Boating buddies, Gudmund Olafsson and Nigel Oliver, commission a do-it-all cat that can cruise and fish
When I started boating back in Iceland more than 30 years ago, I did so with a homemade 14ft speedboat. From there, I quickly progressed to a Shetland 2250SS, which my friend and I modified to take a Volvo Penta KAD42 – and while it was never designed for that, it turned out to be a terrific sea boat. Having moved to the UK, my boating was then limited to the occasional visit to Iceland, so to keep my sanity, I bought a used Sealine 410 in Germany, before bringing it back to its new home port in Chichester Harbour.
While this was probably my all-time favourite boat, a visit to the 2003 London Boat Show saw me tempted into a brand new Cranchi 33 Endurance – and it was around this time that I became friends with my current boating buddy, Nigel. Nigel had been boating since he was knee-high to an outboard and had progressed through a number of speedboats until in 2006, he bought a new Jeanneau Merry Fisher 625. Now clearly, a Cranchi Endurance and a Merry Fisher are very different boats. I’m all about the cruising and Nigel is besotted with fishing – but a few years later, when we both found ourselves boatless, we decided to look for a boat that could serve our mutual interests.
We looked at a number of Australian and Kiwi options, many of which were powercats and almost all of which were aluminium. One of these, the Kingfisher from New Zealand, was about to be built under licence in the UK, so we looked at it in the early stages of the build. It was to be a demo boat for the new UK dealer and the wait for another was going to be long, so we started looking elsewhere. We went for a sea trial on a Cheetah and were bowled over by the stability, handling and seaworthiness of a small powercat but the Cheetah was almost exclusively built for fishing enthusiasts, with little emphasis on the home comforts demanded by a cruiser like me.
Another British powercat option was a Swiftcat. Built in Essex, these were available at 8m and 11m and, being built in such small volumes, could easily be customised to our needs. Small volumes also meant long lead times but, as luck would have it, an 8m hull had just come out of the mould. Nigel and I immediately adopted it and, having looked at the wheelhouses produced by Breaksea Boats in Weston-super-Mare for their Vigilante range, we decided that this was the way to go. As if by magic, our new Breaksea Swiftcat was born.
THE BREAKSEA SWIFTCAT
Measuring 8m in length with a 3.7m beam, the Swiftcat felt like quite a big boat – especially as the twin Suzuki 250hp outboards were mounted on pods. That helped free up the cockpit space but it also made the boat nearly 10m long. And the Vigilante wheelhouse was also widened to provide a superb interior space, while still enablin
