Hakvoort News

Hakvoort on Discovery Channel and Youtube

One episode of "Super Yachts" on Discovery Channel showed the Hakvoort yard. For those who missed it:

Hakvoort episode Superyachts - YouTube

Here are links to 6 of the episodes, unfortunately for me they are not in English.

?????-????. ????? 1. Discovery. ????????? ????? ????? ? ?. ??????????? (??????????). - YouTube

The series was never broadcast in the US or England http://www.***********/discovery?steID=1&catID=2109 so maybe those of you living in the countries lucky enough to have the series distributed could send us links as no matter what the language I will still enjoy the video!?

Here is where and when the Icon video aired.

ICON YACHTS IN DISCOVERY CHANNEL'S SUPERYACHTS - Icon Yachts

Perhaps someone in those countries can find us links?

YN248 build progress

This are two photos (taken today) of the YN248; Some new parts of the Aluminum superstructure are placed.

Note the huge "garage doors" on both the port and starboard side of the ship.

Photo courtesy: André from Stentor Yachts "Liberty"

This morning when I woke up and turned on the tv to a morning channel the first subject was about the Hakvoort yard in Monnickendam.
The village has a little problem concerning Hakvoort.
The Hakvoort yard wants to Built 2 big new sheds in the coming 5 to 10 years in the centre of the village, but this beautiful authentic village doesn't want to have the modern new sheds.

Hakvoort says it needs to have bigger sheds to be able to compete with the other yards and if they to don't grow they will slowly go out of business.
When the interviewer asked why they don't go to the outskirts of the village to built the new sheds the answer was quite strange..........Hakvoort said that other yachting companies that had changed their location all went out of business.......?????

Hi,

That answer probably sounds better to the majority of viewers who have no idea about the business better than saying we hadn't thought of that or there is not enough water or the land owners want too much money etc.

In this case, I also believe its a bad excuse. But I know of one other well known dutch yard (yacht builder), where the change of its original location at least contributed to its downturn.

changing yard locations in netherlands

I would like to share few comments;

- dutch employees are not willing to move even close distances like 20-30 km to new locations. could very well be related with transport by bikes;
- due to very strict environmental restrictions, it is very difficult and costly to develop a close by location;
- business does not pay enough return to enable yards to move and invest completely in new locations.

Nilo, I am able to buy all of your arguments. Especially yout last point, is what happend to the yard, I mentioned above. But as a very long term buyer of dutch boats, I would like to add one or two more important points.

When a well known custom yacht builder stops listening to his repeated buyers and tries to talk them into their purely profit orientated new building technics and existing designs, just to make them pay for their new vast building facilities, may find out, that he looses this customers (for ever). And if on top of that, the owner of that company lives at the other end of his country and only shows up in his office rather few and far between, he might not even recognize going out of business.

But the biggest problem seems to me, that more and more yacht builders see their salvation (future) in building bigger and bigger boats. I know of a (dutch) yachtbuilder, that had sworn only a few years ago, to never build boats bigger than 80 ft. Now he is advertising plans of boats of 140 ft+. Or one famous megayachtbuilder, which assured everybody less than 5 years ago, he would never built bigger than 250 ft, if at all. He is now extending his shed(s) to be able to build yachts up to the 290 ft / 2999 GT border (Which is a big step).

Will say, constant growth does only works, if the profits pay for it and you do not leave your buyers behind. We have a very old saying in Germany: "A Cobbler should stick to his last". I think, there is still some truths in it.

New renderings of project "Golden Age". Looking good!
http://www.***********.com/yacht/golden-age?type=construction

The treatment over the forward facing windows on the main deck is really interesting.

Those "louvers" (for lack of a better term) forward, along with the continued theme aft (one deck lower) make me think of the art-deco cars of the 1930s...

Maybe someone with more knowledge of design & architecture (Lars?) would know the term.

Since the links no longer work to find them open you tube and in the search window put "discovery channel yacht" or "discovery channel superyacht" and the Hakvoort episodes will show in the list along with some other great yacht videos in English.