I’m looking at something so priceless, it seems borderline illegal. The feeling is not unlike breaking into a vault without lifting a finger. There’s the impenetrable door made of steel-reinforced concrete, cast aside on its hinges to reveal a gleaming bounty of diamonds ordinarily stored in Switzerland. Or, in this case, Holland, where my inside man, Joost Mertens, is showing me an archive of something far more interesting: line drawings of the first Doggersbanks, penned by Dick Boon in 1968, forever changing motoryacht design.
“Somebody hired Mr. Boon to make this drawing,” Mertens says as he moves his cursor around the screen. “People developed plans from these line plans; it was all calculations done on the water surface and projected area of the frames, the volume of the boat, principal construction.”
Behind him, people stroll along the sunny, waterfront promenade in Sneek,
