When Conditions Change

Summer traffic on the Riviera is admirably unimpressed by a Ferrari.

Jacques Sicotte has a few of them, so he may be allowed the comparison. From his home near Cannes to Saint-Tropez, the drive can take close to three hours in the summer. In Temptation, his J Craft Torpedo, the same journey takes about 50 minutes.

Saint-Tropez becomes an easy outing by sea, rather than a drive that consumes much of the day.

Sicotte bought his Torpedo in 2010 after seeing a J Craft ferrying guests around Monaco during the boat show. The lines had their effect at once. His tastes run to E-Type Jaguars, Ferrari Dinos and the sort of machinery that earns attention before it moves. But Sicotte is not only a collector of beautiful forms. A mechanical engineer with a doctorate in nuclear physics, an official Ferrari Ambassador and the former owner of Emilia, a 1931 America's Cup 12 Metre Class sailing sloop, he wanted to know what sat underneath the beauty.

He had never tried a J Craft Torpedo. His question was how she handled.

He went to Gotland with his wife Linda and their young son to meet the builders and work through the configuration of Temptation. Linda chose the red-and-beige upholstery. Jacques specified rose polished steel for the dashboard, inspired by Bugatti, and a Nardi steering wheel from the people behind the wheel of the Ferrari 250 GTO. He was interested in the woodwork and trim, but also in what was, as he put it, under the hood.

"My classic cars are the ones I love the most, because of their style, but I do know quite a lot about how things work. For example, for our boat I wanted to have the more flexible and powerful engines."

Once Temptation was home near Cannes, she did not become a ceremonial object. During the six-month summer period, Sicotte and Linda would use her three or four times a week. Sometimes that meant breakfast nearby. Sometimes it meant Saint-Tropez instead of the car. Sometimes it meant a longer journey that kept them aboard overnight. They have slept on her dozens of times.

With her Nardi wheel, Bugatti-inspired dashboard and red-and-beige upholstery, Temptation hardly looks like a daily driver. She draws attention in harbour, and Sicotte enjoys that. But he has never kept her there simply to be admired. He uses her for the familiar runs along the Riviera and sometimes takes her much farther.

One such trip was to Corsica. On a calm day, they left at sunrise and had breakfast there at 10.00. Temptation, as Sicotte put it, “simply zoomed across.”

He has taken Temptation along the coast beyond Marseille, into little coves and on to Italy. At Alassio, he and Linda went ashore to a hotel and returned the following morning to find that the harbour staff had washed the boat without being asked. They wanted her to look her best.

Further west in the Mediterranean, Captain Bruno remembers a more animated version of the same confidence. Bruno is a J Craft captain who has been with the company since 2012. Asked for his best experience with a Torpedo, he chose a passage to Ibiza with Alex, another J Craft captain. They travelled in separate Torpedoes, one following the other through the rough weather.

"The waves were crazy high, more than three metres high, and we had to stop in Ciutadella to refuel the boat. But we decided straight away to get out again because we were so confident in the capability of the boat, and we really enjoyed surfing those waves together, even if it was crazy, really crazy."

The stop in Ciutadella matters. It is the moment when the conditions have changed enough to make a decision necessary. They could have refuelled, reconsidered and stayed put. Instead, because they trusted the boat, the weather became part of the experience rather than the end of it.

That is a different kind of luxury from a sheltered lunch reservation. It is the freedom to decide with confidence when the sea has its own view of the day.

For Sicotte, confidence also appears in the last few metres of a passage. Returning to his berth, he uses the IPS propulsion to handle Temptation alone, even when the weather is not obliging.

"Because of the IPS drives I can dock it alone under any conditions, even in heavy winds, I don't need anyone to help out. It has an amazing propulsion system that operates each propeller drive independently. You can have one pushing with the other one pulling at the same time."

That detail should not be reduced to a system note. It changes ownership. The passage does not end with a new dependence on crew, timing or luck in the harbour. The same confidence that carries the boat across open water continues into the berth.

Elsewhere, the distances become larger. A Torpedo made the approximately 500-nautical-mile crossing from Hong Kong to Hainan across the South China Sea in 16 hours. On the return, the crew reduced speed for the night portion, and the passage took 22 hours. In the United States, J Craft's own Torpedo ran from New York straight to Nantucket, then continued to Martha's Vineyard, Rhode Island and Maine. She has also crossed from Miami to the Bahamas. For the owner who kept his Torpedo at Fisher Island for seven years, the Bahamas crossing became a regular journey between homes on opposite sides of the water.

These examples are not there to make the boat sound heroic. They make a quieter point. Distance becomes less absolute when the boat is trusted enough to be used.

Fred Coyle brings a different sort of authority to that trust. He first tried a Torpedo in Florida, spending a weekend at Key Largo before commissioning Amazon Queen and travelling to Gotland to spend time with the builders. An owner-operator who has been boating since he was 15, and a former US Air Force F-15 pilot, Coyle is alert to how a machine answers the person controlling it.

"It's almost as though, if you think you want this boat to do something, it already does it for you. It's just so easy to operate and handle and manoeuvre. As a former US Air Force F-15 fighter pilot, it's like I'm flying a jet again, but across the waves."

He and his wife Rejane began their travels in the Baltic before Amazon Queen was transferred south for the Mediterranean leg. Some days brought six- and seven-foot seas that Coyle says she handled really well. At the helm, what stays with him is not simply speed, but the way the boat turns.

"What's remarkable is that the Torpedo has a little bit of old-school about her in the way that she turns, she banks like an airplane, for lack of a better way of putting it. All your gravitational forces are going through your body instead of against your body. So, she doesn't throw you around, but rather centres you."

That is where comfort stops being a vague lifestyle claim. It comes from behaviour at the helm. The boat does not merely take people somewhere attractive. It changes how the journey feels while it is happening.

Amazon Queen later travelled to Florida aboard a ship, was used there and in the Bahamas, and moved to Coyle's home in Knoxville on the Tennessee River system. After 14 months she had recorded 288 engine hours. He and Rejane were already thinking about the places they had not had time to reach in the Mediterranean, with the Amalfi Coast and Croatia on their list for a return.

There is another sort of changed condition, less dramatic than three-metre waves and more familiar to anyone with children. It comes at six o'clock in the evening, when the day has gone well, nobody quite wants to go home, and three daughters begin to get hungry.

On BABEBI, in the South of France, Anya Brunander solved that problem in a very particular way. She had the yard install an induction plate on deck, so she could cook pasta with ketchup and keep everyone out until sunset. It sounds minor until you imagine the alternative: the spell of the day breaking because dinner has to be found ashore, or because everyone has to go home. Instead, the boat quietly absorbs the change of plan. It lets the day keep going for everyone aboard.

Anya and her husband have often taken their three daughters away overnight on BABEBI. By day, the open cockpit is a place to dine and entertain. With the bimini raised and the cabin enclosure in place, it becomes a fully enclosed second cabin, heated or air-conditioned as needed. The table lowers at the touch of a button to make a double berth for the parents, while the daughters sleep in the forward cabin. The same Torpedo that was open to the day gives the family two comfortable cabins for the night. “We just have our duvets and it's cosy.”

One outing grew into several days away, beginning on a calm sea with duvets brought from the house and hardly any spare clothes. That might sound inconvenient. For Anya, it became part of the charm.

"We're not campers, but we love that feeling of freedom," she says. "We ended up getting a spot in Cannes Harbour, and because you're on the Côte d'Azur, wherever you're going to go you can get a restaurant. And you can buy things in the pharmacy like toothbrushes, and you can buy clothes. The kids loved it, because everywhere we went we got new clothes as we were running out!"

From Cannes they went to Saint-Tropez for a few nights and then on to the Île de Porquerolles, visiting the Fondation Carmignac, with no fixed plan for the journey.

"You know, you don't like to head off on a holiday without having a hotel booked when you have kids. But this time, for the kids it was great because when they said, 'Mom, what's the plan?' I could say, 'There is none. We're just going to go; we're going to sail!'"

That is not a soft family ending after the serious handling stories. It is another expression of the same idea. The conditions changed. The children were hungry. The day stretched. The plan disappeared. Because the boat had beds, a galley solution, restaurants within reach and enough confidence built into the journey, the absence of a plan became the adventure.

Near Cannes, Sicotte still washes Temptation down and covers her after each use. He still enjoys the phones coming out aboard much larger yachts when he enters the harbour. "It's great, they're standing on a $30m+ superyacht and they're complimenting me on our Torpedo!"

But admiration is only the visible surface of the story. The real measure is what the boat allows before and after the glance from the harbour: the decision to leave before sunrise, the confidence to go back out after refuelling, the ability to handle the berth alone, the comfort of a turn at speed, the pasta made at six, the duvets brought from home, the children asking what the plan is and being delighted when, for once, there is none.

When conditions change, some boats become more complicated. The Torpedo becomes more useful. Weather changes, routes change, family timings change, arrival plans change. What remains is the owner's willingness to keep the day open.

Sicotte and Linda have been planning another Italian journey, this time to Capri, with a few days to make their way along the coast. "I raced my America's Cup yacht in Naples a few times and I'd like to go back. It would take maybe a few days; we'd just hop along the Italian coast; stop off; the kids like to swim; and we all love Italian food!"

That is the more useful promise. Not a boat preserved for perfect conditions, but one that gives its owners permission to use imperfect ones well.