The Dutch design firm Vripack has worked on more than 7,500 yacht projects, including a 171-foot, six-deck sportfisher. It also partnered with Nordhavn Yachts on the interior design of Nordhavn’s 80-foot trawler. Suffice it to say that custom is a word Vripack’s team knew quite well even before they met a Norwegian man named Ivar Presttun.
Even still, when Bart Bouwhuis, co-creative director at Vripack, talks about the 61-foot boat that Presttun commissioned, he calls it just as much of a reminder that an owner can truly get what he wants in a custom design.
“This boat proves that when you have a vision, it can be done,” Bouwhuis says. “We all know many examples of failure and frustrated owners who say they’ll never own a boat again. But here, it proves that it can be done.”
Presttun, who earned his millions in the pager and SMS business, is a longtime boater who found himself with the money—and, just as importantly, the time—to bring his vision to life. He had owned five sailboats prior to commissioning a 59-foot powerboat from Steeler Yachts, a Dutch yard that turns out about a dozen boats each year. Presttun took delivery of that yacht in 2018. He liked it and the yard’s service standards quite a bit, but he wanted more.
Specifically, he wanted much more interior volume in a similar length overall, and he wanted a steel-hull boat that could be driven by electric propulsion.
“It’s not a good idea to have a large boat that goes only on fossil fuel,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for the future. When you build a boat, you don’t build it for this year or next year. A boat like this, it can easily last for a hundred years. It’s a steel hull that you just can maintain and keep it. It’s important that the boat is timeless in design.”
And one more thing: He didn’t just want electric power for use once in a while. He wanted to live aboard for months at a time, and have everything run off electric whenever possible.
“It’s not just doing two or three hours cruising and then start up the diesel engine,” says Yorrith Joosten, chief commercial officer at Steeler Yachts. “He wants to live on the boat. When he enters the harbor, he wants to cook or whatever. That’s totally different from a normal boating experience.”
Steeler had never built a boat with electric propulsion for that type of use, nor had Vripack ever packed as much living space into the length overall and specifications that Presttun envisioned.
“Ivar showed us the brief, and we said, ‘Oooh, okay, that’s going to be a very large boat,’” Bouwhuis recalls. “He said, ‘No, it will be owner-operated. I want it compact, compact, compact.’”
Essentially, Presttun wanted an oceangoing house with single-level living. The first thing Vripack did with the design was to remove the side decks. Presttun said he didn’t need them for the way he cruises along the Norwegian coast, and he’d prefer the extra interior living space. He also wanted the aft deck to be like a back porch, a place where he could step aboard easily, remain dry in bad weather, store his bicycle, take off his shoes and then go inside without having to traverse any steps.
“You have a roomy feeling,” Presttun says. “It’s a quite normal kitchen, a dining table where you sit comfortably with the big windows. And since the floor is above the waterline, it’s more or less you are sitting on the waterline. It’s really beautiful. And you have the space from the volume—you have the sofa, the wine cooler, the fireplace, you have what you normally would like to have.”
The salon’s fireplace throws light, not heat, and is one of numerous home-like touches on board. The master stateroom, forward on the same deck, has a walk-in closet. There’s a day head on the main deck, like a half-bath in a home with a washer and dryer. The soles are heated, to keep the space warm even in the higher latitudes.
Yes, there are two guest staterooms belowdecks, but they did not impinge upon the vision for the main liveaboard deck. For instance, they only have standing headroom in the dressing spaces, not over the berths.
“Guests will be maybe 2 or 3 percent of the total time on the boat,” Presttun says, “so the guest cabins are half a deck down. I think that’s really a good solution.”
Places where Presttun spends time as an owner-operator got the lion’s share of the real estate, including the wheelhouse, which has true 360-degree views. “When you steer the boat, you can see perfectly well around you,” he says. “There is not a fixed wall behind you, the way there is with a lot of boats this size. When you’re out sailing, you want to have the view. You don’t want to use the radar or a camera to see what’s coming behind you.”
While the team at Vripack was bringing the interior concept to life as part of the three-year build process, the Steeler yard was working on the electric-propulsion specs. The thing that helped them most wasn’t the continually improving technology; instead, it was Presttun’s desire to continue cruising at sailboat speeds.
“He created his own definition of time,” Joosten says. “He goes at the speed he wants to go. He has the ability to do that. It’s total freedom.”
Presttun decided that he wanted a boat with a 6-knot cruising speed. It didn’t need to be able to go faster to outrun storms, or anything else, really, because Presttun likes being at sea. He wanted as little energy consumption as possible, he wanted a steel hull for strength and stability, and he was willing to cruise slower to get it all.
“I thought about what is the most important thing that I, as the owner, can come to with this concept, and that is, I think, to not be in a hurry when you are at sea,” he says. “If you can avoid being in a hurry, that’s a very good start.”
Thus, the Steeler 61S Electric is equipped with a 75-kW diesel generator, but it also has a 90-kW electric propulsion motor and can run on shore power. At 5 knots, it can run on batteries alone for 8 hours, with normal energy consumption on board. At 6 knots, the boat has a 2,000-nautical-mile range. Solar panels and windmills on the roof help to feed the 184-kilowatt-hour battery.
From the shipyard’s perspective, Presttun was the perfect client to try this type of system with, because he understood the available technology as well as its limitations.
“Ivar knew a lot, and he also knew to expect a long and bumpy ride in the design and development of the boat,” says Steeler Yachts CEO Hans Webbink. “The propulsion is only one element of this. It’s very specific. It’s unique. And the efficiency at the speed that Ivar wants is unheard of.”
At the start, Webbink adds, he wasn’t sure the concept was going to work out. Ultimately, he was happy to be proven wrong.
“We took a leap into the future, driven by the client, but he was not driven only by the green footprint,” Webbink says. “He wanted a superb yachting experience—unique propulsion with a unique interior with this quality that we were able to achieve. It created a total package that I think makes it by far the most pleasant boat to be on, on the water, where I always thought the electric future was a compromise. Gray skies, nothing will be the same as in the past, it will be worse, we have to juggle our way into the future that is grim. The real boating is over. No—there is bright blue skies. We’ve created a magical experience.”
Pushing new limits is just how Presttun thinks, according to the Steeler team. Joosten says that when Furuno’s technicians came on board to commission the helm equipment, Presttun was sitting at the helm reading the manual and asking the technicians whether they’d thought to check in certain areas to solve problems.
“If you want to talk about somebody who knows how to enjoy life on a boat, that’s him,” Webbink says. “But don’t mistake that for not being demanding. He is one of the most knowledgeable boat owners on the planet.”
The yard is now receiving two or three requests per day for information about the Steeler 61S Electric, Webbink says, but he doesn’t expect it to become a production model until the technology costs drop.
So far, Presttun says, he has cruised about 2,000 nautical miles on the new boat. He likes to go skiing in the winters, but from about late February onward, he’s almost always on board, including in the harbor at Oslo with the other liveaboard boaters. He spends eight months a year living aboard and cruising, and likes it so much that he’s planning to sell his apartment in the city.
“I don’t use it,” he says. “I don’t really see the concept of living on dry land. I don’t see the benefits, when you can stay floating on water.”
Those benefits include moments like when he’s in bed, looking down through the windows that are designed to give him water views all around. This year, he’s planning to cruise in the northern part of Norway, where he can hike up the steep mountains and enjoy long days with the midnight sun.
He’s also looking forward to the evolution of battery technology and fast-charging stations, and his onboard battery room is ready for upgrades as they become available.
“It’s a whole new way of boating without the engine noise and the engine fumes,” Presttun says. “You don’t want to stop. It’s amazing. You can do the same thing with a sailboat when you have wind, but I like to go when there’s no wind and it’s totally quiet. That’s the nicest time to go.”
All in all, Presttun adds, “I think the boat is a masterpiece.” It’s the kind of compliment that yacht designers and builders don’t often hear from owners—especially not from owners who commission a yacht in the 60-foot range that has a cruising sweet spot of only 5 or 6 knots. But Presttun sees no compromises in the Steeler 61S Electric. He sees only opportunities to enjoy life afloat as he likes it.
“A lot of people think that when you go more sustainable, you have to sacrifice,” Bouwhuis says. “I think this boat also proves that when you accept that top speed is not really what you need, you can cruise with all the comfort you want.”
Vripack Steeler 61S
LOA: 61ft. 2in.
Beam: 19ft. 7in.
Draft: 5ft. 5in
Construction: steel
Displacement: 163,000 lbs.
Fuel: 792 gal.
Water: 1,056 gal.
Engine: 90-kW Aradex/Hydrosta
Info: steeleryachts.com
This article was originally published in the May/June 2023 issue.
