German Frers // Yacht Designer
On the Wind Sailing
Andy Schell
4.8 • 593 Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2016
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
#171, The legendary yacht designer German Frers…He earned his chops working for S&S under Olin Stephens himself, but it was only through a chance meeting that he got to sketch his first namesake yacht. Frers' one-off designs quickly began attracting the best production builders like Swan & Hallberg-Rassy, who hired him to design their bluewater cruising boats, and some of the most iconic super yachts ever built came off of his drawing board. I spoke to German on Skype from his office in Argentina about all this & much more.
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Big thanks to last week's guest & Hallberg-Rassy CEO Magnus Rassy for helping arrange this week's interview with German Frers. The two episodes kind of go together, as German & I started our conversation discussing his side of the HR44 story, from the designer's perspective which Magnus told at length last week from the sort of visionary's/boat-builders perspective. You don't need to listen to one to understand the other, but they're fun to hear back-to-back.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is David from Seattle, and I am on the foredeck of East Bjorn right now, and I wanted to say a couple of words about my own adventure on this boat. |
| 0:10.7 | I think the big thing is how surprising it was. I read a lot and tried to prepare myself for what it was going to be like, ultimately, it's just something I had to experience. |
| 0:22.7 | I think it was more challenging than I expected, more rewarding, more spontaneous. |
| 0:29.1 | We had a lot of side adventures that weren't necessarily in the plan that kind of came together. |
| 0:35.2 | And we had almost everything. |
| 0:36.7 | It was just such an incredible assortment of sailing and great weather and fog. |
| 0:45.4 | Yeah, it was super awesome to be on this boat. |
| 0:50.3 | And I hope to do it again soon. |
| 0:56.0 | Be spontaneous. Be adventurous. |
| 0:59.3 | Be like David from Seattle and book a passage on East Bjorn. |
| 1:03.1 | Check out the full calendar on 59-north.com slash offshore, |
| 1:07.2 | including Caribbean trips and a sale to Scotland in 2017, |
| 1:12.3 | plus our Arctic adventures in 2018. David promises you'll love it. |
| 1:19.8 | Good morning from Iceland. I am in the airport in Reykjavik. |
| 1:30.3 | Mia and I are en route to Sweden, where we have the next two months off while we take a break between sailing seasons. |
| 1:36.3 | It's about 2 o'clock in the morning, East Coast time as I record this. I got about an hour sleep on the plane. |
| 1:42.3 | Fun fact, did you know that in Swedish, Iceland is spelled like island? |
| 1:48.0 | It's very confusing on Swedish maps. |
| 1:51.0 | The IS is pronounced east and means ice. |
| 1:55.0 | Just like the IS in East Byrne. |
| 1:58.0 | Eastland equals Iceland. East Byrne. Eastland equals Iceland. |
| 2:01.6 | East Byrne equals Ice Bear or of course polar bear. |
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