Ken and Roberta Williams have a lot of blue-water miles under their hulls. Indeed, the Williams have crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific and cruised just about everywhere from Alaska to Turkey on their two Nordhavns, first a 62 and then a 68, both named Sans Souci.
They sold the 68 a few years ago and spent last summer writing books. Ken’s was about Sierra On-Line, the computer-game company they started together and sold in 1996; Roberta’s was a historical novel about Ireland.
But cruising beckoned. For their new boat, they downsized, to a Grand Banks 60 (pictured above), even though at the time they ordered it they had never set foot on a Grand Banks 60.
They just took delivery of their new Grand Banks, named Cygnus, at Elliott Bay Marina in Seattle (Grand Banks are made in Malaysia), and took a first test drive on Puget Sound. “The boat performed flawlessly, was exceptionally quiet, and easy to drive,” Williams wrote on kensblog.com.
The Williams chose the Grand Banks because they plan to do a different kind of cruising. They crossed the Atlantic in 2004 (with the Nordhavn Atlantic fleet, from Fort Lauderdale to Gibraltar), and the Pacific in 2009. “We have our ocean-crossing merit badge and don’t feel a strong need to do it again,” Williams wrote.
They also wanted to go faster. After the test drive, Williams wrote, “the most obvious thing I noticed was the speed. The boat was instantly at a comfortable cruising speed of 22.5 knots and I could have gone faster, but with logs in the water I didn’t want to. If I slowed down to the same 9 knots we ran on Sans Souci, Cygnus will have a range of over two thousand miles.”
Cygnus is powered by twin 900-hp Volvo D13 engines, and the Williams ordered it with lots of extras for their future cruises: two gensets (20kW and 12kW), a Seakeeper gyro-stabilizer, a hot tub (perhaps a first for Grand Banks), dual radars, a fuel-polishing system, a joystick with Dynamic Positioning, and a special tilting mast (press a button and the mast tilts down, a major advantage for going under bridges in Florida or the Great Loop).
The Grand Banks 60 is a first-rate cruiser. In September, 2017, I was on board the brand-new hull number three with Gary Weisman, the former president of North Sails, and his wife, Sue, as they cruised from Norwalk, Connecticut, to a dock on the Hudson in New York City. They had just bought the boat; this was their first time underway. Also on board were Tom Whidden, the CEO of the North Technology Group, and his wife, Betsy; they had ordered hull number four.
With twin 1,000-hp Cats, the Grand Banks 60 topped out at just over 31 knots (only 23 knots faster than my old Grand Banks 36), and cruised easily at 24 knots. And it was quiet and comfortable throughout the speed range. Before I got on the boat, Mark Richards, the CEO of Grand Banks, told me to watch the wake. “It’s as flat as a straight edge,” he said, an indication of the efficiency of the hull. As it turned out, the wake was indeed minimal for a 60-foot boat.
Right now, the Williams aren’t sure where they’ll cruise this summer, particularly with the border to Canada closed due to the pandemic. Still, he wrote, “there are plenty of great places to cruise in the Pacific Northwest without heading north.”
When thinking about the change from the two Nordhavns to a Grand Banks, Williams was philosophical. “There are many ways that the two boats are very different,” he wrote, “and that is part of why we made the trade. We had run nearly 50,000 nm with our two Nordhavns and were feeling like we wanted to do something completely different and perhaps less ‘off the grid.’ We also wanted to go places that Sans Souci couldn’t go, such as the Great Loop. Cygnus will be a different boat, and we’ll use it differently That’s exactly what we were in the mood for. But do we miss Sans Souci? Of course.”
Specs.: LOA: 65’4”; Beam: 19’2”; Draft: 4’7”; Disp.: 61,730 lbs.; Fuel: 1,530 gals.; Water: 300 gals.; Power: 2×900-hp Volvo D13. Read more:
