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Some years ago I wrote a piece for a British magazine about a Royal Navy frigate. A state-of-the-art anti-submarine warship, she displaced around 4,800 tons and carried me from the naval base at Portland down the coast to Plymouth, England, at 30 knots, thanks to two Rolls-Royce Olympus gas turbines. Mischievously, as we anchored in the sound in the gathering dusk, I asked the engineering officer to calculate his ship's fuel consumption—not in miles per gallon, but in feet per gallon. With a wry grin he duly did so, and the answer was 273. "Roughly," he added.
Two hundred and seventy-three feet per gallon. An insane statistic, obviously, and a mere footnote to the main story, which, after all, concerned a fearsome cold warrior, armed to the teeth with Sea Wolf missiles and nuclear depth charges. But just recently I hitched a ride on the first Pershing 115 as she cruised up the Italian coast at high speed, from La Spezia to the Genoa Boat Show, and I have to confess, I felt a similar desire to translate this turbocharged behemoth's prodigious appetite for diesel into everyday language. Just how far would a gallon of Kuwait's finest take her?
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It seemed an unworthy thought. It's impolite to bring such subjects up with boats like this. You focus on how beautiful they are, how fast they go, and, if you know the owner well, how much they cost. But nevertheless, with two 3,700-hp V-16 diesels in the engine room and 40 knots on the log, such things do cross your mind.
Astonishingly, Pershing boss Tilli Antonelli didn't think 7,400 hp would be quite enough for some owners, so each 115 is built with a central molded-in stern pod, ready to accommodate a TF50 gas turbine. The extra 5,600 hp this brings to the party should push the 115's top speed up to around 55 knots (63 mph), with cruising speeds in the high 40s. As for what it will do for the boat's fuel consumption—well, it won't be pretty.
Even without the TF50, the Pershing 115 is quite a piece of work. Antonelli takes great pride in creating driver's boats, with exciting performance and sweet handling. And although even his sternest critic would probably cut him a little slack now that he's building boats of 100-plus tons, the gargantuan 115 turns out to be as great a ride as all her little sisters. There's that familiar dramatic heel when you crank the helm hard over; a tight turning circle; taut, assertive seakeeping; and a solid, thoroughbred feel. Acceleration is an inevitable victim of the physics of power to weight, but it's still not at all bad—have a look at that curve on the boat spped graph. As for top speed, this boat takes no prisoners.
Weird as it seems—and believe me, in a boat of this size and displacement, it did seem weird—I found the 115 almost as much fun to handle as the superb 62 I'd tested a couple of weeks before.
The 115 is a true Pershing and a great piece of engineering. Getting a boat like this right is impressive enough; getting it right the first time is extraordinary. Yet Antonelli told me that this prototype reached 42 knots the morning after launch (with a clean bottom and clean waterjets) and added, perfectly straight-faced, that they'd found the center of gravity to be four centimeters off. "But we're happy with that," he said, cracking a smile.
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