This is a feel-good story for me due to my long association with Pacific Asian Enterprises, the builder of Nordhavn motor yachts. PAE started life in the late 1970s building the Mason line of classic cruising sailboats at the Ta Shing Boat Yard in Taiwan. Their first boat was the Mason 43 and, as it happens, I and my family bought hull number 3 and spent five years sailing Clover around the world.
In 1986, PAE launched their first long-range cruising motor yacht, the N 46 that quickly set the stage for a new era of ocean voyaging for cruisers who wanted the seaworthiness of a classic trawler, the comfort of a proper yacht and a range of at least 3,000 miles.
The 46 launched the Nordhavn brand and in. the intervening years they have built more than 700 hulls from 41 to 120 feet. To date, original 46s have crossed more oceans and made more circumnavigations than any other production motor yacht in history.
Nordhavn’s Chief of Design Jeff Leishman remarked, “The N46 is always going to be a classic but the old version feels out of place among today’s Nordhavns.”
Hence the creation of the N46 MKII. Over 40 years and the many millions of miles covered by Nordhavns, Leishman and the other PAE owners have learned volumes about what works out there and what doesn’t. Plus, they have had the feedback from hundreds of owners. And, yacht design technology –-Computational Fluid Dynamics, for example—has made the design process much more efficient and the shapes of the hulls more modern and efficient, too.
While the N46 MKII is entirely new, it also adheres to the builder’s core mission of creating couple’s cruising boats that can cross oceans, cruise the world’s remotest regions all with superior seakeeping qualities, fuel efficiency and ease of handling.
The MK II version has a more voluminous hull and is able to deliver the efficiency and range with twin engines (135-horsepower Nanni diesels) that was an essential feature of the single-engine original. This gives the owners a level of redundancy that improves confidence when pointing the bow at a far horizon.
The additional volume allows for a huge walk-in engine room and 30 percent more fuel tank capacity. The volume also expands living spaces quite dramatically to match the style seen on the latest generation of Nordhavns. The demographic for the new 46 tends to skew younger and many will use their boats for remote working so they need the extra space.
The look of the new MKII is definitely more modern but the designers went to great lengths to preserve the North Sea styling of the original without making it look dated. The new boat is stylish and the lines of the decks, pilot house and flybridge flow together harmoniously.
One of the changes the builder is making in the MKII, as in the new 41 and 51, is to fit out the boats with all the gear, systems and equipment that a cruising couple could need at the factory and as a standard package. This cuts down on costs for the owners and helps to make the build process more efficient with fewer if any change orders during construction. Owners have plenty of custom decisions to make at the outset and many fewer while the boat’s in build.
Nearly 40 years after the first 46 changed the world of long range motor yacht cruising, the new 46 MKII promises to open that adventurous door to a whole new generation.
