Superyachts: Ship shape

British companies are making waves in the superyacht sector, discovers Tom Otley On a warm English summer’s morning, the sight of large superyachts in the blue water off the small tourist port of Falmouth might seem incongruous, for this isn’t the Mediterranean, but rather Cornwall. The overnight train here from London Paddington might be called the “Night Riviera Sleeper”, and the fishing town of tight cobbled streets lined with pastel-coloured shops selling nautical souvenirs is undoubtedly beautiful, but it is so in a very English way. Yet peering through archways and alleys leading down to the sparkling River Fal, the huge multi-storey vessels are often present. Shipbuilding in the mighty yards of northern England and Scotland fell silent in the 1960s, and although the industry will never fully return as the skills and infrastructure have been lost, in its place companies such as Princess (Southampton), Sunseeker (Poole) and Pendennis here in Falmouth are seeing some success at the top end of the market. According to the UK Marine Industries Alliance, the leisure, superyacht and small commercial marine industry was worth almost £3 billion in 2012/13, of which more than a third was from international trade. The latest Superyacht UK Survey, published in 2014, said the industry was worth more than £492 million in 2013-14, up 7.1 per cent on the previous year. For those of us whose boating experience might be Mirror dinghies and the odd flotilla holiday on the Ionian, this is the stuff of lottery wins, although even then it would have to be a multiple rollover. To buy a new superyacht (a vessel over 24 metres), you not only need tens of millions for the purchase but an income in the millions to keep it in working order, in a marina, and with a permanent crew on board. Pendennis builds bespoke superyachts but most of its business is in rebuilding and restoring vessels; steady work compared with the more cyclical new-builds. It’s not just that billionaires like to keep their boats, well, ship-shape – it’s a condition of them continuing to be insured, since most superyachts need to have an extensive programme of maintenance and surveys every five years to retain their rating. A short walk from the centre of Falmouth towards Henry VIII’s Pendennis Castle, the Pendennis buildings sit in four hectares of the Falmouth Docks. Recent expansion has seen a single hall replaced with two 90-metre-long warehouses alongside a further 45-metre double-width hall, workshops, a hospitality suite, an 85-metre mast shed and a 640-tonne travel hoist. Throw in a new 7,564 sqm non-tidal wet basin large enough to fit several 40- to 50-metre yachts (or a larger 110-metre-plus yacht), and the pride in joint managing director Mike Carr’s voice is unmistakable. “Nobody in the UK can offer this and the shipyards in Northern Europe that can, don’t have dedicated superyacht facilities,” he says. The cost of all of this isn’t cheap – £23.8 million in the past three years (it had a turnover of £36 million in 2014). Still, it takes more than impressive facilities to tempt superyacht owners to place their vessels in your shipyard. Carr is clear that it is Pendennis’s workers that give it an advantage, possible because of the location, and partly through apprenticeship schemes. “Cornwall has always been an industrious engineering-led region with, for instance, good electrical skills coming out of the mines, as the standards in the mines were very high because of the explosion risk. And in Falmouth there were core skills which survived: fabrication, pipe work, mechanical skills for engines, but there wasn’t necessarily the management or the know-how to package those skills for this market,” he says. To augment the skills base, Pendennis introduced two apprenticeship schemes for 16- to 19-year-olds, with more than 170 young people passing through these programmes since 1998, starting with electrical, joinery, fabrication, mechanical engineering and surface finishing skills. “We started looking at it when we had about 140 people, because we were finding it more and more difficult to fill some positions,” Carr says. “In Cornwall, you think 30 miles is just around the corner, but on country lanes it’s a long way, so we had to get people locally, and we needed to train them so we could have the quality and the customer service. It’s slightly altruistic because we wanted to give something back to the community as well.” Carr says that with the company focusing on bespoke yachts of 30-100 metres, both sail and motor, “the technical nature of these yachts and the quality you have to achieve goes up all the time”. One of the ways his skilled workers continue to improve is by repairing yachts from top builders around the world. “We’ve worked on Feadships [Dutch motor yachts], as well as Italian and American boats. We also get involved in technology projects – such as the HEME [High Efficiency Marine Energy] project, looking at new ways of powering a boat more efficiently through better battery technology and capturing energy that would otherwise be wasted.” The reputation Pendennis has acquired means the yard has five or six projects booked for winter, with summer slightly quieter. The range of work is impressive, from giant motor yachts to new-build versions of the classic J-class racers of the 1920s, such as Lionheart, Ranger and Velsheda, all of which were in Pendennis’s Falmouth yard in recent years, and which were racing one another only in June. After leaving Falmouth, yachts can continue to be serviced in the Mediterranean by Pendennis’ s refit facility in Palma. The yard is wary of giving details of the boats it is working on, not least since a simple Google search can identify the present owner and all previous proprietors. It did make an exception for Malahne, an astonishing restoration of a motor yacht built in the UK by Camper and Nicholsons in 1937. Over a 30-month period it was stripped back to its bare bones and then restored, although to modern maritime requirements. It has art deco-influenced interiors by Oliver Laws Ltd, also responsible for the redesign of the public areas of Claridge’s hotel in London. It’s a stunning feat, but one that demonstrates the range of skills the yard displays. From the reimagined 1920s racing yachts to the status symbols of the world’s oligarchs, there doesn’t seem to be much Pendennis can’t turn its hand to. In this corner of the UK, the marine industry is going strong. pendennis.com