I’m looking at something so priceless, it seems borderline illegal. The feeling is not unlike breaking into a vault without lifting a finger. There’s the impenetrable door made of steel-reinforced concrete, cast aside on its hinges to reveal a gleaming bounty of diamonds ordinarily stored in Switzerland. Or, in this case, Holland, where my inside man, Joost Mertens, is showing me an archive of something far more interesting: line drawings of the first Doggersbanks, penned by Dick Boon in 1968, forever changing motoryacht design.
“Somebody hired Mr. Boon to make this drawing,” Mertens says as he moves his cursor around the screen. “People developed plans from these line plans; it was all calculations done on the water surface and projected area of the frames, the volume of the boat, principal construction.”
Behind him, people stroll along the sunny, waterfront promenade in Sneek, a medieval city famous for its intricate canal system. Sneek is also home to the glass-enclosed headquarters of Vripack, on the banks of the Houkesloot canal, where designers now use 3D software to create the drawings. During the past 60 years, Vripack has grown from Boon’s one-man studio into a full-service yacht design house with exterior and interior design and naval architecture.
In that time, more than 500 Doggersbanks were built at various boatyards and homesteads around Holland. Clients were provided a kit, and built boats at their leisure.
“If you could weld, you could build a boat,” says Mertens, who is the sales director for Doggersbank. “So, there’s a lot of homegrown projects.”
Vripack no longer sells these “hobby kits.” Still, as the line expanded to include larger explorer yachts with aluminum superstructures, the hulls never deviated from Boon’s initial drawings. Doggersbanks are trawlers with fin stabilizers and round displacement bilges known for their seaworthiness. When a Doggersbank enters the market after being refitted, buyers tend to take notice.
Most frequently, it’s the offshore models that hit the market; the list of refitted Doggersbank explorer yachts is nearly as long as Mertens’ digital archives. Inshore models that have received similar amounts of TLC are much harder to find—making Martina a unicorn by any standard.
Built in 1985 by the Van der Werff & Visser shipyard in Gorredijk, a 30-minute drive from Sneek in one of the Netherlands’ northernmost provinces, the 62-foot Martina was kept closer to Rotterdam. That is until the owner, a pragmatic Dutchman, and the son of a Rhine barge skipper, decided to overhaul the entire boat down to the bare metal. Unlike the ambitious torch-wielding hobbyists of years past, he enlisted help—from a highly esteemed boatyard he founded.
Zeelander Yachts builds elegant dayboats under the direction of Sietse Koopmans, who owns Martina. “He’s sort of a perfectionist,” says John Clayman, president of Seaton Yachts, a North American distributor for Doggersbank. “He shared with me the 157-page owner’s manual. When I worked for Ted Hood, we built a lot of boats and worked really hard on our owner’s manuals.” This was altogether different. “It’s so comprehensive. In the engine room, you look at how he did stuff, and I’ve just never seen anything like it before on a boat this size.”
The refit process, with systems that Clayman says are superyacht-quality, was finished in 2018. By then, Martina had been shipped back and forth to Turkey (the location of a Zeelander subcontractor), sandblasted multiple times, painted twice, reupholstered twice, repowered with Volvo Penta engines and generators, rewired, and outfitted with stabilizers and a
bow thruster.
“It’s a new boat in an old suit,” Koopmans says. “Everything is brand-new. There’s not an old part on the boat. The windows were the only original thing, and [they] swapped those last year because two of them were leaking.”
Koopmans admits that he’s been a perfectionist his whole life. He’s also been a boater, having grown up under the tutelage of a father who loved to tinker in the engine room. Martina, named in honor of Luce Koopmans’ eldest sister, whom he felt eternally indebted to for providing him with a job at a pivotal moment in his life, was actually the second Doggersbank that Koopmans’ father owned. The first, a carbon-copy of Martina, was lent to Vripack to display at boat shows in the United States. Then-19-year-old Koopmans accompanied the boat, captaining it from Miami to Annapolis, Md., where she was eventually sold.
Even then, a laundry list of improvements was brewing in young Koopmans’ mind. One of the first things to go on Martina was the original steadying sail masts, the taller of the two being nearly 24 feet high. A shorter, telescoping mast was added to house the radar. Today, the mast (without sails, but still functional) straddles two captain’s chairs at the upper helm. With the push of a button, it retracts to get under low-lying bridges.
The original teak deck had spots in it, so Koopmans replaced it with the same synthetic teak used on Zeelanders. He also removed the davits from the stern, and extended the boat’s length by 3 feet with a swim platform. This was all done to better accommodate the tender and an Opacmare passerelle that’s remote-controlled and hydraulically powered. However, if Martina’s interior volume allowed for it, I have no doubt he would have found a way to install an amidships tender garage like those found on the larger Zeelanders.
Koopmans estimates that he funneled about $2.5 million into the refit, a good chunk of it into the engine room. Martina now has a 355-hp Volvo Penta D9 diesel engine and an accompanying electric motor, as well as a five-blade prop and propeller shaft. At the helm, three Simrad screens are connected to a CZone network so the captain can see, from anywhere in the world, exactly how full the 1,994-gallon fuel and 740-gallon water tanks are.
Power is provided by a set of Kohler generators: a 380-volt primary with 17.5 kW, and a secondary 230-volt with 6.5 kW. They’re connected to Mastervolt inverters. All the electricity on board is supplied by lithium-ion batteries, with the generators solely responsible for the charging. This setup was intentional, as Koopmans learned from his time aboard superyachts how disastrous voltage drops and spikes can be to electrical components if shore power is left unattended.
In addition, Koopmans requires total peace and quiet at sea. “Eliminating engine vibration and noise is an obsession I have,” he says.
The old Martina made grating hydraulic noises underway. So, Koopmans also installed stabilizers and a bow thruster with electric power. Zeelander’s engineering team soundproofed the engine room with insulation, upgraded mounts and a composite box around the engine. The result is a whisper-quiet system that is practically unheard of on a nearly 40-year-old yacht.
Mertens, at Vripack, is tickled with the refit’s result. “In this size range, it’s not common that people have this much of an emotional connection with the boat and the financial capabilities to do this,” he says.
Koopmans, who is also an accomplished captain, most recently cruised more than 100,000 nautical miles with his family on a modern 122-foot Vripack he named Zeepaard. And yet, when he meets up with friends in the Netherlands, he still takes his father’s old boat out for a joy ride. “My friends all have Zeelanders, so they don’t like it when I show up with Martina,” he says. “They say, ‘What is this? You need to have a Zeelander.’ But I love the boat. Honestly, I really love it.”
For him, the issue is how infrequently he uses it. If time allows, Koopmans has plans to ship Martina to the United States, where he would finish a loop he unofficially started when he cruised from Miami to Annapolis all those years ago. Either that, or sell her, whichever happens first—despite her connection to his father, who has since died.
“I’m a bit Dutch and a bit Calvinistic,” Koopmans says. “If I had a car in the garage that I didn’t use, I would also sell it. [Martina] only has around 150 hours on the engine. So, if there’s someone out there I can make happy that respects and loves it, I will be able to part with it.”
Like the line drawings in Vripack’s archives of the very first Doggersbanks, Martina can only approximate a well-worn memory of simpler times. But she’s also been rejuvenated with the look and feel of a technologically advanced ship. And for that reason—whether for Koopmans or a lucky suitor—she’s worth her weight in gold. Or in her case, 125,000 pounds of Grade A blasted steel.
This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue.
