Our Boat

Our boat is a 1999 Hallberg-Rassy 53', which we purchased new through Jan Place at West Coast Yachts, the HR dealer  in Seattle.  She is a modern, fin-keel, spade rudder sloop with a removable cutter stay rig.  Hallberg-Rassy's Site has a ton of great technical detail as well as stock interior photos of ours and every other model of HR, so we won't go into too much general detail here.  Rather, I'll just touch on the highlights and only go into detail on things that are specific to our boat.

This image (taken from from the HR site) shows our interior layout with a few minor differences.  We had the double berth to starboard in the aft cabin widened at the factory for one thing.  Additionally, our boat has a hanging locker forward in the Pullman berth and some shelving differences from the layout above, but other than that, this is exactly our layout.  The factory is very happy to work with you on small changes, if you discuss it with them early enough in the construction process and if the changes meet with their (very Swedish) notion of what's appropriate.  Usually, their notion of what's appropriate is worth listening to.  In hindsight, we probably should have chosen more of the options and had the factory do more work up front then they did.  We've doen a lot of work to the boat since we bought her and we wish we had the optional extra fuel tank for example.   

A partial list of things we've added to the boat or otherwise modified since we got her include: increased 12 volt battery bank capacity, SSB radio, dedicated weatherfax, Iridium Satellite phone, dedicated navigation and multi-media computer with switchable navigation station and cockpit displays, dingy davits, a 3500 watt inverter, a 185 watt solar panel, an Aerogen6 wind generator, removable genneker pole over the port bow roller, folding stern ladder, redundant autopilot drive motors and an  automatic engine room fire extinguisher system.  Most of this work was done by Sound Rigging and Yacht Services (now under the banner of YachtMasters) on Lake Union in Seattle.  These guys do super high quality work and they stand behind it.  Talk to Todd Rickard, who runs the place (todd@yachtmastersnw.com).  If you are thinking of having some serious work done on your boat,  I can't recommend them enough.