At the Cannes Yachting Festival this past fall, DutchCraft—a sister company to Zeelander—unveiled the DC56. It was not your typical 56-footer. Built to seat as many as 44 people, it also could be loaded up with tons of gear, set up for a party with a DJ platform or turned into a fish-stalking machine with a fighting chair. And it had a maximum speed of 40 knots.
Now comes the second model from DutchCraft, the DC25, a superyacht tender that shows an equal amount of innovative thinking in design.
The DC25, which premiered in January at the boat show in Düsseldorf, Germany, has a length overall of 26 feet, 3 inches. It’s built of carbon fiber and has fully electric propulsion, with the ability to cruise silently at 32 knots for 75 minutes, or to cruise at 6 knots for six hours, according to the builder.
“We believe electric propulsion will be key in a future that cares about ocean preservation,” Floris Koopmans, DutchCraft’s sales and marketing manager, stated in a press release. “We are committed to investing in this positive movement, and the technology that we have developed for the DC25 is a step in the right direction.”
The low position and compact size of the drivetrain is what gives the boat so much extra space on deck. There’s a center console forward for the skipper, with rails abaft it that allow elements to be swapped out. At right, you can see how the DC25 looks with padded bench seating on the rails. More seats can be added to fit as many as 12 guests, or the seats can slide away to make room for, say, a rack holding eight sets of scuba-diving gear or piles of luggage heading to and from shore. Or the deck space can be left open to house a pair of personal watercraft, all kinds of gear or, perhaps, an ATV.
The center console is shaded by a hardtop that pivots toward the bow, a design element that DutchCraft says will make stowage easier in a superyacht tender garage. And the height of the hardtop can drop from 11 feet to 6 feet, 4 inches when it’s time to put the tender away for the night. Beam on the boat is 7 feet, 8 inches.
“There is nothing else like it in the size category,” Koopmans says. “The sheer capacity and range of uses [are] phenomenal.”
The DC25 can be used as a family dayboat, or it can be a crew-ready shuttle for
handling groceries and garbage. The boat’s batteries can even be used as an auxiliary power supply for a superyacht at anchor or in port.
The design brief on the DC25 called for giving yacht owners “the flexibility and fun they desire from life on the water, backed up by robust and practical design.” For a Dutch brand looking to establish its bona fides primarily on the ideas of versatility and practicality, the DC25 is a smart follow-up launch as the sistership to the DC56.
