Fidelis

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Oh, my, how easily a 184-foot sailing yacht becomes the perfect vessel. Her once overwhelming size diminishes with familiarity, especially when she’s in the company of siblings gathered for a couple of days of racing. Her luxurious and spacious accommodations, though never taken for granted, make strangers feel welcome. Fidelis, a 56-meter Perini Navi ketch, is a perfect example. After spending a day aboard her during the Perini Navi Cup in Porto Cervo, Sardinia (see video below and a complete photo gallery here), this past September, I realized that she, and others of her ilk, could be the ultimate in world-girdling cruising yachts.



At sea, big is always better than small, especially if the naval architect and builder get all of their sums correct. A well-designed, 56-meter heavy-displacement yacht has a gentle motion, a long waterline for high average speeds and enough freeboard to keep the seas from mounting the deck. It also has a tremendous amount of usable volume belowdecks, which provides the owners, and their interior designer, with more options than they can easily consider.

Over a bottle of limoncello and several cups of espresso, the sensitive designer will have discovered enough about the clients to mingle his pet ideas with theirs. The happy result: The designer has fun and the owners love their yacht.


View a complete photo gallery of Fidelis here.

Yachts of this size and complexity require many brains to design, style and engineer. Ron Holland provided the naval architecture in collaboration with Perini Navi’s design staff, and his input shows in Fidelis’ clean wake. You’d expect such a heavy yacht to dig a big hole amidships and sculpt a frightful quarter wave in her effort to exceed the traditional speed/length ratio of 1.34, but Holland’s design keeps wave-making resistance to a minimum. Even at 1.34, Fidelis has a top speed of 16.45 knots, but I had no way to confirm her ability to reach, or exceed, that speed in the light air off Porto Cervo. On the upside, the ratio of sail area to wetted surface allowed her to ghost along at 5.4 knots in a true wind speed of 8 knots, 40 degrees to the apparent wind.

Fidelis is the 10th example of the 56-meter series, which began in 2003 with the launch of Burrasca. All of these, save the sloop Salute, are ketches. Perini’s design team styled the entire 56-meter series, and keen observers easily will recognize the similarities among the fleet. They’ll need an even keener eye to spot the differences. Most are subtle and appear in the superstructure, because the hull of each 56m is the same as every other. Perini Navi builds the aluminum shell of these yachts at its yard in Turkey, and commissions them at the yard in Viareggio. Aluminum doesn’t require permanent tooling, so alterations in the characteristics of the superstructure are relatively easy and economical. Perini’s willingness to accommodate the client’s preferences lets owners establish a personalized identity for the public face of their yacht.



Owners rarely get the chance to see their Perini Navi from the perspective they need to in order to embrace every nuance of its exterior design. Most often they’re too close, but inside the yacht, close is good, as I discovered when I stepped from the afterdeck through one of the curved glass doors and into the salon of Fidelis. The word clutter doesn’t exist in this owner’s lexicon, and because of that, the main salon made me think of a desert landscape dotted with exactly the number of dwellings necessary to support its small population. Perini’s interior design team, headed by the legendary Bernardo Chichi, and the owners selected whispering earth tones, accented with shouts of black and dark wood, reds of the U.S. Southwestern desert and shiny metal.

This blend of soft and hard, with intimate islands of furniture and throughways of wide teak planks bleached to the color of sand nearly stopped my heart.