A SURPRISE AT EVERY TURN
With her voluptuous curves, a long, elegant sheer, and a purposefully flared bow, the Zeelander Z55 appears at first to be little more than a thoroughgoing exercise in American retro styling. You could easily imagine her as a Prohibition-era rumrunner. But looks can deceive.
She is, of course, Dutch-built, and with her fiberglass construction, IPS drives, high-quality detailing, and midships tender garage, she is not so much a styling exercise as a thorough exploration of modern motoryacht design—and a surprisingly successful one at that.
Taking the Mulder-designed hull of the shipyard’s earlier Z44 model, superyacht naval architects Van Oossanen scaled it up and tank-tested the result, which was optimized from the outset for Volvo Penta’s IPS propulsion. Twin 725-horsepower IPS 950 engines are standard. Our test example at the recent Cannes boat show, the first
