Perini Navi - Maltese Falcon; Sailing Yacht

Superyacht Cup 2007

Every day of the regatta the vast 88m (288ft) three masted Maltese Falcon built by Perini Navi left everybody in awe including experienced yachtsmen. The remotely controlled free-standing carbon fibre rotating rigs, complete with 18 yards are a technological masterpiece, setting 15 in-mast fuling square sails operated by 75 electric winches aloft. The detailed design, testing, planning and engineering for such a vast and untried project is difficult to comprehend and the execution is an outstanding testament to all invloved.

For the final day of The Superyacht Cup it was possible to see the awsome offwind power of Maltese Falcon in action. Rather than the typical offwind problems of large sailing superyachts where exrtra crew are required to handle gennakers to give any reliable offwind performance, on Maltese Falcon the helmsman just bears away and the square sails instantly offer maximum projected area.

On the final reach to the finish Maltese Falcon was sailing close to 20 knots pushing a large bow wave in front of her.

New Book on Tom Perkin's quest to build Maltese Falcon

On July 3 David A. Kaplan's new book, "Mine's Bigger": 'Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built' was due to be released.

"Tom Perkins had a dream. It wasn’t to get rich, acquire power, or marry fame. As the man most responsible for creating Silicon Valley, he had done all that. His venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers remains the most celebrated money machine since the Medicis. He’d helped found Genentech and fund Google. And in 2006, his resignation from the Hewlett-Packard board of directors triggered the revelation of a spying scandal that dominated the front pages. Along the way, he also managed to get himself convicted of manslaughter in France and to become Danielle Steel’s Ex-Husband No. 5.

No, as hit his 70s, Perkins wanted to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever–the “perfect yacht.” His fantasy would be a modern clipper ship–as long as a football field, 42 feet wide, with three masts each rising 20 stories toward the heavens. This $130 million square-rigger–the Maltese Falcon–would evoke the era of magnificent vessels that raced across the oceans in the 19th century.

With keen storytelling and biting wit, Newsweek’s David A. Kaplan takes us behind the scenes of an extraordinary project and inside the mind of a larger-than-life character. We discover why any sane man would gamble a sizeable chunk of his net worth on a boat. We meet the cast of engineers who conspired with him. And we learn about the other two monumental yachts just built by gazillionaires that Perkins is ever eyeing. In a battle of egos on the high seas, Perkins loves to preen, “Mine’s better! Mine’s bigger!” On the Falcon’s climactic voyage across the Mediterranean–1,600 nautical miles from Istanbul through the Dardanelles, to the Greek Islands and Malta, by Sicily and Sardinia, and on to the French Riviera–we revel with Perkins as his creation surges along at record-breaking speeds.

This is the biography of a remarkable boat and the man who built it. More than a tale of technology, Mine’s Bigger is a profile of ambition, hubris and the imagination of a legendary entrepreneur. And in the end, too, it is a story of love and loss.".....Kaplan

Buy the book, see more photos, watch a video...at Kaplan's website:
http://www.davidakaplan.com/

Perhaps one should read the comment on this book on the website of the Falcon......www.symaltesefalcon.com

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