Double B

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The Alessa Leigh rebuild started as a fairly quick trip to the yard. “The project started with just a bucket,” says Chad Delannoy, Bell’s long-time captain and project manager. A bucket is what west-coasters call a fiberglass crow’s nest above the helm that serves the same purpose as an East Coast tuna tower. The original bucket design would have weighed 2,000 pounds, unacceptable since they were removing only an 800-pound Hatteras-original radar and antenna mast. Instead, the entire bucket was kept to 900 pounds using carbon fiber.

“That took about three weeks to design and four months to build,” Delannoy says. “Then Scott [Bell, the boat’s owner] heard about the new 2,400-horsepower engines from MTU.” Bell employed naval architects and engineers, and tank-tested several designs before settling on a 9-foot extension with much less pitch in the propeller pocket tunnels (from a 9-degree down angle to 2 1/2 degrees).

“Then Scott said, I love the cockpit and the engines, but I don’t like my interior,” Delannoy says. “In one conversation we were removing the entire interior from the vessel.” Every piece that could be lightened was. Cored structures and carbon fiber were used for everything, including cabin soles. “At one point I was standing in the engine room looking up at the sky,” Delannoy says. 

Much of the interior became structural, yet to utilize every inch of space, nothing was committed to paper plans in advance. “I’d work with a carpenter for a week to mock up a section of the interior in plywood and cardboard and Styrofoam,” he says. “The Bells would come by and tweak it, and then we’d involve Tim Nolan, the engineer.”

Noise and vibration mitigation were as much a priority as saving weight, “Particularly in the master stateroom,” Delannoy says. “Scott wasn’t concerned with how we did it, but that was a priority.” Bulkheads attached to the hull only with vibration-deadening strips, vibration-isolated platforms upon which equipment was mounted with additional vibration-isolating mounts, sound-absorbing sprayed coatings, and pumps and equipment chosen in part for quiet operation satisfied Bell’s mandate — to never hear a pump or motor while in his stateroom. Sound at 20 knots on the bridge also stayed below 60 decibels.

For long excursions far offshore, redundancy was another mandate. “There isn’t a system aboard that doesn’t have a backup,” Delannoy says. “One was never enough, two was better, and in some cases we have three. Scott has one wife, but at least two of everything else.”