BEYOND THE HORIZON

Jasper Smith, founder of Arksen and champion for a new brand of off-grid oceanic adventure, talks to Alex Smith

- Alex Smith and Hugo Andreae

Jasper Smith's formative years were full of outdoor adventure; of climbing, mountaineering and sailing, and while his professional background would eventually anchor itself in the software business, the older he got, the keener he became to build tangible products that could bring others the kind of experiences he had so enjoyed. "I've owned boats for the last 25 years and I've done quite a lot of long-distance passages," he says. "I've sailed from Sydney to Alaska; from the Faroe Islands to South Africa. I've done various transatlantic ocean voyages. So I was really interested in where form meets function and where adventure really plugs into that."

That's essentially how Arksen began. "There are very few sailors who don't dream of sailing off into the distance and across the horizon, but actually, the vast majority of boats are just not built for that. So starting Arksen was really about trying to build machines that give people the confidence to go as far as they could possibly dream of going." To that end, they're designed and built as commercial vessels rather than leisure yachts; to Workboat 2 and Cat 0 standards for unrestricted offshore operation. As Jasper puts it, "They're designed and built as mini ships for continuous use so, subject to maintenance, they could run 365 days a year, in the same way that maybe a ferry could."

Critically though, Arksen is about much more than just capable hardware. "When you're building a business, you need to think about what it is that an owner of one of your products wants to get out of it. And almost nobody we speak to is interested in owning a boat. Fundamentally, they're only owning a boat because they want to go and do something else, so the traditional model of 'Come to me because I can sell you a product' - well that model is pretty much just legacy now." And that's where the new Arksen syndicate comes in...

SHARING THE ADVENTURE