Brix Marine’s recently-built whale watching vessel, the Raven, works off of the company’s popular 49-passenger design with a quad outboard configuration for speed and redundancy.
The Raven is the second whale watching vessel the Port Angeles, Wash.-based catamaran maker has built for Allen Marine Tours of Alaska.
The newer vessel has more power than the first, as it’s outfitted with four Yamaha 450 HP outboard motors with 18-inch stainless steel three-blade propellers.
At 48 feet long and 18 feet wide, the Raven is sizable but light, with aluminum construction. It’s also fast, averaging 30 to 35 mph fully loaded with passengers.
The quad outboard system distinguishes the Raven from vessels with more conventional set-ups.
“With the four engines, there’s incredible redundancy, so in an emergency situation the boat can be operated on a single outboard,” Brix’s managing director, Perry Knudson, told Pacific Maritime. “And when we’re in a quad scenario with the four outboards, we’re able to prop the boat so that it operates as efficiently as possible with a full load.”
Outboard motors are well-suited for limited touring seasons.
“When the tours are open, that’s when they’re going to make the money,” Charlie Crane, Brix’s director of sales and marketing, said. “They don’t really like diesels because it’s hard to find a diesel mechanic and it’s real easy to change an outboard. They can usually carry a spare and keep them online and keep the money rolling in.”
Speed also is important for whale watching.
“One of the other things to consider with a boat like this is they’ll want it to be fast so they can get out to the whale-watching grounds, wherever those happen to be,” Knudson said. “In some cases that may be a 30-minute run and in some cases they may have to go an hour and they want to be able to cross that distance quickly.”
On the way to the whales, passengers are in airline-style seats in a climate-controlled environment with what Knudson described as “big picture frame-style windows so they can still they feel like they’re connected to the outdoors.”
He added that once the Raven is where the whales are, “the vessel will be sitting in a basically static scenario and one of the things we have to plan for in a boat like this is passenger crowding.”
Passengers move outside to view whales and the catamaran’s stability is key when they congregate on one side of the boat.
The Raven features three decks—a large main foredeck, a smaller aft deck and a second story deck on the vessel’s elevated pilot house.
Passenger comfort is an obvious consideration.
“With the catamaran design, the vessel is very stable versus a monohull, with a lot less seasickness,” Crane said.
The Raven is a high-tunnel catamaran, with a higher tunnel section than a classic tunnel catamaran design. The high tunnel design allows more air flow under the hull, a feature that comes into play when waters get choppy.
“What that does is it makes the ride even smoother in an offshore environment, so when they’re moving at 30 to 35 miles an hour and they’re in a sea state of four-, five-, six-, eight-foot waves, we’ve brought the part of the boat that could create a slamming condition higher up out of the water to prevent that,” Knudson said.
“And so by comparison,” he added, “it’s a smoother running boat in a larger sea state—when we start getting into this 49 passenger range, we really try to steer people towards that high tunnel version just because of the passenger comfort.”
The vessel’s elevated pilot house allows line-of-sight whale spotting and seats three, including the captain.
The dashboard features Yamaha’s outboard control system, with joystick adjustability.
It took about 10 months to build the Raven at a cost of about $1.3 million.
“But the devil’s in the details—we enable customers to have a high level of flexibility to design the boat so you can make it a lot more expensive with a lot more customization. or less expensive if we were keeping certain things simple,” Knudson said.
Founded in 2001, Brix Marine’s catamaran production has continually evolved.
“We’ve been building this style boat for well over 20 years,” Knudson said. “And when I talk about those two hull forms, classic tunnel versus high tunnel, we’ve got over two decades of massaging this hull design in either direction to make sure that we’re optimizing it.”
“And we’re pretty proud of what we’ve developed, and yet we will continue innovating with it into the future, as we have opportunities to do that,” he added.
And there is indeed opportunity—Knudson said Brix is working on offering electric battery systems.
“The electric drive technology has come a long way in the last few years,” he said. “And right now the batteries seem to be the more challenging portion of that design, but technology is changing rapidly—we’re working on those designs and are looking forward to being able to offer our typical portfolio range, but now with this whole battery electric option.”
Brix is working with a client who wants electric-powered boats and it won’t be long before they’ll be in production.
“It’s not going to be 30 days (from now),” Knudson said, “but I don’t think two years is a ridiculous timeline for when this stuff is going to become more available.”