SAIL TALE: Backing from a mapping-technology guru sparks a pioneering plan to build a yacht appealing to its wealthy customers' green instincts.

• Author: Macmillan, Mike

While eastern North Carolina has a storied heritage of boatbuilding, no one's ever seen anything like the 88-foot carbon-fiber catamaran under construction outside of Edenton a mile from the Albemarle Sound. "It's more like building an airplane than a boat," says Michael Reardon, a co-founder of Daedalus Yachts, which plans to sell the crafts for about $12.5 million a pop.

To design and manage this project, Reardon and Daedalus have imported elite boatbuilding talent and struck a deal with College of The Albemarle's Edenton-Chowan campus to train employees to work with advanced composite materials. The Daedalus D88 is intended to be one of the greenest and most technologically advanced boats afloat, capable of circling the globe without the use of fossil fuels at speeds of 1.4 to 1.7 times that of the "true" wind. It can be sailed with a minimum of two crewmen, leaving room for 10 passengers (or nine and a chef), and can be configured with three or four cabins.

Going green is important to Reardon and his co-founder and key financial backer, Stefan Muff, whose technology helps power Google's ubiquitous mapping service. "In 35 years of building and sailing boats, I've seen the oceans get more and more polluted," Reardon says. "Every year, it's worse than the year before. As boat manufacturers, we have to ask ourselves what we can do to change this."

Daedalus employs 26 people at a 40,000-squarefoot leased facility next to Northeastern Regional Airport. The big-boat market it addresses is not high volume--just 220 units of 36 feet or more were built in the U.S. in 2017, and another 395 were imported, according to Bonnier Corp., which publishes an annual report on the sailing industry. Only a handful of those were more than 60 feet.

In the rarified market in which Daedalus operates, unit sales are declining, but the length of the boats has been increasing, Reardon says. "People are spending more," he says, noting that for his customers a boat like the D88 might represent "0.0001 percent of their wealth."

The first boat off the line will belong to cofounder Muff. "Stefan's philosophy is to change the world," Reardon says. He's already done so through his pioneering work in geo-referencing technology for internet and mobile services. Google Maps acquired Muffs Switzerland-based company in 2006.

Muff, who lives in Lucerne, Switzerland, and runs a software company, will continue his mapping odyssey when he takes delivery of the first D88 sometime...