Honest by design
Live features are labeled live. Future ones say so, plainly. What you see is what your boat gets.
Built aboard, out where it has to work.
Yachtara didn't start in an office. It started on a cruising sailboat, miles from the marina, where the weather decides the day, the diesel counts its hours, and the anchor is what lets everyone sleep.
The Founder
Bart Schillebeeks
Bart is a very senior technological architect and visionary, with more than 25 years designing platforms and leading transformations for multinational global companies such as Canon, Philips, and ING.
He works at the front edge of technology, cloud, security, and AI, envisioning and turning it into systems that support global multinational companies. Today he is the enterprise architect who builds the technology behind the Elcano World Challenge, and the founder of Yachtara.com.
Yachtara is built with that same discipline, and tested at sea before anything counts as done.
The Proving Ground
The Elcano World Challenge
The Elcano World Challenge sets out to sail around the world carbon-free, on a lightweight aluminum electric catamaran being built for the attempt. Conceived by Jimmy Cornell and named for the navigator who completed the first circumnavigation, it is an engineering problem as much as a sailing one: a modern boat, run on sun and wind, with no diesel to fall back on.
Yachtara's founder is the technological architect of that program. The systems thinking that has to carry an electric boat around the planet, careful with energy, honest about limits, ready for weeks offshore, is the same thinking Yachtara is built on.
Explore the Elcano World ChallengeThe Captain
Peter Lukursky, Sailing Into Freedom
Peter leads the Elcano World Challenge from the deck, not a desk. He has sailed and documented years of real cruising, ocean passages, remote anchorages, repairs in places with no chandlery, on his channel Sailing Into Freedom.
Yachtara's direction grew from a collaboration brief shaped around the onboard needs of that project: the practical questions a boat asks when it is far from help, asked by someone who has been there.
In Peter's own words
I was born and bred in Australia, and educated in Mechanical Engineering (BE, University of Sydney) and Law (LLB, QUT). I have been sailing and recording my adventures on YouTube for ten years, and they have been dramatic years, to say the least.
I have had to deal with a sinking boat and being stranded off an inhospitable coastline in northern Australia, a lightning strike that smashed a hole in the bottom of another boat and a three-hour battle to save her from sinking, and a 71-day exile at sea when the world shut down during Covid and refused us entry into any port.
On the Elcano Challenge
The Elcano Challenge was conceived by the famous Jimmy Cornell, a man who has been pivotal in the sailing community for more than 40 years. It is named after Juan Sebastián Elcano, the navigator of the Magellan voyage, who completed the world's first circumnavigation in 1522, five hundred years ago.
For many hundreds of years, of course, people have sailed the world carbon free. But for the general sailing public to wholly embrace the concept in the present, it needs to be done in reasonable comfort and at reasonable cost. To prove this, Jimmy set sail in a fully electric modern boat with modern conveniences in 2021. Unfortunately, after careful monitoring of the boat's systems, and only three weeks in, he believed they would not succeed with their current design, and he abandoned the project. This should not be taken as proof that it cannot be done. There were many reasons for the abandonment of that project. We believe we can do it better. We have done the research, we have refined the boat design, and the time is ripe for another challenge.
How we build
Tested where it matters
Changes prove themselves on a real boat at sea before they're called done.
The whole boat
Passage, upkeep, anchor, crew, one place, because that's how a boat is actually run.