The Gazelle Project

The Gazelle Project is manufacturing quality steel sailing vessels - but it is not just about manufacturing, there is much more to it than this...

The Project was set up to support sailing; not sailing for pretence or sailing for a few hours each week in and out of the marina - but sailing for adventure, sailing for self-discovery and extended journeying under sail. But for many of you, justifing the cost of such an adventure is impossible and so the benefits of the experience are out of reach. If The Gazelle Project is going to overcome this, and thus facilitate people being able to gain the benefit of these experiences, it has to achieve something remarkable - affordable ocean going yachts but without any compromise on build quality. This, I believe, is something we have achieved.

Low cost of ownership

Low cost of ownership is ensured not only by our choice of manufacturing location - which is in Southern India - but also by our choice of the Gazelle design by Tom Colvin of the USA, which has the following features each contributing significantly to lower costs:

• She is a single chine steel vessel requiring only the use of simple and easily worked materials.
• She requires very few expensive machined parts.
• She is junk rigged - a rig requiring only simple materials and only one set of sails (and sails that can be patched easily and repaired anywhere.)
• And if it comes to it she doesn’t even need an engine and can be sculled with a yuloh (a traditional Chinese oar used on many of the river junks.)

No compromise on quality

We will not compromise on build quality - and it is important here not to confuse build quality with luxury gadgets. Our Gazelle’s are not floating caravans with everything from air conditioning to a dishwasher fitted - that was never our intention. It has, however, always been our intention as builders, to ensure that our yachts are built faithfully to the original design, using skilled craftsmen and using only materials of verifiable quality. At the end of the day we can sleep easy knowing that we have done everything possible to make these vessels sea-worthy. This is real quality and it is the only type of quality that matters. Our means of ensuring this quality has been to use traditional ship building methods and place the whole construction process under the supervision of experienced British Shipwrights.