Boat

Geoff checking the weight of his new boat.

The Boat is Bold Explorer, designed by Bruce Roberts and built in the UK for the operating company Sail UK.  She was built in 2002 to Category “O”, unrestricted worldwide operation.  Category “O” is the highest regulatory standard governing commercial vessels and defines the requirements for their stability, construction, machinery, operation and manning.

Bold Explorer has already sailed around Iceland several times, around the British Isles and the Orkneys and the Azores several times and Madeira, The Canary Islands, The Cape Verde Islands, St.Lucia, Martinique and St.Marten.

Bold Explorer is a Bruce Roberts 434D design.  Essentially she is a steel, hard chine hull with a deck saloon cabin, bermudan cutter rig, fin keel and skeg hung rudder.  Her originally intended design details (from the plans) are length overall 43 foot 4 inches,  length on the waterling 36 ft 8 ins, beam 13ft 6ins, draft 6ft, displacement about 16 tons, including about 5 tons of lead ballast and with a sail area of 895 sq ft. and Cp 0.58. 

However, Bold Explorer is special! With her lengthened transom her overal length has grown to about 45 ft.  She has been constructed to ice class, and in places her steel plate measures 18 mm thick (over three quarters of an inch)!  This is as thick as some of the tankers and cargo ships that I helped design and build in Wallsend in the late 1970′s and early 80′s, for example: http://www.shipsunderway.co.uk/shell_marketer.htm.  The result is that Bold Explorer weighs in at nearer 20 tons - about 20% up on the original spec!