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Mark Grosvenor relied on his and his dad’s bluewater experience in building his salty, 96-foot Doggersbank Offshore motor yacht.
by Bill Ando
photography by Pamela Jones (Interior) & Stephane Bravin (Exterior)
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01/01/2005
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| Bloemsma & Van Breemen |  |
Although the
hull and superstructure are Lloyd’s-classed, the number of bow stringers was
doubled and two-and-a-half tons of additional steel were added to the original
design. Grosvenor says, “The steel is thicker than the design scantlings. We
doubled the thickness of the plates at the waterline.”
He didn’t want to deal
with storm boards and so insisted that Patriot be able to withstand a complete
rollover. To that end, all the windows are made of three- and five-layer glass
laminates with insulating air spaces between them. LePard jokes, “If someone is
shooting at the boat, stand behind the glass, not the aluminum!”
With a pair
of modest 385-hp 3196 DI-TA Caterpillar diesels and two Northern Lights
generators, there is plenty of room left over in the engine room for servicing
the equipment. The temperature in the machinery space is controlled to be 10
degrees warmer than the outside water temperature.
A copious lazarette
houses a dive compressor and the yacht’s exercise room. “It’s the same gym
equipment used on nuclear submarines,” Grosvenor says. An LCD TV and stereo
system provide entertainment during workouts. The watermakers, usually found in
the lazarette, are located amidships in the cofferdam.
In retrospect,
Grosvenor says he regrets signing with a smaller and relatively inexperienced
shipyard. He says the yacht was delivered late and substantially over budget.
Most bothersome, he says, was that his new boat suffered several critical
mechanical failures shortly after delivery, resulting in a series of delays that
significantly added to the final cost and resulted in altering his cruising
schedule. Despite these problems, Patriot already has two Atlantic crossings to
her credit, including one with Grosvenor’s 83-year-old mother, Rachel, aboard.
The boat cost more than he expected, he says, and took longer to finish.
“The good news, though, is that Patriot is in many ways a much better boat now.
We were lucky in a way that all these problems surfaced together, so we could
make the boat perfect.”
In the process, Grosvenor says, he has learned
several lessons, which he will apply to building his next yacht. First, he will
only contract at a yard with a proven track record of building to his expected
level of quality. His second lesson, he says, stems from the fact that when the
failures on Patriot began occurring, the builder’s contracts with its suppliers
prohibited him from dealing directly with the yard’s subcontractors. He had made
the mistake of taking delivery of his yacht without full systems documentation,
he says, so when things became contentious between himself and the builder, he
found himself painted into a corner with neither access to the original
suppliers nor the documentation new companies needed to make repairs. “I’ll
never let myself get put in that position again,” he says.
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