the chance acquaintance of Hans Staals and his latest project,
a Cape Scott 85 called Amnesia IV, all tented over with construction plastic
in a marina in Vancouver, British Columbia. Staals is a big, affable Dutchman
with a background in building and maintaining commercial fishing boats.
The 85 was “almost ready to go,” he told me as we proceeded
along a side deck littered with tools and the inevitable detritus that
gathers at the feet of boatbuilders.
A mechanic surfaced
from the engine room at one point, proffering chunks of a ZF controllable-pitch-prop
mechanism. “Broke,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, don’t
worry,” Staals replied, “I’ll just weld it,” pointing
with a pen he’d extracted from his blue coveralls.
Assurance suffused the
remark. I remember thinking that neither broken parts, gathering detritus,
nor any other force of man or nature would likely stand between Staals
and the completion of this ABS-classed passagemaker.. I also remember
thinking that the 85 appeared to be a veritable hotbed of savvy engineering
and well worth a boat test.
So a few months later,
with Amnesia IV newly ensconced in her element, I returned to Vancouver
for another look. Staals and I immediately repaired to the wheelhouse,
where Pat Bray, the 85’s designer, was waiting with several members
of his staff and owner Erwin Krieg.
An atmosphere of quiet
expectancy prevailed. The fact that the only main, a naturally aspirated,
1,300-hp MAN diesel one deck down, was already idling at 575 rpm was virtually
indiscernible—the PMY sound meter registered just 56 dB-A at the
helm station (65 is the level of normal conversation). Staals explained
that the main deck underfoot was a seven-inch-thick sandwich of Divinycell-cored
fiberglass, rock-wool insulation, marine-grade plywood, and various layers
of Soundown acoustical material.
I noted none of the
tenderness that sometimes characterizes displacement hulls at rest, even
as large motoryachts passed by, piling substantial wakes into our slip.
According to Staals, this was due to the damping effects of the 85’s
two-part stabilizers, each with a fixed, bilge-keel-like “rolling
chock” or fin and an articulating surface abaft it.
We hit the trail. Our
test boat was outfitted with two Kobelt electronic engine controls, one
for propeller pitch and the other for throttle. Getting out of the slip
entailed simply separating the boat from a finger pier with two 50-hp
hydraulic thrusters, bow and stern, and then, with the throttle holding
at 575 rpm, advancing the pitch control to 50 percent. In seconds we were
merging with the traffic on False Creek, doing five knots and bound for
nearby English Bay.
Next page >
Part 2: I loved driving the 85. > Page 1,
2, 3, 4,
5, 6
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