Originally published in Sail Magazine

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Repass says, “When you put a big house on a sailboat you have to solve three problems. First, how do you make it look good? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think we succeeded here. Second, how do you see over it? We dealt with that by raising levels in the cockpit. Third, can the windows break? We’ve used glass that is hurricane-rated. In tests it has withstood the impact of a two-by-four traveling at 35 miles per hour. What it takes to achieve that is a layer of PVB (plastic) laminated between two layers of heat-strengthened glass at a total thickness of 7/16 inch. That’s twice as thick as a car window.”

The pilothouse roof provides more than shelter. Fitted with 20 of Solara Energy’s 40-watt solar panels, the surface is designed to produce enough electricity to run the boat without other charging sources. These high-output silicon-wafer panels are good for 22 amps at 24 volts for a theoretical total of 3,000 watt hours per day, assuming 5 to 6 hours of sunshine. Solara’s panels conform to the roof ’s curvature and can stand up to foot traffic.

Belowdecks
The interior styling is varnished cherry, with traditional-style white trim. Cherry countertops have been used in the galley and heads “because they hold up well, and they look great,” Repass says. The plywood sole is faced with individual cherry-veneer planks with relieved edges interlaid with 3/4-inch strips of anti-skid.

Nothing in the pilothouse blocks the view to the outside, whether you are cooking in the galley, resting in the dinette across from the galley, working at the nav station, or just kicking back on the 4-foot-long forward-facing helmsman’s bench. Moving forward you step down to cabin level, where there are three staterooms and two heads. At the aft end of the pilothouse you step down into another sleeping cabin nestled alongside the engine compartment and a world of accessible storage and comsystems space.

One advantage of a pilothouse is the space available beneath it. On this yacht there is a generous pantry area that will serve well when stocking for along cruise. There is also a washer/dryer, fuel and water tankage, and easy access to all equipment. The adjoining engine room space has 6-foot headroom, a sink for washing up, a 7-foot workbench running fore and aft, and ports to ventilate it. A hatch to the cockpit increases ventilation and serves as an emergency exit. There is also four-sided access to the 100-horsepower Yanmar turbo diesel that drives the yacht at 11 knots with a three-blade Gori propeller.

The yacht uses a 24-volt system, and gel-cell batteries are installed because they do not produce flammable hydrogen when being charged, are maintenance-free, and can be fully recharged without losing capacity. The battery bank is oversized because the family wants to be able to ride at anchor for days without running the diesel.

Under sail
Repass recalls that before he finally decided to built Convergence, he talked to everyone he could about the merits of unstayed cat rigs and nobody had anything bad to say at a practical level. “Yes, they do look different,” he says,“ but once you get past that, they open new horizons. Engineers stopped using wires to support airplane wings a long time ago. Yes the rig moves around, and that takes some getting used to. But having no wires helps us have a skinny design, and skinny designs are fast.”

Convergence has two free-standing tapered masts that carry full-batten sails and wishbone booms. The carbon-fiber masts and booms were heat- and pressure-cured in an autoclave for high strength and low weight. Because the spars are designed to flex progressively toward the tips, they can spill air in puffs, and that, the designer says, provides a smoother ride by not transferring sudden stresses to the deck.

Because the masts flex so much, modern brittle sail laminates are not appropriate. Repass and Santa Cruz sail maker David Hodges worked with Challenge Sailcloth to develop a new woven Spectra/Dacron radial fabric that is 100 pounds lighter than an all-Dacron mainsail.

Almost everyone who sails with Repass is struck by the irony of his making a living selling boat stuff while owning a yacht that is rigged for simplicity. There are, for example, only four winches on this 66-footer. Repass answers simply that what really counts here is the quest for better and happier sailing.

In early trials the yacht hit 13.5 knots running downwind wing-and-wing in a 20-knot breeze. With the right conditions it should easily surpass 20 knots downwind under full control. While the motorboat cross-pollination might suggest that some sailing qualities have been compromised, that’s simply not the case. On every point of sail the helm of Convergence has a precise feel; she “talks” to the driver the way a good yacht should. She feels alive.

One stormy day on San Francisco Bay last spring, not long after the yacht had been launched, Repass was steering Convergence on port tack and sighting forward over the top of the pilothouse. Everything was fine for a while, but then the heavens opened and the rains came down. So the three people aboard did the obvious. They moved the party inside and kept right on sailing, listening contentedly, perhaps even smugly, to the pitter patter of rain on the roof.

DESIGNER’S COMMENT
Convergenceis a twenty-first-centurymotorsailer in that it can both sail welland motor well, unlike the old kind ofmotorsailer that could do neither. Mostdesigns are sloops because people wantwhat they’re used to. But we’ve been doing catrigs for a dozen years now, and none of those boats havebeen rerigged, because the standing rigging doesn’t wear out.A cat rig is low maintenance. The sistership, Derek M. Baylis,a research vessel andmarine-sanctuaries school ship, was designed for simplicityand ease of handling; you can’t accomplish that mission ifyou’re trying to show people how to use a coffee grinder.Randy Repass absorbed what we were doing, and theresult, we believe, is a neat marriage of sailing andpowerboat cultures. Randy has done the whole fast-sledsailing thing, in Santa Cruz and elsewhere, and later helearned what there is to know about powerboat cruising.

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