| Hargrave 108 |  |
After owning three Italian-built production motor yachts
progressing from 55 to 80 feet, New Yorkers Richard and Lynn Levy were ready for
a bigger boat with enough fuel tankage to take them to the Caribbean, Panama
and maybe Alaska. They had also developed some very specific requirements
based on their yachting lifestyle.
| Click on the Spec and Design tab at top to see complete list of resources. |
Shopping the marketplace with their broker and Steve Forrest,
their captain of many years, the Levys quickly discovered that the ability to
customize a production yacht to their requirements was harder than they
expected.
"What we were looking for was a builder who would give us
options," said Forrest. "The owners wanted a boat with generous outdoor living
space, a garage for a substantial tender, and they only wanted three staterooms.
You would think that last part would be easy, but for some builders, a
hundred-footer with three staterooms isn’t in their vocabulary."
 "Everybody kept telling us we needed more staterooms; well,
we’re not everybody, and we don’t need more rooms," added Levy. "Plus, I knew
range was important to us now. Our last boat only held 800 gallons of fuel; we
couldn’t go past the Bahamas on that." (Click image to enlarge)
Sensing his client was ready to make a break from production
boats, Allied Richard Bertram broker Bob Martin suggested Hargrave Custom Yachts
in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "The more I thought about it, the more I knew I
wanted to build something from scratch and assume all the responsibility that
entails," said Levy.
"I knew of people who had gone to Hargrave for the price. I
won’t tell you that I didn’t care about the cost, but I was shopping for
flexibility, for customization. The truth is, what was important to us was
getting the boat we wanted," said Levy. "In our design meetings, whatever we
asked for, there was no hesitation. Even when I said I didn’t want to carry the
tender on the flying bridge….They had never built a boat with a tender garage
before, but they got right to work and figured it out."
Beginning with a rough length of 100 feet, the boat grew in design to supply
ample room for the engine room, fuel tankage and the garage. In fact, the design
of 108-foot (32.9-meter) Freedom fairly revolves around the tender garage
and the articulating hydraulic rail launch and lift mechanism engineered and
built by Airtek. This hefty, gleaming stainless steel system snugly cradles a
15-foot Nautica widebody tender in its own storage bay fitted with watertight
access doors and explosion-proof lights, which are mandated for
the storage of an outboard-powered craft in a closed compartment. When the
garage door is open, the rail system slides aft at the touch of a button and,
after clearing internal structures, tips downward to ease the tender into the
water. Sea trials proved the design’s precedent-setting engineering when the
captain tried—but failed—to flood the space by backing down hard with the garage
door open.
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