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Yacht Conversions

Discussion in 'General Yachting Discussion' started by Yacht News, Feb 28, 2007.

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  1. Yacht News

    Yacht News YF News Editor

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    It seems that converting older and old vessels into 'yachts' or at least that has yacht styling is quite a popular thing to do. We have seen many successful conversions over the years such as the Bart Roberts, Wega and so on. For the most part they people in charge of the conversions do quite a good job. One of the Latest i have seen is this converted tug. Her name is the M/Y Ariete Primo. She is 45M long and 9.5M wide, built in 1967 and refitted/converted 2006. She has a cruising range of 4000 NM.
    For more information refer to... http://www.fraseryachts.com/Charter/Yacht.aspx?ID=Y8976_MC
  2. KCook

    KCook Senior Member

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    I expect the original crew wishes they had that Jacuzzi pool! :D
  3. lurker

    lurker New Member

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    I read it somewhere that Bart Roberts was a lousy conversion job. Which is one of the reason why it had such a hard time on the market. Mind you that I think it was overpriced to begin with.

    The owner worked on the boat as project manager himself and I am not sure if he is really qualified for that job. I have also seen the pictures of the conversion progress, not all that impressive.

    Giant got some serious problems, too. Man that boat runs so **** dirty. I wish it can get out of the Med sea and stop ruin the air over there.
  4. Yacht News

    Yacht News YF News Editor

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    True: I have never seen a yacht put out so much BLACK SMOKE in my life as a ************ and enthusiast as the m/y GIANT.
  5. lurker

    lurker New Member

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    To be fair, not all converted yachts are bad. But in the case with Giant, if you they aren't even willing to spend money on the engine, you really have to wonder where else they have cut some serious corners. As much as I love yachting, we have to be reponsible to the enviroment, too. Of course two new engines and the cost of installing them with a conversion like Giant is not cheap, but get the job done right. I don't think the guest will enjoy the aft deck much with black smoking over their head.

    I have always wanted to get an aft house explorer yacht when I get older. A retired Canadian coast guard vessel can be a good candidate for conversion, though I am not so sure about that anymore with the expected high oil price in the future.
  6. Yacht News

    Yacht News YF News Editor

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    Yes, the Bart Roberts turned out to be a pretty ok conversion. She was an ex/ Canadian Coast Guard vessel too right?
  7. lurker

    lurker New Member

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    IIRC, she was. I think there were few ex-CCCG vessel on the market recently. One of them was a 214' offered by the same company that did GIANT. I kinda look into it, but once I saw the black smoke pumping out of GIANT, no thanks.

    The ex-German Navy research vessel Planet was on the market, I contacted them but they pulled the ad and told me that it was off market. Don't know what the story was. She is a beautiful ship, a bit too big as a yacht for me.

    Another issue that I have with conversion is that you really don't know what happened on that ship before. For all I know an ex-coast guard vessel could've pulled some dead bodies onboard during a rescue. Gives me the chills know that dead bodies were on my yacht.
  8. theyachtsman

    theyachtsman New Member

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    Sure looks pretty in the pics,although I guess thats the point,too bad
  9. Yacht News

    Yacht News YF News Editor

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    Another conversion project is the "Delta Bravo One". She was once an hydrographic vessel for the USSR but now she has been redone and is on sale awaiting an owner to buy her. They are asking 11 million for the 'yacht'.

    DB1.jpg
  10. Capt J

    Capt J Senior Member

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    As for the engines in Giant, it could be they cannot get the parts to fix them and changing engine types would be a HUGE project which would mean cutting half of the boat apart. I don't know. Just because a diesel is black smoking, does not necessarily mean it is wasting that much fuel compared to if it was running clean.

    I would have NO issues with what happened on a ex-coast guard vessel in it's past. You know that if you get into rough seas, it's going to be more capable then most of the Yachts built as Yachts.
  11. Marmot

    Marmot Senior Member

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    :confused:
  12. Henning

    Henning Senior Member

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    Personally, I don't think many commercial vessels make good candidates for yachts, hydrographics vessels and commercial passenger ships being the exceptions. The problem is hull form. Hull form is always a compromise tailored towards the vessels mission. Most commercial vessels have a large prismatic coefficient because their job is to transport as much cargo as possible. Efficiency isn't that large of a matter (until you get to the point of being unprofitable like with the SL-7s, Military Sealift Command ended up with them because no one else could afford to operate them), someone else is paying the fuel bill as in the end consumer. Operate it slowly enough and have it hold enough and it will make money. Nobody cares what it rides like either. On that front, tugs make absolutely the worst yachts. I used to run Invader class tugs for Crowley and can't count how many times I woke up on the ceiling or was plotting a position on the chart when the deck left me in mid air and the wheelhose side wall came and hit me with great force. Also these vessels are powered to be towing 730' barges at 12 kts. There's no sense in having 2-20-645-E7 EMDs at 3600hp each running continuously at 20% load to move just the boat around, and setting up a new running gear set more in tune with the power needs of the vessels new mission is an expensive exercise in impracticality, and you will still have a vessel that draws far more than is necessary because it had to be designed to resist a certain amount of tripping force from a towing situation gone wrong. If you don't balast her down to her design lines, you are quickly into a bad stability regime, so you have to pay to haul around a bunch of weight that you don't need, that's drag and that's expensive. Old OSVs, oilfield supply boats, are very slow for their horsepower because they are basically big square flat bottom boats with a short bow lead and square step up stern. They were made to maximize the amount of tank volume below decks. They have heavy "P tanks" mid ships that when you remove them, you quickly find you have stability issues which limit your deck load (in the case of a yacht conversion, the weight of the new house) besides the fact that they pound like the dickens when going to weather. Then there is the cost of actually bringing the interior spaces to "yacht grade", that's where most of the rest of the money is. Between the mechanical systems that need to be added and changed out, and all the fluff on the inside, you have 90% of the cost of the vessel. Why not spend the other 10% building a new hull which is designed to be efficient for the intended mission? You don't really save a whole lot by converting an old commercial vessel, and the ongoing waste in expenses due to inefficiencies very shortly far out weighs any savings on the build end. To me it's not a logical solution. Besides, by the time most commercial vessels are given up, it is because the vessel is no longer economically viable. Most of them are ditched (anything that Tidewater has up for sale, I promise you this is true) the majority of the hull metal is in need of replacing. If the boat can still pass class, or can be made to pass class viably economically, it will stay in commercial service. Usually the 20 and 25 year class inspections are the determining break points, because they are the tough ones. In my experience putting over a dozen boats through these inspections for companies, it's a 50/50 whether we do the repairs or take the boat out of service.

    I think it's a very false and uncomfortable economy converting old commercial vessels into yachts.
  13. Henning

    Henning Senior Member

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    :confused: :confused: :confused: Uhhhh, yes, it means exactly that. When you spew unburned and patially burned hydrocarbons out the stack, that means you did not harness their caloric value.

    As for Giant itself, I remember when that boat was sitting on the bottom in Ensenada.
  14. Henning

    Henning Senior Member

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    Here's an excellent example of another impracticality of a commercial vessel as a yacht. This one will travel quite well, but has limitations on its enjoyability. How do I get my guests in and out of the water? Yachts are quite often used to enjoy the water, where is the access to the water?
  15. Marmot

    Marmot Senior Member

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    You just won't give up will you? Is it some compulsion to post even if you haven't a clue what you are writing about? Gotta give you credit for having a rich fantasy life anyway ...

    Efficiency is the supreme objective of a merchant ship design. The ship has to operate efficiently in the trade it is designed for or it is worthless. Brand new ships have been scrapped without ever having been used because fuel costs increased or the freight rates dropped and they were no longer efficient the day they were delivered and were scrapped without ever loading a cargo.

    Operate it slowly enough? What are you smoking? The fastest merchant ships on the seas are containerships in the liner trades. They have to be fast to keep a worldwide schedule within hours and have to be efficient in order to make a profit.

    Everybody who ships goods or rides on a merchant vessel cares a great deal how it rides.
  16. Capt J

    Capt J Senior Member

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    Yes, that is true. BUT, it doesn't take a whole lot of un-burnt fuel to make black smoke sometimes. I lost a cylinder on a 12v71TI due to a split tip on an injector, the boat remained cruising at the same speed over ground, yet had 1 cylinder out of 24 not burning fuel, and it left a smoke trail so black you couldn't see through it.
  17. Henning

    Henning Senior Member

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    I did say that efficiency only mattered to the point of profitability and gave the SL-7s as a prime example of a series of ships that could not be operated at a profit by the commercial sector. Due to their ultimate speed though, they have been taken over to operate for MSC because they can get the Marines gear into position faster than any other ships. I'm pretty sure the only thing faster on the oceans is an aircraft carrier. Try to understand what I say, I know it's hard for you to comprehend sometimes because if more than 3 thoughts need to be considered at a time your brain starts to boil. A yacht makes no profit. It operates at strict expense. A commercial ship makes money. It doesn't matter how much fuel it uses so long as the cargo capacity and the billing ability for that cargo is greater than the costs of the vessel + operating costs. The increased prismatic coefficient is more than offset by the extra volume and weight of cargo it is able to haul. That is not true in a yacht. A yacht does not stack containers to the wheelhouse deck. It gains no benefit from the increased prismatic, it only sees additional cost burden.

    As for ride, you just made it very obvious you have never run or been on a commercial vessel, especially not an ocean going tug. The people who design and build them have crew as an after thought. The prime consideration is "How much cargo can we get on it?" Sometimes they have to consider "Will it fit through the Panama Canal?" They do not care if we get beat up.
  18. Henning

    Henning Senior Member

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    It was burning fuel in that cylinder, it was burning as much as it had air to burn, it was just getting a lot more fuel than air than it normally did. Your speed didn't change, but your fuel consumption did.