| Perini Navi | 88M | "Maltese Falcon" | 2006/23 |

Interesting Photo Set

Found this interesting set of photos by Tim Wright of the Falcon at the St Barth's Cup
http://www.photoaction.com/index-1.html

..click on St. Barths 'Bucket' 2007,
..then chose Maltese Falcon

Luff Rope Details?

Does anyone have knowledge of the 'luff-rope' details on Maltese Falcon??

I use the word 'luff-rope' (for lack of another word) for the edge treatment of the sail that must follow some grooved track in the yardarm?

Thanks, Brian ! The best photo-series of MF I have ever seen !
I never knew whether I would like the Falcon or not, but since I visited the Bucket, and after having seen her, I fell in love with her : she is anchored or sailing so impressive..........that she is very,very high on my list as "favourite yacht" !!

Getting Aquainted

She kind of grows on you, doesn't she? I wasn't so sure I'd like her when I first saw the drawings

Sea Trials

...another excerpt from Kaplin's book...


"After the customs shipment appeared, after we lifted anchor and docked alongside a tanker to take on 20,000 more gallons of diesel fuel, we set out for the ten-day shakedown cruise through the Dardanelles, into the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean, on to Malta and up to the Côte d'Azur and the Italian Riviera. At that point, the Maltese Falcon had sailed only one day in her life. This was unusual: sea trials for a new yacht typically lasted for weeks to ensure that everything worked and that the boat wouldn't sink under the stress of wind and seas. But the two 1,800-horsepower engines had performed flawlessly, the electronics showed only minor hiccups, the experimental sailing rig was still standing, and nothing leaked. And Perkins was in a hurry. He wanted out of Turkey, where he had spent parts of five years while overseeing the Falcon's construction—often living aboard a motor yacht he kept docked at the shipyard. He'd had enough of the noise of all-night welders working on freighters the next dock over, toxic fumes from the painting shed, metal scraps in his scalp—and the nasty stray cat in the shipyard he named Satan. He wanted the open sea.

The sea was his sanctuary—all the more so after the death of his beloved wife of thirty-three years, Gerd Thune-Ellefsen Perkins, a decade earlier. Perkins knew the Mediterranean and Caribbean better than his own San Francisco Bay. Untethered to the worries of everyday existence, life on the water seemed to allow Perkins to escape to a world of beauty, freedom, and on-demand solitude. He could brave the elements, yet live in the rarefied luxury of mahogany and cabernet. He could test out every new technology and gadgetry that an engineering geek loved, yet have chefs and stewards to cater to every detail of his needs. His 138-foot old schooner Mariette had given him the chance to compete on the European racing circuit with a classic yacht. His 154-foot Andromeda la Dea allowed him to cruise the oceans and circumnavigate the globe; on that ketch, he had sailed to Antarctica before rounding Cape Horn, criss-crossed the Atlantic seven times, and in a victory of happenstance over prudence, survived the 'perfect storm' of 1991 near Newfoundland that killed at least 12 people.

................

Day by night, as he experimented with the Maltese Falcon's sail formations and angles of attack on the wind, Perkins absorbed himself in his technological masterwork. Most of the time, he seemed to prefer that obsession to the corporate intrigue he thought he'd long gotten out of. No longer was he on the board of thirteen public companies at the same time—chairing a record three of them on the New York Stock Exchange. The Falcon was the crowning achievement of his half-century of yachting. It was to be his retirement project—actually, given the boat's mammoth size, it was to be his self-described 'retirement village.' As the maiden voyage got underway that morning in July 2006, Perkins decided he'd try his ****edest to stay on course with what was supposed to be the trip of his life.

It was a journey long in the making. Perkins had gotten what he wanted most of his life. The Falcon was the ultimate prize—a boat nobody else could have conjured up, a fantasy that made him a visionary, a fool, or both. Nearly six years earlier, he had decided to create 'the perfect yacht.' Given both advances in materials science and the explosion of dot-com lucre, two other American tycoons were attempting about the same thing. All the better to Perkins: he wanted to make the best boat, but it would even more satisfying if he could beat out others while accomplishing it. 'Mine's bigger,' as Perkins liked to say, meant somebody else's needed to be smaller. In a kingdom of haves, he had to be a have-more. Temperamentally, constitutionally, pretty much clinically, Perkins needed to be in a battle of egos on the high seas. After all, there's not much fun in winning a competition of one.

Perkins's 'clipper yacht' was intended to evoke the era of magnificent vessels that once raced across the oceans. But his 1,367-ton square-rigger would be more New Old Thing than mere tribute to the past. It was a futuristic marvel born of modern technology and design. Gone was all the rigging: there were no ropes, no wires, nothing to support the masts or the horizontal yards, or to control the fifteen sails carrying nearly 26,000 square feet. No longer was there a score of deckhands to climb the rig to furl and unfurl every sail. Instead, the masts were entirely freestanding and, unlike masts on any other boat, they were not stationery, but rotated. The sails were deployed at the push of a button, rolling out from inside each twenty-five-ton mast. Dozens of computers and microprocessors—connected by 131,000 feet of cable and wires—integrated the whole thing, allowing helmsman and crew to control the boat nearly effortlessly. And unlike the clippers of yore, with their vast, white expanses of billowing canvas, the Falcon's sails in effect formed a nearly flat vertical wing on each mast. Conventional clipper morphs into fin-de-siècle machine—a marriage of old and new, or a mutant of tradition? It depended on your perspective.

Damm the risks, damm the uncertainties, damm the costs—it was full-speed ahead. That was the Silicon Valley ethos that Perkins was so elemental in establishing. Now he would change the culture of sailing. Part art, part science, and part magic, sailing was a way of commerce for thousands of years. It had been the instrument of global discovery going back to antiquity. It was a romanticized sport of kings since the seventeenth century. Sailing was no longer necessary to travel the world, but it remained essential to Perkins. Sailing was beautiful, dangerous, enduring, primordial, noble. Sailors reined in nature and harnessed the wind——yet were at their mercy. Tom Perkins resolved to leave his mark on that long arc of history and imagination—in short, he intended nothing less than a sailing revolution. And a vessel through which his boundless ego could be expressed—the largest privately owned sailboat on the planet, the Maltese Falcon."

This is the story of that yacht and the man who built it.

Excerpt from Mine's Bigger: Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built by David A. Kaplan (HarperCollins 2007).

Rail Down View

...great view, courtesy of marine photograher Amory Ross

If the intent of that photo was to make the viewer want to be on board, it worked.

Does kind of make you want to be there, doesn't it.

Too bad I couldn't get the whole length of the photo in to the width allowed on the forum, as the extended back deck creates yet another different perspective, especially with the two crew members standing at the rail

This photograher, Amory Ross, does a great job !!

Falcon at Ft Lauderdale Show?

I saw a brief hint that Maltese Falcon might appear at the Ft Lauderdale show. Does anyone have such information??

I've heard the same. But don't know any other details.

on 60 Minutes

If anyone sees this message they are due to have Maltese Falcon on 60 minutes in a few minutes

Just watched it. Learned that he has two yachts?

CNBC presentation

Here is another nice presentation that appeared on CNBC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Mvu57FP3c

...this posting appeared on another forum, but I thought it was appropriate enough to post here....Brian

For anyone who missed the show, here is a link to the Perkins interview with the MF segment.

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_vi...ml?id=3450746n

IMHO, the interview was terrible. Leslie Stahl and the 60 minutes producers had an obvious agenda. The questions about not being able to stand having a woman in a position of control were clearly setups, with any reference to what the women in question had done edited out. (Fiorina: forcing an unpopular merger, losing profits and stock value in the process of trying to integrate two disparate corporations and cultures. Dunn: Secretly investigating top HP employees and board members, authorizing criminal fraud to obtain copies of personal telephone records.) The questions could have been phrased in the context of power struggles between board members and top management, but that would have been accurate and not nearly as controversial. Too bad no one in the "news" business has the guts to be a real journalist anymore.

One telling Perkins comment was left in, although glossed over. The venture capital firm Perkins co-founded in 1972 is one of the most successful in the world, and it loses money on 8 out of 10 projects.
__________________
Best,

Charlie

I agree, there is obviously a hidden agenda! I wonder what flavour dip the presenter would like with that chip on her shoulder?? (sorry for the poor humour!)

James

A video celebrating the birth of Maltese Falcon, courtesy of Perini Navi (I thought I had posted this, but I guess not)

http://www.*****.com/SynfoTV/synfotvLargeScreen.asp?video=1078

Thaks Brian,

It's a great video but no sound or commentary! Do you know if there is a sound/commentary version?

Coffee Table Book

...in case you haven't seen the ads for this new 'coffee table book'..


"The Maltese Falcon"
by SuperYacht Art, 240 pages, hardcover. Published by TRP Magazines, printed by Butler & Tanner. 50.00 GBP.


The Maltese Falcon is certainly one of the world's most recognisable and impressive yachts, but I must confess that I was less than impressed with the look of it's superstructure. To my mind's eye, square rigs belonged on wooden vessels from the 1800's through the end of the clipper era. Tossing three columns of what appear at first glance to be updated Chinese Junk rigs onto a modern Perini Navi hull seemed, well, odd.

It wasn't until I viewed a long piece on the 60 Minutes television show about the boat and its owner Tom Perkins that I got past my prejudices to look a bit deeper into the technology behind the boat, and when this huge coffee table book landed with an audible thud on my desktop I began to look with real wonder at just how Perkins brought his childhood dreams to fruition:

"Cutty Sark was the iconic clipper, capable of running before strong trade winds at speeds over 20 knots and logging hundreds of miles per day. As a kid I studied her log books, which had been preserved and annotated by sailing historian Basil Lubbock. I must have been a hand aboard a clipper in some previous incarnation because I have always been drawn to these square-riggers. After decades of ownership of sailing yachts... I was still obsessed with the clipper square-rigger concept.

"So I wondered if it would be possible to bring forward the advantages of this design into the 21st century. Could one create a clipper which would be practical and not require dozens of young crew to set and hand her towering clouds of sail? My good friend Fabio Perini had built a superbly beautiful hull of 88m, but it remained unfinished. Might it be the platform for an entirely new idea? I asked Perini Navi to explore the clipper 'yacht' possibility. This triggered the submission of a plan by renowned Dutch naval architect Gerard Dijkstra which caught my attention."

The story of the build project and the engineering and programming needed to enable a single person to control all the sails and steering is astonishing. More than an engineering masterpiece, the rigging on the Maltese Falcon is functional sculpture. Wait until you see how the interior's been fitted out...

Thousands of photos from an array of world famous photographers including two of my favorites Carlo Borlenghi and Franco Pace.

This book is available for purchase by visiting superyachtart.