Engineering excellence,
on every ocean.

There is a well-populated field of naval architects and design consultancies producing rig, keel and appendage work for performance yachts, and we are not one of them. Owen Clarke, Lateral, Brookes Bell and their peers do that work and do it well.

What sits between a completed design and a yacht that sails to it is a different discipline, and it is the one that tends to go unmanaged. A carbon rig arrives from the spar maker with a tuning matrix and an installation sequence; somebody has to commission it, load it in stages, and correlate the rig tensions against the designer's numbers before the first offshore passage. A keel modification needs class approval, a structural submission, a yard capable of the work and an inspection regime that catches a fault while the yacht is still in the shed. Appendage work needs to be specified precisely enough to tender, and tendered widely enough to price.

That is the work we do. The design authority stays with the designer; the engineering judgement about whether what arrived matches what was specified sits with the owner's team, and it is not a judgement the yard or the supplier can be asked to make about their own work.

Most technical consultancy is engaged in one of three shapes. A defined piece of work with a deliverable, such as a structural submission, a stability review, a rig commissioning plan or a systems specification for tender, is quoted on a fixed fee against a scope agreed in advance. Ongoing support across a season or a build runs on a day rate against an agreed envelope. And a second opinion on somebody else's design, quote or failure is normally a short fixed-fee piece, because the owner needs an answer rather than a relationship.

The director rate is GBP 125 an hour and specialist day rates are quoted against the discipline. Weather routing runs at GBP 325 a day for twice-daily routing. We publish these because a firm that will not indicate a rate before a meeting is usually pricing the client rather than the work.

Two constraints are worth stating. We do not sell equipment and take no commission from any supplier, which means a specification from us is not a route to a particular product. And we will decline work where the honest answer is that the existing design is sound and the money is better spent elsewhere, which happens more often than owners expect on performance programmes.