January / February 2023

RÉMY

An elegant small sailing yacht built in a garage

Michael Sauter

BEN SCHEURER

Jan von der Bank built his yacht, RÉMY, to a design by Martin Manzner of Berckemeyer Yacht Design of Germany. The boat, 9.5m (31’) LOA and now known as the BM31, is built with radius-chine plywood construction, with a final topside planking layer of mahogany. Jan worked with Martin on many details to give the yacht spare aesthetics, for example by leading sail-control lines out of sight belowdeck.

Anyone with an interest in wooden boats in Germany during the past five years would have had a hard time missing news of Jan von der Bank’s extraordinary backyard construction project. Jan not only built a 31' (9.5m) sailing yacht, from scratch, in his long single-car garage in Eutin, in northern Germany, but also spent many additional hours maintaining his extensively detailed website about the project. As the yacht came together stage by stage, people eagerly watched for every new episode, awaiting word of his next clever solution or latest milestone of progress. Before long, he had more than 10,000 social-media followers not only in Germany but far beyond.

He named the boat RÉMY, after his favorite animated movie character, the chef who happens to be a rat in the Disney film Ratatouille. “If a rat can cook, I can build a boat,” he had told himself. Such a name is fitting for a yacht that became the star of its own show, because Jan, as an author of television screenplays and books, has an affinity for characters. But he also has an eye for design, having been trained as an architect.

His project started in response to a challenge from one of his friends: “Let’s each build a boat at home,” the friend had said, “and let’s see how we are doing.” That friend decided instead to buy a boat. For Jan, however, the seed of an idea for a bottom-to-top construction had taken root. Many of his blog readers followed his work all the way through to the boat’s launching in June 2022 at Schilksee, the harbor of the 1972 Olympic Games in Kiel.

Jan calculated that he spent some 3,650 hours building the boat, and who knows how many more hours managing the chronicle, in German and English. I wondered why he would choose this path, devoting so many hours to a small workshop instead of enjoying sunny hours on the water. After all, he has been a sailor almost since he could walk, and he is known for racing high-performance sailing dinghies, most notably as a 2005 world champion in the singlehanded Contender class. His reply was very simple: “This is no contradiction. When I am working on the boat, I am, with my heart and in my head, at sea….”