Earlier this week hull number one of the glorious new Nordhavn 86 did a 10 minute harbor tour of Dana Point on its way up the coast from San Diego to Newport Beach. With designer Jeff Leishman at the helm – a couple of blasts of her throaty horn and some graceful pirouettes brought lustful smiles from the scores of camera toting onlookers lining the harbor to get their first peak.

The excitement of a seeing a new Nordhavn design in person for the first time is a long time coming and it was fun for the PAE employees in town to leave their desks and set aside their tools and take a few minutes to share in the appreciation of welcoming in a new model. 8601 was ordered a couple of years ago and her arrival is the first of many to come – in fact we have deposits for the first eight hulls, with several interested clients flying in to town (literally from all over the world) during the next couple of weeks to walk through hull number one and confirm plans to place their own order.

With the Thanksgiving holiday as the backdrop it was truly a weekend to be thankful for with the smooth delivery and offload of our new flagship. On Sunday our dedicated arrival crew (which included PAE President Dan Streech) met in San Diego to receive 8601. Dan’s wife Marcia was along for her first chance to be a part of the offload crew and word has it that she was so emotionally overwhelmed during her initial walkthrough by the sheer grandeur of 8601 that she was moved to tears, pretty heady stuff for all of us Nordhavnphiles as we clearly have raised the bar yet again and are now wading into realm of super yachts.

2008 will see a steady stream of larger Nordhavn arriving at our offices worldwide. We have continued to build boats all across our product line from 40 – 76 feet so if you find yourself thinking more about this being the year you leave shore and embrace the wonderful lifestyle of a liveaboard trawlerer we have much to talk with you about.