8. The Best Ocean-Crossing Motor Yachts: Steve Dashew on FPB Explorer Yachts & Seagoing Comfort

What really makes a motor yacht safe, comfortable and capable of crossing oceans, not just surviving them? 

Sue sits down with legendary designer and lifelong cruiser Steve Dashew to talk about FPB explorer yachts, and why not every metal boat in the anchorage is created equal.

Now retired from full time yacht building, Steve and Linda have swapped FPB commissioning for land yachting in Arizona, photography, and a very serious Ford truck and camper project. But Steve is still studying hulls, watching the America’s Cup, advising quietly in the background and thinking deeply about what makes a truly capable long range cruiser.

Drawing on hundreds of thousands of sea miles, including Greenland, the South Pacific and long upwind slogs that most of us try to avoid, Steve explains why their approach was always “cruisers first, designers second” and how that changed the shape of FPB.

A core theme in this episode is the importance of consistently high average speed at sea. Many boats can post an impressive top speed in flat water, but very few can maintain meaningful pace through crossing sea states, head seas, or long downwind passages. Steve explains why average speed, not peak speed, is the fundamental pillar of safe passagemaking.

 A yacht that can reliably deliver consistently high average speeds unlocks shorter passage times, the ability to ride or outrun weather systems, and, most importantly, a calmer, more predictable experience for the crew. Comfort and safety are not separate ideas; they are linked directly to whether a boat can keep moving fast while keeping motion under control.

In this conversation, we dig into:

• Steve explains how maintaining 10–11 knots in real ocean conditions lets you stay with favourable systems, avoid the worst of storms, and dramatically reduce fatigue on passage. As he says, “If you can keep your average up, the weather works for you. If you can’t, it works against you.”
• Why explorer style yachts have exploded in popularity, and why many look like FPBs but do not behave like them when the barometer falls.
• The idea of yacht design as a zero sum game, where every interior gain, hull tweak or fashion line has a direct impact on motion, steering control and safety.
• How to evaluate an explorer yacht if you are planning serious miles: why you should sea trial in ugly weather, insist on going out when the broker would rather stay alongside, and look closely at the people behind the design.
• The difference between a boat that “can take it” and a crew that actually wants to keep going. As Steve puts it, successful cruising is about being mentally and physically comfortable, not just structurally safe.
• The story behind FPB 83 WIND HORSE. Steve and Linda staked their own money and miles on a radical concept that many experts said would not work. Tank testing, CFD and ratios got them part of the way, but the real proof came after 15,000 to 20,000 miles at sea.
• Why steering control is everything offshore. FPBs are designed to surf safely at speed, why many owners are initially afraid to do so, and how average speed around 10 to 11 knots lets you work with weather systems instead of being punished by them.
• The trade off between interior volume and true seagoing ability.

If you care about long range cruising, motion comfort, or are quietly shopping for an explorer yacht that can really cross oceans, this is a conversation worth your time. Steve is candid about risk, generous with hard won lessons and very clear on one thing: it is much safer, and far more fun, to go fast in control than to go slowly and suffer.

Transcript

The Best Ocean-Crossing Motor Yachts - Steve Dashew on FPB Explorer Yachts & Seagoing Comfort

Sue: I'm Sue Grant from Berthon, and we're just going to have a chat on Skype now with Steve Dashew of Dashew Offshore – now retired, but still a very keen observer and still mentoring and doing quite a lot in the yacht design business, thank goodness.

Okay, so Steve, we haven't done one of these podcasts for a little while and, although we talk all the time, we thought it'd be fun to record one. So now that you're not doing yacht designing and delivering FPBs 24/7, what are you and Linda getting up to these days – as if I didn't know?

Steve: I think we're busier in retirement than we were when we were working full-time.

We've been, of course, keeping up with what's going on in the yacht design world and particularly the America's Cup, which is just incredible. We've been spending quite a bit of time on our photography, which we've never had time in the past to pursue as much as we would like to.

We're doing a little consulting, and we've taken a Ford truck and put a camper on it, and totally redone the camper with yacht-style systems.

Sue: A land yacht.

Steve: A land yacht for sure.

So Linda decided that the interior aesthetics were lacking, so we ended up putting a whole new interior in it.

Sue: Yeah, yeah. And it's got a RIB as well that goes behind it.

Steve: Yeah, we decided we had to have a boat of some sort, so we have a six-and-a-half metre Zodiac RIB. I think they call it one of their industrial types. Actually, this particular model is used by police and rescue services on Long Island Sound. So it's perhaps a bit too aggressive for the Arizona lakes, but it gets us on the water.

Sue: Perfect. Fantastic.

One of the things that we notice – and you and I have chatted about this – is that since we stopped accepting orders for FPBs, there's been a growth, an exponential growth, in the explorer yacht market, and there does seem to be quite a lot of bare metal that looks a bit like an FPB about.

And you've looked at that too?

Steve: Yeah, we've been, of course, keeping our eye on what's going on in the marketplace. And actually we're flattered by people trying to imitate what we've done in the past.

When we were working together it was always clear to me that you guys came from a different angle. It wasn't about sitting in front of a computer screen. It wasn't so much about looking at dynamics and mathematics. It was more about real-life experience and building it, cruising it – all that kind of stuff.

Sue: Can you just go through that a little bit for me? Just unwrap that a bit.

Steve: How many days do we have to record? That's a very involved topic.

Sue: You've got 45 seconds, Steve.

Steve: I think the easiest way to answer that is to say that, at the end, yacht design is a zero-sum game, and anything you do within the envelope that constitutes the design affects everything else.

The way you make those decisions is a critical part of the equation, and everybody makes those decisions based on their training and their experience. Our approach has been different than anyone else’s because we are cruisers first and yacht designers second. We've always been trying to fulfil the goal of a “perfect yacht” and, in our case, because we like to travel, we love the high latitudes but we don't like to pay comfort or security penalties.

So everything we do in the yachts reflects that, which means you have trade-offs that are quite different to a more conventional approach.

Sue: Yeah. I mean, when you're building something – you know, an explorer yacht – if you go and buy a production boat, it is what it is. There's a spec and there are spec choices and bish-bosh.

But when you're building something like an FPB – something that's going to go to the Antarctic, have real capability and all that kind of stuff – it's quite a big deal.

So, if you were going somewhere where they were offering you an explorer yacht, how would you go about evaluating the right design package – that you're starting from the right hull shape, the right design from which you can build that boat?

Steve: That's a really difficult question, Sue, for us to answer.

We've had the benefit of all the modern tools: CFD, and we were probably one of the first or second people to use velocity prediction many years ago when it was brand new. But at the end of the day, it's the real-world experience that we have to make the decisions on.

No matter what the computing power, it doesn't tell you what happens in rough water. It doesn't tell you what it feels like after you've been going to windward for three or four days into a crossing head sea, with three or four more days to go, and what you feel like when you're on that passage. That's what focuses our design.

We don't have the time, and we don't really want to get into the details of what other people are doing. What we can tell other people is: just look at the boats carefully, look at the people behind them.

If you're going to go seriously cruising on any boat, you want to be out in gale-force conditions. It's a huge investment of your time and money – plus your security – and we would just highly recommend that you go to sea in some adverse conditions.

If nobody wants to go out with you, that's the day to go out. If the broker doesn't want to take you out, those are the conditions you really want to test the boat in. And then you'll know.

Sue: That's something you said that's really interesting actually, because a lot of people talk about whether the boat will take the seas and whether she's safe and all the rest of it, but you're talking about how the crew – how the people on the boat – are feeling when they're in those conditions. And that's actually just as important, if not more, isn't it?

No point having something that will take the punishment if she kills her crew while she's doing it.

Steve: Sue, you've hit the nail on the head there. The real key to successful cruising is being comfortable mentally and physically.

You don't really know what that is until you're trying to get through standing waves upwind or downwind, or you have a crossing head sea where there's no speed or angle that is comfortable. As you get tired on these longer passages, the accelerations of the boat, the sea state where you live, how difficult it is to move around the boat – these all come into play with what you're feeling.

When you're tired and there's a little bit of extra motion, it's like a snowball effect; it gets worse very quickly mentally. So the ability to rest, the ability to have the mental security that you know you can outrun the weather conditions, that you can maintain high average speeds, that your systems are secure but accessible if you need to get to them – that's all part of the package.

When you take all those pieces and put them together and now you're at sea and it's a husband and wife, short-handed, etc., the way those pieces go together and the way that you're experiencing those long passages…

If you're comfortable, then it's like, “Okay, let's go. No worries – it's just a couple thousand miles here or there.” If you're not comfortable, then you're looking for excuses.

And you know, Sue, our sailboats and our powerboats all have huge mileages on them. They don't sit at the docks. People that buy those boats, new and used, are looking for boats to go places on. The reason they go places is because the trade-offs we make are all orientated towards seagoing comfort, security, and average boat speed.

Now, it's a zero-sum game, so when you do that, you give up a little interior space, which you have to make up for with a little bit longer waterline. But at the end of the day, if you want to go places, there's really no other way to do it.

You have to have steering control, you have to have the ability to maintain these high average speeds – because that's how you make the weather work for you – and you have to have a hull shape which, above all, is comfortable in all sea states. If you miss any of those points, then people will not be comfortable and they'll look for excuses. They'll look for the perfect weather window, which of course is always next week.

Sue: Yeah, no, I mean that's absolutely true.

So if you're building this boat – and people buy from people, so it's super important that you trust the people you're working with – but nonetheless, when you are buying something where you know there isn't another one in the world, it's not like an FPB where, if you buy an FPB 64, there are 11 in the world and there never will be a 12th. But if there were, you'd know her characteristics because there are literally hundreds of thousands of sea miles under those boats.

But say you're building this boat and there's one or two on the water, or none on the water. What data would you absolutely insist on seeing as being really important before you commit to build?

Steve: Sue, that's a really tough question – and a good one, obviously – because when you're starting out from scratch, it's a lot of money that you put on the table, and you don't have the luxury of going to sea on another boat.

I'm not sure how I'd answer that for other people. In our case, we've always built the first boat in a series for ourselves.

Sue: Well, look at WIND HORSE. I mean, you were that soldier – you and Linda were those soldiers. You started out, you knew the designer quite well, but what did you absolutely, what was really important? Because she was a whole new thing. You didn't know whether the motorboat was going to work; you didn't even like them.

Steve: You could say that WIND HORSE was a huge risk for us because we hadn't done a boat like that. We certainly had several good friends who are very talented designers, and they told us it wouldn't work.

The major problem that we faced – and everybody that's buying one of these boats is going to face – is: how do you put together a yacht which will recover from a capsize, that has a good stability curve for that, and that's comfortable in a seagoing form?

It's common and easy in sailboats because you've got a keel, you've got a rig, you have high polar moments, etc. But with a powerboat, the way that most powerboats are done – with the exception of surf rescue craft – they typically do not have stability past about 60–70 degrees.

For example, on passenger liners, on big ships, they have ballast tanks up high to reduce the stability, because if the stability is too high, their motion is too quick.

Now, that's the tricky part: how do you design a hull shape that both recovers from a capsize and is comfortable, without a keel or a mast? That was the part of the equation with WIND HORSE that we were struggling with.

As far as efficiency goes, our sailboats all powered for more miles, much more efficiently and faster than any of the trawlers did, so that was easy. It was the comfort equation that was difficult.

We spent almost a year working 18–20 hours a day, seven days a week, looking at literally thousands of configurations. Linda was bringing my meals to the office – we work at home – and it was a very stressful period because we were talking about a lot of money, and people were saying this wasn't going to work.

We knew the propulsion part was easy. It was the motion equation.

Sue: Well, I remember people saying, “That guy Dashew designing a motorboat? It's not going to work.” I remember that.

Steve: All the ratios are different than normal motorboats, and that's why. But if you have conventional ratios, you don't have the comfort.

So when we designed WIND HORSE, we spent time in the tank, we did CFD work, we did all kinds of theoretical work – spent a significant amount of time and money on this theoretical analysis – to try and buy ourselves some comfort, some insurance.

She was so much more comfortable than we had anticipated that that made me uncomfortable, because we weren't really ready to do another boat until we understood what the ingredients were that went into making her such a wonderful boat at sea.

It probably took us 15–20,000 miles on the boat before I really felt comfortable that I understood the ingredients, and that's when we started the 64.

Sue: Right, okay, okay.

So, we met in 2008 on a horrible morning – raining, dull – in Berthon Lymington Marina. It was just you and Linda on board the boat. Do you remember that?

Steve: Do I remember a typical summer day in England? Yes.

There has to be a reason why everybody moved to the New World and all the foul-weather gear is designed in the UK. I think I know what that is.

That trip was a really good example of what a comfortable seaboat will do for you. At the end of 2007, we didn't have a plan. We'd been wondering, “What are we going to do next year?” And somebody had mentioned, having been to Greenland, what a wonderful place it was. We thought, “Geez, let's go to Greenland.”

When we were in Southern California that seemed like a rather long way away, but the reality is, when you start looking at the passages, it's ten easy days to Panama. From Panama it's four easy days to the Bahamas. From the Bahamas it's three or four easy days – picking your weather, of course – to northeastern Canada. Then you have some time to work your way up through the Straits of Belle Isle, and if you're passing straight through, that's just a couple of days. And then you're three days from Greenland.

It's so simple. And when you're in Greenland, you're five days from Ireland. So we just made a spur-of-the-moment decision: changed our insurance coverage, went to the grocery stores, put a whole suburban load of food on board, and we took off. It was that easy.

Sue: Peanut butter?

Steve: Definitely peanut butter.

And that was quite amazing, because when we saw you… Most people say, “What was that? Close to 10,000 miles?” We'd left in February and we saw you in September, right? And we were resting. We didn't feel rushed. We had as much time as we could. We got a good look at Greenland.

In fact, we would have liked a little bit longer, but you probably don't remember that the summer of 2008 was probably the worst weather I've ever seen in the North Atlantic. It was continuously just storm after storm after storm, and the storms were more like wintertime positions. So we were facing headwinds on the trip from Greenland to Ireland, theoretically.

Then there was this huge double-low storm that covered the entire ocean from Greenland to Ireland – just one mass of bad weather. When those things pass, they leave what's called a “col” typically, which is a short period of calm. We said, “Okay, we're not really ready to leave, but let's take advantage of this weather.”

When we passed the Fastnet Rock, it was a grey day and the surf was breaking, but we were only seeing 10–15 knots of wind. Six hours after we got in, it was blowing 50–55 knots.

That's where this average speed is so important. If you can average 10 to 11 knots in all conditions, that's enough speed that you can play the weather systems.

Sue: And of course you're averaging that in comfort, so the crew aren't being killed by it.

Steve: Exactly.

In our case, on most of these passages we've had the time to make videos. So, like the passage we're talking about – from Greenland to Ireland – there's a video up on that.

The best example of a passage in comfort, though, is the trip from French Polynesia to Panama. This is crazy: it's upwind against the trades, it's against the currents, it's a theoretically inefficient, slow trip where you get pounded to death. But we did the trip on one tank of fuel. Actually, we could have gone all the way to Fort Lauderdale with the fuel we had left. And we were comfortable. There wasn't a single day that we didn't enjoy the passage.

Sue: So tell me: when you launched WIND HORSE, you weren't sure – even with all your experience – that this was going to work. So she went in the water and she worked so much better than you imagined. What else could you have done to have made sure that she worked without real-life testing?

I'm trying to get at: man goes to buy a boat, has a designer – how do you actually know that design, with all the tests that have been carried out, will work when the boat launches?

Steve: There's really no answer to that question.

If you have not done this before, then you're taking a risk, because the CFD work doesn't really tell you what's going to happen in a seaway. Even if you go to the big tanks with waves – like MARIN in Holland – you have the Reynolds number scale effects and it's very difficult to interpret the data.

Your comfort issues and your security issues never come from a single set of waves. They come from crossing sea states. That's what gets you in trouble and makes it very difficult to make efficient progress.

So in our case with WIND HORSE, we knew we were taking a risk. We were rolling the dice. It was a lot of money for us that we were taking a chance with. But we thought we would be more comfortable upwind than sailing – that was a given. We had a whole series of different types of boats and different hull shapes from which we had upwind experience, so we weren't coming at it blind.

The thing that surprised us so much was how comfortable WIND HORSE was off the wind in particular, and how well she surfed. That was much better than what people expected – and what they told us to expect – because of the hull shape we were using.

Each design we've done since has been a little different, and the last boats we did were entirely different from what we started out with. That's all based on refining the concept.

Sue: But of course at that point you aren't taking the same risk, because by this time you know what you're doing, because WIND HORSE has been the trailblazer. Then come the 64s, then comes BEOWULF, then the 78, and so on and so on.

So actually when you're buying something that's part of a series, the designer “gets it” – particularly a designer who hops on the boat and cruises her for 60,000 miles.

Steve: Well, the best example I can give you of that is steering control.

As you've heard us talk about before, ad nauseam, steering control is the holy grail. It's what controls your safety when you're jogging into a Force 9 or 10 storm with crossing sea states, and it's what allows you to surf at speed, and what dictates how fast you can surf and in what conditions you can or can't surf.

Surfing has so many variables involved, because it's not a single set of waves. The problem is when you have a crossing sea state. For example, the video we have up of Cochise when we were doing sea trials heading up the Bay of Islands: we had this quickly rising gale and we got up to winds in the low 50s.

It was easy – the steering was no problem. It was great fun until we started closing with the Bay of Islands. It's an ironbound coast and we had waves reflecting back from the foreshore at various angles, and you have this chaotic sea state. There's no way to model that. You just have to go through it.

The variables involved in that are things like the depth of your forefoot, the size of your rudders, the shape of the hull and whether it develops lift or not. It's very difficult to have a bow which penetrates and a bow which lifts – those are sort of opposite ends of the spectrum. But if you can get a bow that lifts at speed, as the boat accelerates, you don't lose control.

You never know for sure. There's always risk. Cochise was based on a progression of previous designs.

To model this, you'd need a week of data for one speed. It would take years or a huge computer farm to try to model in rough water. But when you actually go out and do it, then you have a real baseline.

The thing we've found as we've pushed designs towards more comfort is that some of those approaches typically reduce your ability to steer the boat. You can't do that, because if you can't steer, then you have to stop running sooner; you're afraid of surfing, etc.

In our case, we've always sacrificed anything we had to in terms of interior volume, or what the market expects, for that ability to steer the boat in extreme heavy going across seas.

If you want to see what it should be like, just take a look at the video from that day, or the video we have up on surfing. We were really surprised to learn that many of our owners were afraid to surf, which stunned us.

When we investigated that further, it was because if you come from a conventional powerboat background, you equate surfing with broaching, and broaching with sometimes very unhappy consequences. So they were afraid of the boat surfing, whereas actually the safest way to use our boats is to keep them at speed.

Sue: Well, as we know, going fast is a lot more fun than going slowly.

Steve: And a hell of a lot safer.

The other point I want to touch on – we referred to this briefly before – is something we learned with BEOWULF. As the weather-routing software has got better and the weather modelling has got better, if you have sufficient boat speed, you can make the weather work for you and avoid the bad stuff.

Again, it comes back to average boat speed. If you can average – I mean, 9.5–10 knots is kind of the absolute minimum – and as you go up from there, you get better and better control.

For example, when we took BEOWULF from New Zealand to French Polynesia, it was a wintertime passage. The weather is normally quite foul and the highs hadn’t dropped yet, so we were facing headwinds again. Then we had a high come through in the right position and we said, “We’re off,” and we rode one single high-pressure system all the way from Auckland, New Zealand to the Austral Islands – 2,000 miles.

Before and after that, it was just chaotic and upwind, but that one system got us all the way there. We want to do the same thing on the powerboats, because if you can pick your weather and stay with it, then it's more comfortable, way more fun, and that combination of fun and security is why people put the miles on our boats.

Sue: So in conclusion, all that is metal is not quite the same. And it's a lot more fun to go fast than it is to go slowly. And steering control is all.

Steve: That's well put.

Traditionally, motor yachts carry their lines quite full aft, and that has a very negative consequence.

Sue: Well, it's great for interior volume.

Steve: Yeah. So that's what we were saying before – it's a zero-sum game. If you want interior volume and you don't get it by lengthening the boat, then what happens is you have what we call the “fat ass” on the boat.

There are some performance advantages in smooth water, theoretically, but when the time comes to head upwind or to surf across seas, they're far less comfortable and you run out of steering control much earlier.

It's a trade-off. It makes sense if you're doing a boat for short passages. But for us and our clients, it doesn't make sense, because the volume doesn't help you if you're not going anywhere.

Unless that's your goal – if you're happy sitting at the dock, then that's cool.

Sue: Okay. Well, Steve, thank you so much. It's always fab to speak to you, and every time we do, given we still have quite a lot to do with FPB and the resales and so forth, I just remember again why it is that they are very cool boats. Thank you.

Steve: Well, thank you, Sue. It's always a pleasure to talk boats with you.