Andrew Semprevivo, vice president of sales and marketing for Seakeeper, says trickle-down stabilization technology has been part of the plan from the start. Seakeeper debuted at the end of 2008 with a system for midrange yachts and intended to go smaller, but requests pushed the technology up instead.
“What moved us from 50- to 60-foot boats to the bigger boats was the market,” he says. “We had a lot of demand from boats above 60 feet that had used fin stabilizers and were looking for an internal solution.”
By the end of 2014, the company was offering its Seakeeper 5 unit for 30- to 40-foot boats, but, as Semprevivo says, “It was bigger and heavier than it should have been for those size boats, and most of those boats don’t have generators that were needed to power it.”
Hence the new Seakeeper 3, a stabilizer that runs on 12-volt power and can be installed on center consoles by replacing the leaning post. The unit comes with a replacement post manufactured by Nautical Design in Pennsylvania. The bottom pan in the post is the size of a cooler, and the gyro fits inside. The design can be installed as a refit or spec’d on a new build.
“And we’re not stopping there,” Semprevivo says. “Our vision is to bring this technology down to 20-foot boats. We compare it often to air conditioning in cars. In the ’30s, air conditioning was a luxury item. Very few cars had it. It was very expensive and took up the entire trunk. Today you just expect the cars to have air conditioning.”
