Custom building just two boats a year on an average –both more than likely to win international awards—Alloy Yachts is one of the world’s most sought after sailboat makers.

Dev Nadkarni
Even if you had a spare hundred million dollars to splurge on the super yacht of your dreams and wanted it built from Australasia’s best sailboat maker, you would have to wait three years --even before he got started, that is.

Hambrook at work in his Auckland office. Pics: Dev Nadkarni

Custom building just two boats a year on an average –both more than likely to win international awards—Alloy Yachts is one of the world’s most sought after sailboat makers. “Our big disappointment at boat shows is that sometimes we lose customers simply because we can’t start on their projects immediately,” says managing director Tony Hambrook.

But he has long learnt to take that into his stride because the passionate boat maker that he is, he refuses to compromise quality for the sake of quantity. “We will never get into production boat building,” he says. “We’ll stick to what we’re good at –building custom boats.”

Hambrook’s lifelong love affair with boat building began in 1977 when he began building his first one and having completed it two years later, went on a three and a half year cruise, half way across the world. “Starting out from Nelson, we spent three months in Fiji, sailed across the Pacific to Canada backed down the United States coast to Mexico, Panama and the Caribbean, spending another three months in Fiji on our way back.”

Hambrook counts that first long sailing trip as an important turning point in his career as boat builder. Those were the years before global positioning systems (GPS) became ubiquitous. “We relied on a plastic sextant to find our way just as mariners had done for centuries,” he says. “Years later, I am still learning from that trip.” Hambrook learnt the basics of navigation at a polytechnic in his native Nelson.

Back in New Zealand, he knew exactly what he wanted to do: build yachts. He started out as a consultant in a company that a few years later spun off into Alloy Yachts where he became the production manager and was asked to manage the entire company a year later, in 1989. He has been managing director ever since.

Designing the next award winner

Alloy Yachts’ focus is large aluminium sailboats ranging from lengths of 100 to 220 feet (30-68 m). It does not build fiberglass boats using the material only for internal fittings. Over the last 21 years, his company has won sixteen International Awards and has been placed as a finalist on as many as seventeen occasions.

The company has never shied away from taking up challenging tasks. It built Georgia, the largest ever sloop in the world. “It presented many challenges,” says Hambrook. “From the designing of extra heavy duty captive winches to life raft launching mechanisms, it was quite a job.”

Nearly every part of the boat is fabricated and fitted out at the company’s sprawling Henderson plant in Auckland. For Hambrook says he does not believe in outsourcing. “For something that is as complicated as this, we need to maintain top quality and have as much control on it as we can,” says Hambrook.

Como. The company has won several awards.

He employs a staff of 320 that includes not just boat builders but architects using sophisticated design software, interior designers, plumbers, electricians, metal fabricators, carpenters, upholsterers, besides a host of other specialists. Only navigational and entertainment electronics is outsourced. “We even make our own winches and gangplanks --we’re pretty much a turnkey operation,” he says.

The boats costing between 50 and 100 million dollars each are built to be the pride of their owners and Hambrook’s team has to work with owner-appointed naval architects who brief the Alloy Yacht team and work with them through the phases of construction. Some owners are particular enough to fly in teams of designers including their own interior design and furnishing experts to brief his team, says Hambrook.

Custom boat building needs a high degree of skill and that is the reason why Hambrook has such a robust apprenticeship programme in his company. “We can’t build quality boats without skilled men,” he says. “And it’s not easy to come by good hands --so we have 60 apprentices.” Each apprentice undergoes a 8000 hour training contract including theory curriculum set up by the local boating industry training organization.

Though he says most apprentices grow with the company into supervisory jobs, a quarter go away to work as crew in the shipping industry to see the world. “Some come back and some don’t and those who don’t prove great ambassadors for Alloy Yachts,” he says.

The personal satisfaction that good craftsmen get out of hand finishing with modern materials but using traditional crafting techniques is special, says Hambrook. “When a boat is completed and ready to sail, we have a staff walkthrough. You should see the sense of pride in their eyes when they take their family, parents on a tour of the boat they built.”

Each boat takes up to 400,000 man-hours of work and his 300 plus team builds just about two a year. The company has five orders pending. “Our next start date is end 2009,” says Hambrook, whose clientele spans the globe. In all these years, Alloy Yachts has supplied a total of 32 yachts and super yachts to Europe, the U.K., the U.S., South East Asia and of course its home region of Australasia.

“Our clientele is the high end leisure market,” says Hambrook. “The boat may be in use anywhere in the world. The owners fly down, spend a week or a month on their boast with family and friends and then fly back. The rest of the time they are either on charter or are parked.”

Apprentices at work.

New trends in leisure super yacht market are only making their tasks more challenging, he says. Customers are demanding quieter cabins with low engine and generator noise, something which Alloy Yachts has been successful in designing. Also, there is trend towards classy minimalism in interior design with things like custom plumbing and marble flooring --and a growing demand for more and more sophisticated entertainment electronics.

What does Hambrook do when he’s not building boats? He loves to paint and cook. “I’ve been doing oils and more recently been experimenting with acrylics on fresco,” he says. Though a consummate boatie, he does not particularly like painting seascapes. He prefers cityscapes –particularly old heritage buildings, “like the ones in Europe.”

But there is nothing like winning the next award for excellence in boat building. “Sure, at the end of the day I’m more than happy to go onstage to collect awards and come home and show the guys what they’ve won,” he smiles with the satisfaction of a proud, successful master builder.