5. From BEOWULF to WIND HORSE - Steve Dashew on the Birth of FPB Explorer Yachts - Berthon International Yacht Brokerage

Sue Grant sits down with designer, yachtsman, and long-time friend Steve Dashew to chart the leap from the record-setting sailboat BEOWULF to FPB 83 WIND HORSE—the boat that founded the FPB explorer-yacht line. Steve recalls why he and Linda built a fast, easily run sailboat, the two-handed 300-mile days they logged, and the stormy passage that flipped a prejudice against powerboats on its head: a broken boom, a hard motor-sail home, and a revelation about comfort, control, and speed. That moment led to Wind Horse—long, lean, efficient, and conceived from a sailor’s priorities: steering control, gentle motion, accessible systems, and high average speed. Sue and Steve dig into tank-test lessons, why 10–14-knot passages transform routing and safety, and how two people can realistically manage a serious ocean machine. They close with how those ideas became a family of 18 FPB hulls—powerboats designed by sailors to go farther, faster, and in control.

Transcript

So, this is another podcast from Bertham, and we're speaking today, or I'm chatting today, to one of my favourite people on the planet, yacht designer, yachtsman, and great friend Steve Dashie, who of course is a legend, and I really wanted to have a chat to him about FPB, his sailing yacht Beowulf, and really importantly about FPB 83 Windhorse, which is the genesis of FPB, a range of incredible explorer yachts, of which there are 18 hulls, and we've been absolutely thrilled to be involved with their development and build, sort of in a very small way, and to watch as these yachts have just done incredible things and continue to do so. So, we'll start with Beowulf, and what made you think about a motor yacht, and what happened, because I know Beowulf sold very suddenly, and you and Linda decided to go a different path. That would be a really long story, but it comes down to the fact that we really enjoy sailing by ourselves, and I almost always have another boat that I'm sketching on within a year when the current boat goes in the waters, because everything is so new and fresh, and you can observe, you learn things that become second nature about the existing design, which makes it easier to see what she would change in the future.

So, when we sold Beowulf, we really weren't looking to sell her, but she got involved in a fight where one person was trying to buy another person's company, and one of the engineers wanted one of our boats, and we weren't doing it anymore, so it got to the point where to keep peace in the family, we had to sell it, and so we were then faced with a basically four-year project to design and build a boat, and that would put us in our mid-60s, so we said, is this realistic? Can we continue to sail these large boats on our own? Yeah, so can you just, can you just, I mean, most people listening to this will know, but can you just explain about Beowulf, because she wasn't kind of any old sailboat. Big flat top main, and... So, Beowulf was probably the boat we would have designed in the first place for us, but she was too radical. I mean, that was our house budget, and we only take little steps.

She was basically like a big planning dinghy, and she would plan like crazy, but 14, 15 knots, she wasn't too heavy, had a clean bottom, she'd be off on her way. We would normally use 300 miles a day, that was the minimum number of trades, sometimes a lot more than that. And what was she overall? Just so that everybody can bear in mind, there was you and Linda, who isn't a big person.

She was 78 feet overall. She had, she was a, I would call her a cat-headed catch. She was, the mizzen was almost as large as the mainsail.

Main was 90, 95 square metres, the mizzen was 89 or something, and our working headsail, the sole type of jib, was 65 square metres. And the first sail off the boat, normally when you, when you were, if you're going to manoeuvre, like sail in the anchoring, which we normally did, even if we made a passage out of power, we'd like to end the passage and begin another sail. We would roll the jib away and then ease the main down and travel a little bit, and then she'd just, you just put the helm on and she'd tap and jibe.

And if you wanted to sail backwards, we had mizzen spinnaker, mizzen hensel sheets that went to the end of the mizzen boom, and we would bring those forward, and we'd steer in reverse with the mizzen, leaving the main just, and so like, and we were long-time members of the Teague Yacht Club, and occasionally we'd be there for race week, and we would go up to head of the anchorage, sail a short gap through the boats, and then we'd back into where we were, drop the hook, freak everybody out, but it was great fun. And she, she was, you could say she was a handful that sailed, but she, she was a very stiff, and we had, we carried upwards of three and a half tonnes of saltwater balance if we wanted to power up, and so she did, she didn't move very much, but a lot less than most powerboats, and everything led to the cockpit. It was difficult if you had two spinnakers up near the jibe.

That took some time. We, we didn't do many races with her, but we did occasionally. Occasionally we wanted somebody.

Well, you took quite a few records, didn't you? Yeah, we, I think we had for a long time the fastest passage from Norfolk, Virginia to Antigua, which was five days and three hours. That's a, that's an interesting passage, because there were two boats the night before the race, were walking down the boat to our dock, and you know, we were probably maybe at 58 or 60 at that point, so really ancient compared to most people, and there were these four young kids, they were on a switch, that's a French cap switch, something like 64, with dagger boards and rotating masts, and they were grumbling and chatting. Well, Skipper was bringing more than one t-shirt and half a toothbrush in, and she said, what's the deal? I said, we're about to beat Beowulf.

Oh, I heard that. I said, oh yeah. So the, that, that got me way more interested, and then we had, we had another person that we knew that had bought a, said everybody wanted to buy our boats, he bought a Open 60, and he, he was going to beat us, and so the first 24 hours were, it was a northern hour against the Gulf Stream, and so what you really had to do for the course, they could reach across, it was like a beam reach across the Gulf Stream, and the northern Gulf Stream, of course, the waves were stacking up pretty good, and then you sort of turned the corner weather-wise, and it was a race to a, to a band of light air.

If you could get through that quickly enough, you'd have fair winds all the way to the islands. If you didn't, you could have a really slow passage. So in the first 24 hours, we put 100 miles on the cap.

If they ever had a chance against us, it was power-reaching, because they had a stability advantage, and so we, it was a one-world call after they, everybody gave their permission. We had to work really hard, just the two of us, and so we turned the corner on the weather, and now we got the breeze, we're sailing pretty deep, about 140 degrees true, which is just a little bit too deep for, for a sort of optimum VMG. So we're jibing downwind, yeah, we had, we had to do 18 jibes of the missile spinnaker, and the main spinnaker, in a one-hour period, in a one-day period, and we were averaging about three and a half minutes down from, from optimum speed, and, and the forward spinnaker was easy, we had to, you just swap the sheets, but on the missile spinnaker, we had to drop it here under the, around the leeching of the, of the main zone, that hoist back up, that took a while.

Anyway, we were jibing the boat, the two of us, about every hour and 15 minutes on the windshifts. We, we ended up, we made it down in five days and three hours, and the switch cap was the second boat in, they were two and a half days behind us. Fantastic.

That was, that was really fun. So we, we didn't want to give it up, and there was a, there was an adrenaline rush that came with sailing maybe over two, it was just almost unlike anything else I'd ever experienced, that it was, it's, it's not only the feeling of the boat going through the water, but it's the feeling of the boat going through the water with the two of us driving. If we, if we had crew, a totally different situation, then you just, you know, you expect to go forward, and the, well, she, the sails, and the sails were heavy, and the rigs, everything was big by human standards, but for both her sides, she looked like somebody forgot to put the upper half of the rig on.

Most people look at her and think, what's, you know, what's with this boat? But she, we, we have, we did have a couple records that were against, where other people had been in records, but one was going back to, and keep it for a moment, they have a, a, a race from Dehay at the North End of Guadalupe. Every year, it's kind of a feeder race, just, it's kind of a fun race. People go down to Dehay for the afternoon sail cross, and then they come back and race back.

So we went down, and the year before Mari Shaw had taken an hour off the, Mari Shaw three was a, I think, 140-foot Rion boat, beautiful boat, very quick, and she took an hour off the record at eight, it's a giant, 167 foot, it's good, it's that year before that, and everybody, until people were leaving the sail down, and they got the thing that showed virally, and fell on the VHF radio, and that's what was happening. Okay, boys and girls, nobody has to worry about the record this year, and because of what, what, what's in the previous year. So we get down there, and both my daughters were there, we came to visit, and my older daughter, Elise, had our two-year-old granddaughter with her, Emma, and her, her husband, Todd, who was a Navy guy, but had been 20 years in the Navy, he was not a sailor, he didn't know anything about sailing, sailing was a race, or anything else, and we hit the starting line, and had the two big, the code zeroes up, and we planed all the way across, I mean, we hit, we're on our, we're on our bow wave, we made it three hours and five minutes, so we're, we're coming into the, the mark of the downwind, to maybe 200, 300 metres off the beach, and anybody makes a mistake, and we're on the beach, so I started to, we took the business, we took the business of Hensel down, and then we took the, we took the forward Hensel down, the big Hensel, because I just don't want to take a chance, you know, some line gets crossed, or Todd makes a mistake, and before we know it, we'd be in the sand, so, turns out that the race committee didn't expect anything for another hour, they just barely got there to take our time, so we took, we took an hour off of the, Mario Schott's record, now, and to be perfectly honest, the next year, we went again, and, and Mario Schott came, we were, we sailed head to head, and she was in, in, in 14 knots of breeze, true, in our mast head, she was doing 17 knots over the bottom, she was an incredible piece of machinery, but they owed us, they owed us an hour on handicap, and we, we raced them for a case of beer for, I said, that's not a fair handicap, we'll, we'll, we'll sell it for 35 minutes, and we beat them on our 35-minute handicap, so we got a case of beer out of it.

Fantastic, so, Beowulf is sold, you want to go fast? So, we, we looked, we looked very, our first instinct was, build a fast sailboat, and what we did, at this point, we knew enough about what made Beowulf go and what we wanted to do, well, I thought that if we got, if we took the, took the hundestad controllable pitch prop off, which is very draggy, even when it's feathered, and went to a, a lifting keel, daggerboard, and, and, and to carbon fibre spar rigging, we, we could pick up enough performance on, on the boat that we would hit the, the 300-mile-a-day mark in a, in a fourth, or fourth and a half less breeze, where it took about 16 to 18 knots, depending on true wind angle, to, to have us average our 300-mile-a-day, and in current configuration, I think we could get that down to 13 or 14 knots, and what happens in that gap, in the, that improvement, mostly, is the sea state goes down significantly, and it's not a comfort issue, it's, it knocks the boat around, and, you know, foils have to work harder, and, and Beowulf is very much, in all these boats, very much a current wind machine, so they're, they're, because they're so light, and they're so clean underwater, the, the horsepower goes up with the square of the increase in, in, in wind strength, but the drag on the boat doesn't, so, because she, there's, it's just, when the surface is linear, this wave drag goes crazy, and these boats don't have, they have very little wave drag, because they're so light, so, but if we could push that, that, that speed down another notch, it'd make a huge difference, I mean, we'd be up 360, 370, and we'd be doing 300, but anyway, but that didn't, it didn't involve us doing, we thought we had another classic, we weren't particularly happy about, and we went, we went, they took it as far as having Richard Down Honey at High Modulus Plastics, that they were bought by Gert or somebody, I'm not sure, and, and Richard's a good friend, they, they did a complete structural analysis and weight budget for us, and it gave us a price on material, so we had that control, and we talked to Ian Franklin, who, in those days, was considered the, was probably the premier plastic boat builder in the world, certainly in South Africa, because not everyone, and we, we got numbers from him on a plastic boat, and the big issue, of course, was tankage, you know, plastic, but we had, we had that sorted out, and the lifting keel, it would have been a hell of a sailboat, but the reality was, as good as it was, it was, it was not going to get a lot of mileage without us on board, by ourselves, so, but we also took a look at a, at a high-performance cap, which is a larger version of our last cap from back in the 70s, just two 70-foot hulls, very simply done, an accommodation pod in the middle, nothing except storage in the hulls, and all watertight bulkheads, it would have been a two and a half times wind speed boat, any, any kind of breeze out there, but you've got this almost 30-foot wide thing sitting on the end tide somewhere, that, that was, we weren't going to cruise on that, so we, we didn't really think, the power, I grew up thinking powerboats are anathema, they're just, you know, they come into a beautiful, beautiful, pristine anchorage, they don't anchor terribly, maybe a four-year generator keeps you up all night, and smoke cigars in the city, in the cockpit, very rude people, generally speaking, that was your impression, that was my impression, and from sailing dinghies for years, you know, if, if you had a crossing situation, and this powerboat could speed up and throw a big weight at you, they would always do that, I wasn't really a powerboat fan, but we had talked to, we had several friends in circumnavigating on them, and it was one of the times we were going around, and I never understood the concept, it just didn't make any sense to me, because of the various safety issues, and speed issues, and I mean, our, our sailboats were faster under power, they had a range under power than the trawlers, but I kept thinking about it, and I didn't really have a plan that I felt comfortable with, it was in the back of my mind, and so we're, now we're fast forwarding to, and when we're getting ready to have Bela go to her new home, we were just, we've been on the east coast with a boat header, we've done, you know, this cruising racing back there, and then we bring her out to the west coast, so we thought we wanted to go back to South Pacific, and we're, it was in, I think it was May, relatively early in May, so way early for hurricane season, and we were, we just passed, we had a fair breeze, which is nice sailing, and the breeze started to pump, and in a fashion which is like, it's trying to get its act together in terms of the vertical dynamics, and the wind structure, and that's interesting, and I'm talking to one of the kids, and they're, they're calling what, we had a phone in the boat, one of the old-fashioned sat phones, and they're calling the weather, they don't know, we don't know anything about hurricanes, this doesn't look normal, yeah, so about four hours later, we had a really nice, we start seeing banded rain squalls, when we see these, just, they're like horizontal bands, and occur while there's only one place to get banded rain squalls, and so now I know we've got a problem, and so I'm telling the kids to see if, see if you can look at the cloud top temperatures yourself, because somebody's missing something, and what was happening, I'm sure what was happening was that the weather routers were, whoever was doing our routers couldn't be bothered, and he was just looking at the NOAA forecast, or the Marine Correction Centre forecast, and they hadn't tuned into it yet, if he looked at the cloud temperatures, they could tell what was going on, but anyway, they did, so the breeze now is only about 35 to 40, and, and the squalls are coming through, they're shipping maybe 30 degrees in squalls, not too bad, nice sea running, surfing, well, we dropped the mizzen, got a roll, so we just had just a mayhem, no hassle, the boat's surfing along, all about thriving, nicely, and this was, it was late in the afternoon, and earlier in the day, a seabird of some sort, I don't know what it was, had landed on the, on the masthead carbon fibre wand, which we used to extend the, the sensor up out of, hopefully out of the upwash, off the, off the roach in the mainsail, and it was about eight, that's two and a half metres long, it had a horizontal leg up maybe 30 centimetres, and so in landing on, landing or taking off, unbeknownst to us, the bird cranked it, it rotated 30 degrees, which we didn't see, and then shortly thereafter, one of these squalls comes through and is driving the boat, and, or keeping an eye on the autopilot, was driving the boat, and wham, the boom comes across, this is a, this 95 square metre mainsail, on a boom with about a two and a half metre overhang, the, the boom section was the same section as we used on the mainsail, and, and internally reinforced, same sections on the main mast, and it had about a two and a half or three metres out past the sheet provision, so, and it, that's where, that's where the highest stress point is, we expected a break, but we never, you can't calculate loads like that, and so, so now we're sitting there with the waves going 35 to 40, and squalls coming through, and, and we've taken a visit down to, we're running, we have just under the engine, surfing down these waves, and, and having the weather, to worry about the weather, and the boom is now hanging off the clew strap, and what's keeping it from dropping all the way are the three internal reef lines, that, that, the, the clew reef saw went through the centre of the boom, fortunately, um, and if the, if the, if the boom comes across and hits one of the pilot house windows, obviously it'll go off, we didn't want that to happen, so, in order to get the sail down, we had to get the boat in the wind enough where the sail would come down on deck, but if the, the steering head versus the wind head, very precise, because if not, you're gonna, you're gonna put Pocahontas in the, in the pilot house, or take somebody's head off, so I, I told, I told Linda, I said, this is kind of critical, you have to concentrate, otherwise the boat's gonna sink, and you're gonna kill me in the process, so she appreciated that, I was making a joke, but it was actually true, she did an absolutely perfect job of feathering the boat, and we got, there's maybe a, a, a 60 centimetre wide area where the boom had to drop, so it would, it would not damage the house, but we could get it under control, which we did, and it was no big deal, we cleaned, we cleaned up the reef line, which was dragging all over the place, and, and so now, what we're doing, we're, we're heading up the coast, it's blowing, blowing really hard, and, and we don't have any weather forecast, so we really had no choice, we just, we just ran with it, and, because we knew, when these things start moving from that part of the ocean, you remember, they're gonna go to the north, north, they can run up and see or they can go out to the west, so we didn't think, we, we certainly didn't want to, behind us, which is what we thought it probably was, so we, we got the boat cleaned up, and started powering, and all of a sudden, we're doing 13 and a half, 14 knots, surfing down these waves, with the, hardly any fuel being burned, and I thought, geez, but, you know, we're still, we're sort of, like, how are we going to get the boat close, and what, maybe we'll fix the boom, and so we get, we get into a bargain, and cleaned everything up, and started thinking about, here, well, you know, back from the power boat, we'll use the Vizint to steady us if we need it, and we'll just power home, which we did, and that was a revelation, because the bail was very light, very light sailboat, and particularly those kind of boats don't like to go into the seasick, they, they tend to paddle, but, but she was extremely flying forward, her half entry angle, I think, was 13 and a half degree, very, very fine, by sailboat standards, and so she actually got out pretty, pretty, pretty readily, the only time we ever, we ever slowed down was in bringing the boat from Panama in the Christmas trains to the West Indies, where, where it was really steep, and going hard, and we, we wanted to stop and take showers, and have dinner, and, but in this, 40,000 miles of per hour, that was the only time we ever slowed down for motion, anyway, so we got back to, to our berth there, behind a friend's house, and we had a really easy trip up the coast, now, we'd done enough motor sailing, you know, that would be expected, but this was something, it was just different, it wasn't, and it got us thinking, and so we started noodling, and, not seriously, but, and then these folks that were debating who was going to buy whose company, and they, somebody came in with, they really wanted to do the deal, and we didn't want to sell the boat, so it worked out for everybody, and so we had to make a decision, but we went into, into, into the design process full steam, I, we had not committed to a powerboat, it was such a, such a foreign entity, and, and we, I, I couldn't get, I remember you caught, you, you called it an un-sailboat, initially, yeah, and, um, I think most people, most people know what FPB really stands for, oh, that's a secret, but anyway, well, I, I mean, I can't say, because we usually put a, an acronym like that on, on, you know, on, on, it's, we worked on somebody's boat, that relates to somehow to the project, and I, I remember, I can't believe I worked on a fucking sailboat, on a powerboat, and, which is, after having owned, owned it, and done, done wonderful things for us, I still felt, I was embarrassed when I came in on the anchorage of FPB sailboats, because I'm a powerboat, anyway, the, the, um, we went, we did a lot of preliminary work, and we taught, we had a number of, of good friends in the Indian, marine industry who had done many miles, um, on, on, on the powerboats, and particularly trawlers, delta type trawlers, et cetera, uh, and they were all very helpful, but, um, uh, Bruce Kessler, Bruce and Joan Kessler were good friends, Bruce is gone now, but, um, Bruce was one of the, probably the, the, the real pioneer in, in the trawler business, because he and Joan had a, had a period when delta was really the, the, the commercial, crab fishery was very slow, delta built him a, uh, one of their, uh, limit sailers, which is like a 140-foot boat in an 83-foot hull, huge monster heavy thing, um, that, uh, was designed to work carrying all kinds of crab pots all over the place in, in the Bering Sea in the wintertime, and they took that around the world. Bruce was into, into sport fishing, and so, um, uh, he was very helpful in what they did, but they had another boat made by another company, and so we went out on a sea trial on a Monday in Fort Lauderdale, almost flat calm, and the motion was so bad in those conditions, I almost got seasick, and I said, we had some of his friends on board, and Bruce, what are you guys doing when you have a real sea run, and he said, we don't, or we keep bucket sanding, um, and that was from, coming from our perspective, that's what I was really concerned about, and so, finally, we did enough work to, to think that we could, although all of my neighbourhood architect friends said we were crazy, but we knew from, from, we had lots and lots and lots of power and data on our sailboats, and the kind of hull shapes we had powered very nicely, and, and they were very efficient, um, they hopefully would power at 10 knots for about 2.7 gallons an hour, US gallons an hour, um, and it, it was just astonishingly, astonishingly efficient, but the, we should, we should do that for, I think, over 2,000 nautical miles under power, um, but the, the, the, there, there's always a question, I mean, if we're going to do this, we're going to spend a lot of money on it, and, um, when you do something that's different than everybody else, you have to be sure as soon as, there's a reason, there may be a reason why people don't do this, that, that you have a thought about, so we, we did a lot of due diligence, and then, in the end, um, uh, I, uh, we had, who ran the, the, the test tank, towing tank in Newfoundland, uh, they, which escapes me now, but they, they, at the time, they were the tank of choice, and, uh, Bruce Farr and, and other, uh, America's Cup and, and Woodbred, other world race, anything, were using their tank to tow it, so they were used to, to, to towing what, what, like, fuel bodies, and Lee gave me, Lee told me what we did, we raised a couple hundred thousand dollars, and he made a really good deal, it was, it was about 50 grand, and, and it's a lot of money, but it was, we were buying some insurance, and I was really after the tank, what, the, when you interpret the data, you have a, a realm scale number that, that makes it very, it's, it, you can't just multiply it by some scale factor, you have to allow for realms numbers, different, differentiation, a bunch of other stuff, it's very hard to interpret the data, to get accurate information, other than comparing it to some unknown entity, what I was after was what did the wake look like, if, and what, what the power, if I saw those, if they agreed with what we thought we would get, then we would go for it, so we, we did the tank work, and, and they did some simulations for us, uh, for, for, for sea state, and, and we, we, we did some testing where we looked at what kind of aeration we get to the rudders and props, um, and we identified that as a potential problem, in heavy going, um, and so we, we pulled the trigger, and we did not know until we had put the boat in the water if we made a huge mistake or not. And, and what, what was it, what was it like, the first trials, did you get an immediate sense that actually we haven't made a mistake, and this is special? Well, what happened was, too, I, I, in, in the year, in doing sailboats, you know, we, we've been, we've, we've been using VPP for, in sailboats since the 1970s, in fact, Baywalt 5, my, Maywalt 6, uh, our last catamaran, was probably the first, uh, the first, uh, boat of the eight yard age type that was on a parametric computer-driven exercise for design, um, a good friend of mine, Norm Risa, was, uh, the, worked at JPL, and he, he was the, the chief engineer on the, on the hypersonic wind tunnel that were being built here in other parts of the world, uh, and, and on the solar simulator that they built, the test satellite there, and in those days, uh, everybody worked on a, on a mainframe that, that you fed with punch cards, and so Norm had an account, we could run stuff on the weekends and nights and weekends when it wasn't busy, I, I still have some of the output, so Baywalt 6 was actually designed on a Caltech mainframe, which is pretty radical, uh, so we, we came back and, and, um, uh, we looked at all this data and, and we thought, it's got, it can't be wrong, it has to be right, I mean, we have, we know what the boat, uh, what the, what the motion's like now, the main difference in terms of hull shape, for instance, these long, lean canoe bodies we've been drawing, is we don't need as much stability, so if we take stability out of the boat, then you can, then you can refine the bow section, the stern section, and one of the things, one of the things that we knew from, from, uh, a long history trying to have, like, cruising sailboats that steered, that steered easily, uh, and you could steer it out in heavy weather, is that you really need to have balance.