Now you can land a helicopter on a sailing yacht! Leave it to Ed Dubois and Alloy Yachts to engineer a client’s dream-come-true. Designing a 178-foot sloop that could land an EC 130 jet helicopter alone wouldn’t have been easy, but Tiara’s owner also wanted a performance yacht with relatively shallow draft. This influenced her length and sail plan and necessitated a hydraulic lifting keel. Tiara’s 208-foot, seven-ton carbon fiber stick by Southern Spars is the maximum for a yacht that transits the Panama Canal and allows her to set 27,000 square feet of sail. Swept-back spreaders hold the mast in column while hydraulic rams tensioning split backstays are lowered to the deck and the furling boom is pulled off centerline to admit the helicopter. With so much hydraulic power in play, Alloy also ramped up the sail-handling system. Just as the yard created new captive winches to handle the unheard-of loads developed by Georgia in 1999, Alloy invented variable-speed hydraulic vertical winches for Tiara capable of winding sheets under load twice as fast as any previously available.