This is a transcript of Mad Mariner's MadCast, the podcast that covers all aspects of boats and boating. In this segment, we interview Tony Fleming, head of Fleming Yachts. He shares his insights on his company, his cruising experience and the industry with Mad Mariner Contributing Editor Diane M. Byrne.

Why don't we start with the beginning of Fleming Yachts? When you decided to launch the company, you chose a Taiwanese yard. Now given your experiences with Grand Banks, which built in Singapore, it seems kind of an interesting switch. How did you make your decision?

Tony Fleming: Well my experience over a collective number of years was in building in the Orient for boats intended for a worldwide market and Taiwan offered widest range of boat yards. It's true that in many people's minds, Taiwan was not associated with good quality, but that really was a question of price. You got what you paid for. People went to Taiwan because they were looking for a cheap boat, not necessarily a good boat. And I felt that Taiwan offered us the best choice and that really proved to be the case. We started back in 1985. We're still building in the same yard and only in that yard. And that yard builds boats only for us and for nobody else. So I think that the decision that we made was borne out by practice.

Around the time that you were establishing Fleming Yachts, that Euro style, as a lot of people like to call it, was really starting to become popular. And you went with a very different style than that. You went with the classic cruiser style. Why did you decide to go that route?

Fleming: Well, my object really was to build the best cruising boat that they knew how and the trouble with the sleek style is that they're not necessarily very practical. I mean boarding the boat is quite a problem. You can't get on the side decks, you have to get on the swim platform. The range is not very great because they go fast and that means they have to be light. And also galley facilities are often absolutely minimal, which is no good if you're trying to go for any distance.

So, I felt that the more traditional classic look was more suitable for what I wanted to do. The other thing is that the trouble with style is that what's in today is very often out tomorrow, whereas the classic style really lasts forever and never goes out of style. No, I really have to say that I didn't have any worries about it because I wasn't trying to build an empire or anything. We just wanted to build a relatively few number of boats every year and I felt sure that, since we were aiming at a worldwide market, it shouldn't be too difficult to find a relatively few number of buyers that felt the same way.

The three Fleming models, the 55, the 65 and the 75, all use solid fiberglass construction instead of cored fiberglass construction. And they each have full-length keels. Both elements are pretty unusual in the motor yacht market. Why don't you explain why you decided to take both of these routes?

Fleming: On the question of the solid bottoms rather than cored bottoms, cored bottoms are often cheaper because they actually use less material and it's a sandwiched construction with a relatively thinner outer lamination, a core in the middle and then an inner lamination. The key point about core is the adhesion between all these various layers and that's not necessarily very easy to get – and the problem is you don't really know whether you've got it or not. There's not any real way to check.

It's also vulnerable when people want to add through hulls. If they don't add them correctly, if they don't cut back the glass or the foam I should say, where the through hull is, then the water can get into the core. And if it gets into the core you have a really horrendous problem.

Also, the penetration resistance is not so good because you have a thin laminate, so if it hits some sharp object it can more easily break through. The cored bottom is very stiff but not necessarily very resistant to actual impact. So those were the real reasons why I stayed with the more simple form of construction. It is actually slightly heavier and slightly more expensive, because you use more glass. But I felt for the purpose that we wanted to use the boat, it was a more appropriate form of construction. We're not looking for speed, we're really looking for durability.

As far as the keel is concerned, the drawback of the big keel is that you've got an increased width of area, so that's more roll resistance. And in my opinion it's absolutely essential for any serious cruising boat to have a keel to give you the protection for the running gear. All our keels extend below the level of the running gear. So if you hit the bottom, and regrettably most of us do sooner or later, then it's the keel that takes the impact and not the running gear. A simple grounding, which could happen to anybody at anytime, is a catastrophe for a boat that does not have any form of protection, because the thing that hits the bottom is the rudder and the propellers. So, your boat is instantly out of action, whereas you've got a much better chance of surviving if it's the keel that hits. And I should also say that our keels are actually isolated from the hulls, so even if you tore the entire keel off, the boat will still not leak.

So, when you decided to take hull number one of the 65 as your voyage of discovery boat, what led to that decision? Had you been thinking about taking a boat for awhile and just decided to wait for hull number one, or was there some other reason?

Fleming: The problem with building a new model from the builder's point of view is that you're very much indebted to the people who are your first buyers, because they're really buying a pig in a poke. I mean, you can give them drawings and all sorts of assurances, but nobody – including yourself – really knows how that boat's going to turn out until after you've built it.

And so you're very much obligated to what they want to do with the boat. And very often what they want to do with the boat is not necessarily what you want to do with the boat. So very often you may have to build about six boats before you actually get to the boat that you really had in mind in the first place. So it was the first time in the company's history that we'd ever been in a position where we could hold back a boat without actually having a retail buyer in mind.

We started off with the 55 and we were a very young company at that time. Of course, like all young companies, we didn't have very much money. Later on, the next boat that we built was actually the 75 and that's a really big boat, very expensive and, again, we couldn't possibly consider not selling the boat. With the 65, we were in a situation where we didn't actually have to sell the first boat. And it was an opportunity to keep that boat and build it the way that we really wanted to build it, starting with hull number one so that you could tell everybody, "look this is the starting point – you can depart from this but at least we have an established starting point."

If you build a boat for somebody else, quite naturally, they want the boat as soon as possible. And you sort of lose control of it for doing extended sea trials and all that kind of thing.

To date you have covered something like 19,000 miles on board Venture. And last year you put something like 9,000 on between March and December. Why don't you tell us about some of the places that you've been, but also tell us some of the things that you found worked well along with things that you determined might need to be tweaked.

Fleming: Okay, well, it's actually quite difficult to pick out certain places because almost the best part of it was there were so many of them. I mean it was almost the collective experience that was the best part. But if I had to pick out certain places, there was up in Alaska where we went to an area called Tracy Arm, which has got chunks of floating ice and ice flows, and we were able to gently nudge those aside. We went down the coast, which is a kind of rough and tumble thing.

The Sea of Cortez, it was really kind of a surprise because it is a wonderful place. I mean it's not much publicized and people who are not on the West Coast don't really even know about it. It hardly has any population at all really, a few towns that are very nice. But there is a lot of wildlife, like whales and the most athletic porpoises I've ever seen in my life. And, you know, you could spend weeks there really just cruising around in this beautiful deserted area.

There were the Galapagos Islands, of course. I think everyone's heard of them and they're famous for their remarkable wildlife. That's very much off the beaten track for most private boats and it's quite expensive. You see far more sailboats there actually than power boats because not many power boats have the range and the seaworthiness to get there.

The Panama Canal was fascinating. The Panama Canal is actually quite quick. We took 11 hours to go through and three hours of that was spent just waiting in certain areas. But it's the implication that you have crossed from basically the Pacific region to the Atlantic region and crossed the Continental Divide and it's history, which is the most impressive thing I think.

And then the Dawanese Circle, which basically goes from New York up through the canal system to the Great Lakes. The St. Lawrence Seaway, Nova Scotia, and back down through Maine and New England, down to New York. That's a 2,600 mile segment. So those, I think, were the main areas of interest.

As far as learning anything along the way, well, of course. I mean in the Galapagos we were south of the equator and up in Alaska you're pretty far north, 53 degrees in fact. So we went through many different types of conditions, open ocean and canals, fresh water, sea water, tropics, ice – all that kind of thing. I think we really did an amazingly good job on the design.

Of course we had a lot of experience by then and there wasn't much except for just a little bit of tweaking. I mean it sounds so small it's almost hardly worth mentioning, but such things as the water heating system, the domestic hot water so that we could get it to the faucets quicker without wasting it running down the sink 'til you get hot water. We did find it was important to be able to divide off the pilot house from the rest of the living accommodation, because we did quite a lot of overnight passages and even the slightest amount of the light coming into the pilot house interferes with navigation. I was really surprised how little light you need in there. But other than that, quite honestly, I don't think there was anything. I mean, quite a few small things that are now in production boats as a result of our trip, but that's about it.

A lot of the times the small things are the things that make a big difference for long-term cruisers.

Fleming: Yes, I agree. I mean many of our owners, they do tell us that they've owned the boat for two or three years and they're still discovering why something was done a certain way. And so we've made these refinements, changes, over the years – all the time. And I think that's perhaps why there weren't so many changes on this boat because we'd been at it, by that time, for about 20 years. And all of the things we'd learned over those 20 years we had already incorporated in the boat.

Speaking of changes, after one of the earlier parts of your trip, you decided to re-power Venture with a pair of 800 horsepower MANs, which are common-rail diesels. What triggered that decision?

Fleming: We kind of felt that some people, especially on the East Coast, were looking for more power. And the engines like the Caterpillar were very big and they occupied a lot of space and were heavy. So that was the first thing, because we put a very high priority on being able to maintain stuff properly, which means you've got to be able to get all around the engines.

And the MAN diesels, being common-rail and being a very modern design, were much better package in terms of size and design to fit in the boat. So we felt that those were really the best engines with the right amount of power for the 65 Fleming. So that started it all.

I also felt if we were going to sort of encourage people to use a certain type of engine, then it was up to us to try them out first. We hadn't really had much experience with common-rail engines at that time. As it turns out, we've been very pleased with them. We've learned a lot. They're much cleaner burning. They're lighter. There are so many advantages really, it's hard to kind of list what they all are. They're quiet, smooth, cleaning burning, economical and compact. They're the right package for the boat. We've done about 1400 hours through a lot of different conditions and we've been very pleased with them.

Among your travels, you participated in the FUBAR Rally in 2007. Some may not know what the FUBAR Rally is, so why don't you explain what it's all about.

Fleming: Okay, well the FUBAR Rally actually was very important for us as it turned out because Bruce Kessler, the gentleman who organized the rally and who previously organized the Nordhaven Rally across the Atlantic, invited me to take part as one of the escort vessels. We brought the boat down from the Pacific Northwest to San Diego in order to participate.

Most of know what FUBAR kind of really means, but in this particular case it stands for, "Fleet Underway to Baha Rrally." The objective of the rally was to encourage boat owners with less experience to venture further afield. We had a lot of people who had actually never been out overnight before and certainly never gone to another country. And they felt much more comfortable being accompanied by a fleet of other boats amongst whom were a lot of quite experienced boaters and builders. So that was what laid behind the rally.

The rally was from San Diego down to around the tip of Baja, California and out to La Paz. It lasted about two weeks. The distance is just under 1,000 miles. And it was very successful. There were no problems of any real significance. People had to run slowly in order to be able to make the distance between fueling, because there are practically no resources down the coast at all. It's extremely remote. There wasn't much feedback for my particular boat because we had a boat that had already done a lot of cruising and we built cruising boats, so there weren't many changes. In fact, I don't think there were any changes actually that we made to Venture.

What was very rewarding, though, was to see the increasing confidence of people who had never done this kind of thing before. And how they were then, sort of having broken the ice, so to speak, they were prepared to go on. And some cruised further down the Mexican coast and all of them, in any case, were then faced with getting the boats back up to California again, traveling independently.

What does the future hold for Fleming Yachts? Obviously right now it's a pretty tough economy for many of the companies in the business. But are you planning on introducing new models or perhaps making some additions to or changes to existing models? Also, I know you've typically enjoyed a nice backlog on your larger boat, so do you have that going on right now as well?

Fleming: Well, I'm afraid to say we don't have any backlog at all and we've been affected negatively just like everybody else has. The backlog, we're still just finishing up the backlog actually, but there's not much at all in the way of new sales coming along. A lot of people hold on to their money to see what the future holds for them. So the backlog has vanished essentially.

We're giving some serious consideration to a new model because this, of course, is a very good time to build one. We need to keep the yard busy. I mean, fortunately for us, the yard is very well grounded financially, so there's no risk there. But of course, you know, they're not going to keep on employing people who don't have any work to do. So, we don't want to lose the key personnel that have worked on our boats now for over 20 years.

So, we're considering a new model but we haven't actually reached a firm decision yet regarding the size or the timing. Any boats that we do build, we still continue to refine the design and it's a good chance to sort of catch up and get everything sort of nice and well organized. We're thinking about things like solar panels on the hardtops to help cut down generator time. We've made quite a lot of changes on the boats to make them more environmentally friendly.

Right now we have a boat that is about to arrive in the U.K., Venture II, which has a few changes in it. We have a new shaft system, which does away with the stuffing box, and we didn't want to put that into our customer's boat because if it didn't work it would be a horrendous thing to take care of. So, we're trying it in the new boat just to give it some miles on the sea to find out how well it works out. But if it does work out, it'll be much more efficient. That's about it actually. As I said, we're sort of waiting along with everybody else to see what the future holds.