梦幻游艇：千万宝贝的诞生

    热爱海洋和沙滩，但是整个冬天不得不留在岸上的读者们，一定会喜欢G•布鲁斯•奈赫特的新书《宏图大志》（Grand Ambition）。而当他们拿起这本关于航海的新书，一定会因为这本书的副标题而疑惑不解，直挠头皮。这条诚恳而又动人的副标题这样写道：“本书献给一条非凡出众的游艇和建造它的人们，以及一名无法真正享用它的亿万富翁。”

    奈赫特是个航海老手。他写过两本关于航海的书，都大受欢迎。一本是关于1998年的悉尼-霍巴特帆船大赛（Sydney to Hobart yacht race）。当时，这个赛事断送了6个参赛者的生命。另一本则是关于“水煮鱼”（poached fish）——既是餐厅里的一种菜肴，又是海盗非法盗捕的意思。他还是玛丽•查四世号纵帆船（Mari Cha IV）的船员之一。2005年，他们驾驶这艘船打破了尘封100多年的横渡大西洋航海时间纪录。

    这次，奈赫特写了一本深入浅出、包罗万象的手册，告诉你一艘当代的超级游艇是怎样制造的。这艘梦幻游艇的主人是一位私募基金投资大亨道格•冯•埃尔曼和他的妻子琳达。他们对现在拥有的游艇中的一艘不太满意：这艘船长197英尺，设计高度有11.5英尺，大得没法泊入他们在劳德代尔堡的别墅码头。他们打算重新订做一艘略小的游艇，大约187英尺长，8英尺高，就起名叫“琳达女士号”（Lady Linda）。他们希望这艘船就在美国制造，从而证明美国制造的游艇也能和在荷兰，或者德国那些顶级船坞建造的游艇一样好。

    Sea-struck readers enduring the long winter ashore will want to pick up Grand Ambition, the latest maritime volume from G. Bruce Knecht. And the minute they do they'll likely start scratching their heads, bemused by the engagingly frank subtitle on the cover: "An Extraordinary Yacht, The People Who Built It, And the Millionaire Who Can't Really Afford It."

    Knecht knows his boats. He is the author of two previous, well received sea stories, one about the deadly 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race, and one about poached fish -- the kind served in restaurants, and also the kind taken illegally by pirates. He was also, it happens, aboard the schooner Mari Cha IV in 2005 when it broke a transatlantic sailing record that had stood for 100 years.

    This time Knecht has written a soup-to-nuts account of the construction of a modern superyacht. The vessel is the dream boat of a private equity investor, Doug Von Allmen, and his wife, Linda, who have a problem with one of their current yachts: at 197 feet, with a draft of eleven and a half feet, it is too big to keep at the dock behind their house in Fort Lauderdale. They decide to commission a slightly smaller one, to be called Lady Linda, 187 feet long with an eight-foot draft. They want it to be made in the U.S.A., so as to prove that an American-built yacht can be just as good as one built in the fancy shipyards in Holland and Germany.