Forty years of catamaran-building knowledge has crossed continents to anchor a new chapter for Seawind Catamarans, with the company releasing a detailed factory video showing how its Seawind 1170 is now being produced at a purpose-built facility in Izmir, Turkey. The footage offers an unusually candid look at the production philosophy driving the 40-foot performance cruising catamaran.
Central to the video is the transfer of expertise from Seawind's existing operations to the Turkish plant. "We have brought over as much information and boat building knowledge as we can from our factory in Vietnam," says Seawind's Mike Rees. "When we go into the assembly stages, they're using the same technical boat building skill sets that we've developed over 40 years of business at Seawind." The Izmir facility mirrors the linear production systems and defined four-week build cycles already established across Seawind's Australia and Vietnam operations, moving hulls progressively from lamination through to final commissioning.
The 1170's hull is fully infused with PVC foam core, with targeted carbon reinforcement placed in high-load areas. Rees is direct about the reasoning. "Carbon reinforcement where we need it, that means we can get our weight down, but we don't make the product so expensive that it becomes unaffordable," he explains. That philosophy pays dividends on the water. During a test sail on Sydney Harbour, the 9.2-tonne 1170 proved lively and responsive, holding a comfortable 7.5 knots upwind in 22 knots of breeze and reaching 9 knots under spinnaker. Boating New Zealand awarded the boat a rating of 4.5 out of 5 in its recent review.
Timber components are cut using CNC machining, while traditional joinery techniques remain central to interior fit-out. Rees acknowledges the inherent tension between technology and craft at this scale of production. "For boat building, when you're not doing a full mass production, when you're still doing a semi custom or a slower production side of things, it's still a very manual, labour intensive job," he says. "The key thing is to bring in the technology to improve that to get your accuracy and your production times up."
Once a 1170 works through the build sequence, a dedicated quality control bay handles final checks before the boat makes the approximately 30-minute truck journey to the marina. "Stage nine is our final QC bay," Rees notes. "It gets loaded up onto the truck and we then truck the boat down to the marina where it gets launched."
The video makes plain that a shift in production geography has not diluted Seawind's core standards. The systems, processes, and performance targets behind the Seawind 1170 remain grounded in four decades of boatbuilding experience. Seawind Catamarans will be showing the award-winning Seawind 1170 at the Auckland Boat Show from 5 to 8 March.
