Ease of maintenance is something that has impressed Jay Dollries ever since he bought his Tesla almost a decade ago. On a catamaran charter with friends in the Bahamas, he couldn’t help but wonder why boats are so far behind in that department—not to mention still using noisy generators to power basic comforts like air conditioning on the hook.
“You spend so much time going through and checking the oil and doing all these things on the boat,” he says. “It’s been nine years ago now since I bought my first Tesla, and I still have that car, and I have spent a total of, I think, $250 on maintenance in the nine years, and I don’t have to check my oil. I change tires and wiper blades, and that’s about it.”
When he learned about Silent Yachts, Dollries saw people who thought like him. He ordered an SY62 during the pandemic, when the company was going through management challenges. Still a believer in the technology, he ordered a second SY62 that just emerged from the shipyard under the company’s new leadership. He still has Sunrise Dream, but he christened the new SY62 100% because it has been outfitted, in Dollries’ mind, to total perfection.
“We have two water-generation systems on the new one,” he says. “We’ve got a much lighter color scheme on it. It’s a four-bedroom plus two crew, versus a five-plus-one. Originally, when we designed the boat, we were going to do four-plus-one, but we didn’t want to put the onus on having a husband-and-wife combo for operating the boat. The crew quarters are a little bit on the smaller side. Having the second crew quarter gives somebody their own space.”
His plan for 100% is to spend this summer in the Mediterranean, starting around Venice, Italy, and then cruising down the Croatian coast to Montenegro and Greece. From there, he’ll head to Italy’s Amalfi Coast, then over to Sardinia and Corsica. The boat will be on display at the Cannes Yachting Festival in September, and after that, he’ll explore the South of France and Spain’s Balearic Isles before heading to Gibraltar and staging to cross the Atlantic.
He plans to be on board for the crossing, and he’s so confident in the boat’s technology that he’s already talking like an old salt about other priorities that have bedeviled boaters for centuries. “I think we’ve got the right crew, and we’ll be smart about making sure we have the right weather,” he says. “We’ll look at the weather patterns and make decisions.”
The Owner
Jay Dollries, 61, has been boating for 15 years. He had a 23-foot Boston Whaler and did fishing vacations at Tropic Star Lodge in Panama. A Bahamas charter with The Moorings showed him what cats could do, and he sought out one with tech that reminded him of his Tesla.
Designed for Solar From Scratch
Models in the Silent Yachts range are not solar conversions of traditionally powered cats. The team creates each boat from a blank sheet of paper.
The Silent Yachts Range
Silent Yachts builds solar-electric catamarans in the 60-, 80- and 120-foot ranges. The company’s founders have been at it since 2009, with the brand’s official debut in 2016.
Goals have a way of evolving. When Rob Vigors was a teenager, his primary goal was speed. He raced on water skis and then became a driver for the sport in his 30s, representing Australia in chasing a world title at up to 112 knots.
But today, with the whiskers on his chin coming in gray, he has other priorities. He moved to the Whitsunday Islands in 2020, bought a 60-foot flybridge monohull and made decent use of it, even though a cat might’ve better handled the short, sharp chop.
“I had looked at power cats,” Vigors says. “What turned me off was the narrowness of the hulls. The accommodations were tight. You had to climb over the bed to get into it.”
Then, at a boat show, he stepped aboard the Iliad 53S.
“It’s like an apartment on the water,” he says. “I went down into the master bedroom, and it was a bedroom that was east-west, and you could walk all around it, and it was queen-size, and I said, ‘That’s the boat for me.’”
That same day, he and his wife ordered Kailani, which is Hawaiian for beautiful sky and ocean. They’ve been cruising the Whitsundays with the cat for about a year, and they say they feel a significant difference.
“I don’t have to have a gyro running all night with the genset going to try and keep us stable at anchor or on a mooring,” he says. “Even the walkway down each side, it’s so big. It’s not like a monohull where you almost have to turn sideways to walk up to the bow. And the bow area’s great. It’s a great entertaining boat too because people can spread out easily.”
Full-height standing room near the engines is another favorite feature, along with a lot more stowage.
“One of the other factors was the swim platform,” he says. “It not only goes down, but as it’s going down, it extends rearward. It’s literally only a couple of minutes to get the tender into the water or extract it out of the water. It just makes life so much easier.”
Handling with the bow thruster is also easier, he says—so much so that it’s helping the couple’s relationship. “With the engines, the shafts spaced so far apart, it’s very easy for coming back to the berth,” he says. “We nail it every time. The old boat, we had a few moments…”
Real estate is constantly on Steve Lloyd’s mind. He started in the business two decades ago, focused on commercial properties. Now in his mid-50s, his brain went straight to land-based buildings when he decided to move from Pennsylvania to Florida’s west coast during the pandemic. He looked and looked for a dream home on the water, but they were all too big for him. Then, he says, “I saw an ad for the Fort Lauderdale boat show, and I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to live on a boat.’ My friends thought I was crazy.”
Lloyd had zero boating experience on the day a broker walked him around the show to see various catamarans. He didn’t like some of the finishes; prominent use of fiberglass inside especially bugged him.
Then he went on a build from Horizon Power Catamarans and really liked it. “My broker said a 52-foot Horizon had just come up for sale,” he recalls. “It was about $1.85 million. I said, ‘If you take a little off, I’ll shake your hand.’ I was living on the boat 30 days after the inspections.”
Four years later, he says, becoming a liveaboard power-cat owner has changed his life. He hired a captain and first mate who run the boat so he can be chief entertainer, sometimes inviting dozens of friends for local sunset cruises or to explore Bahamian islands by day while staying shoreside at night.
“Two of the bedrooms, they can handle queen-size beds,” he says of My Best Life. “The kitchen has the two Sub-Zero freezers and the refrigerator. The TV is a tuck-away. It’s like living in a 1,100-square-foot apartment, but you can go wherever you want.”
The more friends he invites on board, he says, the more people realize everything that cruising has to offer: “I have high-level friends who have never been on the water, and they’re like, ‘Wow, this is what it’s like?’ When you don’t have a boat, you’re not used to the lifestyle.”
He’s also become comfortable at the helm aboard smaller boats himself. In April 2024, he ordered a 32-foot Calcutta catamaran because the bigger cat couldn’t get into all the island nooks and crannies where he wanted to play. “I can take the Calcutta and run around to all the different bars and restaurants down there,” he says.
And he has fully embraced the idea that when it comes to some things about cruising, he actually knows more than a few lifelong boaters do. “The beautiful thing about the 52 is the width, the width, the width,” he says. “People walk on my boat who are boaters, and they can’t believe how wide it is.”
His Best Life
Steve Lloyd had zero boating experience when he got stuck in Florida during the pandemic. He looked for a house on the water, but they were all too big. Instead, he bought a Horizon PC52 and became a live-aboard with a captain and a steady stream of friends for parties.
Horizon Power Catamarans
The PC52 is the smallest model from this builder, with the biggest being 74 feet long. On the PC52, there are three staterooms, with open or sky-lounge versions offered.
Quiet Cruising Package
Horizon’s cats are equipped with a phosphate battery package and Termodinamica variable-speed air conditioning to minimize generator use.
