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For 25 years, Jim Radley has been on a mission to own the perfect yacht.
by Shaw McCutcheon
photography by Jim Raycroft
11/01/2005
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| McMullen & Wing 84 |  |
For more than a quarter century, Jim Radley took notes on what seemed to be illogical things on his boats. He had owned several sportfishers, and moved
up to a high-speed production cruiser—all the while remarking to his wife, why
didn’t they do this? Or do that? Finally, she exclaimed, “If you’re so smart,
why don’t you design your own boat?” So Radley, an insurance executive, did
just that.
Virtually all the surfaces on Jariya are
curved. Custom-made sliding window doors, top, open from the aft deck into the
spacious air-conditioned cockpit. The master stateroom, middle, features
radiused crotch mahogany paneling throughout. The high-gloss paneling of the
salon, bottom reflects the owner’s preference for a stylish Italian
look. (Click image to enlarge)
Jariya is a high-speed waterjet-powered sport cruiser intended for
single-handed use. She has three staterooms, spacious upper and lower salons, a
disappearing galley, a covered aft deck—and a lazarette housing an 11-foot
jet-drive inflatable tender with an articulated crane/passerelle. While this may
sound mainstream enough, as the legendary architect Mies van der Rohe once said,
“God is in the details.”
On a recent Saturday in Fort Lauderdale, Radley sat
on a curved sofa on Jariya’s main deck and—with a mischievous smile on his
face—pushed a button. A large ceiling panel dropped, then slid into a
compartment between the overhead and cabin top, exposing the seating area to the
Florida sunshine. McMullen & Wing—the New Zealand builder that spent more
than two years constructing the vessel—had been unable to find anything in the
yachting supply industry that would allow the panel to hide within the overhead
when opened. With Kiwi ingenuity, yard engineers scavenged an auto junkyard for
a car-top mechanism to duplicate.
Radley’s team included Michael Peters Yacht
Design, whose Sarasota, Florida, company is best known for high-speed hull
designs, and interior designer J. C.
Espinosa, whose assignment was to
create an interior that resembled a “fine Italian suit: elegant and
stylish.”
Radley’s original list had called for a 76-foot cruiser that would
top out at 50 knots, but as the design developed, length increased, and speed
decreased. The first brief had also indicated a composite-built yacht, but
Radley settled on a composite superstructure over a less-expensive aluminum
hull.
Peters designed the hull with a relatively steep 20-degree deadrise
over a modified-V bottom, which gives the yacht directional stability at
high speeds and in rough conditions. These were needed, since
Radley chose the largest available power system—twin 2,000-hp V-16 MTUs
driving two KaMeWa A56 waterjets—to push the boat to 45 knots. Particular
attention was given to minimizing weight.
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