Three DAME winners that reshaped the aft deck

Why deck hardware wins design awards

Aft deck equipment is often where a boat’s design reputation is won or lost. The davit, the tender retrieval system, the sun lounger: these are the pieces owners touch every day, and they sit in full view of anyone walking the dock. Equipment makers carry real responsibility here. A clumsy stainless davit can undermine an otherwise clean transom, just as a well-integrated one can disappear into the boat’s lines.

METSTRADE’s 35th-anniversary retrospective of DAME Design Award winners makes the point clearly. Three outright winners, spanning 1998 to 2007, each picked away at the same problem: how aft deck hardware could work better and look better at the same time. None of them is a drivetrain or a battery innovation in the electric sense, but the thinking applies directly to the day-boat and tender segment electric boat builders now serve.

Montague Smith Crane Davit, 1998

The 1998 winner attacked a category that had barely moved for twenty years. Most motor yachts and large sailing cruisers relied on polished stainless steel davits to stow dinghies. They were heavy and not especially easy to use, and the underlying formula hadn’t changed much.

The Montague Smith Crane Davit replaced that with a one-piece moulding in Kevlar-reinforced epoxy resin. That choice roughly halved weight compared to an equivalent-capacity stainless davit, a meaningful saving at the extreme aft end where every kilogram works against trim and pitching. The composite construction also allowed a curved shape that fully concealed the installation foot, bolts and inner workings, with custom colour matching available.

The enclosed winch was another departure. Operated by a standard winch handle, it used epicyclic gearing to eliminate brakes and ratchets, removing the runaway risk that plagued conventional designs.

The Crane Davit did not achieve widespread adoption. But it arrived at the start of a broader rethink of how tenders and toys are handled aboard, and it challenged every convention in its category. In retrofit terms it was a product aimed at improving the owner experience rather than chasing the lowest build cost, which is precisely why it won.

Besenzoni G 326 MAGIC, 2002

Four years later the jury saw another reinvention of dinghy handling, this time from Besenzoni, a regular DAME nominee. The MAGIC hydraulic davit uses a three-section telescopic jib with a 1.43m reach and a 300kg capacity. When stowed, the jib collapses and folds entirely into a composite-clad enclosure measuring 490mm by 450mm by 600mm high, bolted to the stern platform. It runs from a wired waterproof remote control, and a safety alarm sounds while the unit is moving.

The timing mattered. The early 2000s saw builders expanding bathing platforms into structures large and strong enough to host a small party or to land a dinghy on chocks. Owners were often paying marinas for the overhang of a dinghy sitting in a davit, so using that length as usable deck made economic sense. The MAGIC was designed specifically around that shift.

Besenzoni could have answered the brief with a purely functional unit. The jury’s praise was for doing it with a package that improved rather than spoiled the boat’s appearance, while making dinghy retrieval a genuine talking point. That the MAGIC still appears in Besenzoni’s catalogue, alongside the larger G 336 BIG MAGIC with a longer jib for garage installations, is a testament to how well the concept has aged.

Opacmare Teaky beach, 2007

By 2007 the question had flipped. With flat aft deck space expanding rapidly on new designs, how do you exploit it beyond just stowing the tender? Opacmare’s answer, the Teaky beach, was a sun lounger that folds up out of the deck itself, actuated electrically or hydraulically. The jury found it a genuinely comfortable place to spend time on deck, with only the cushions to stow when returning to a flat surface.

The engineering underneath is the part worth noting. The lift mechanism is compact enough to need only about 75mm of depth below the deck surface, which avoids cutting into cabin height beneath. It comes as a single-backrest version or as a deck chair with one fixed and three movable sections, in three width variants, operated by remote control with a digital control panel.

This is a specialist product, and worth calling out as such. It blurs the line between builder and equipment manufacturer, because integrating a feature like this depends on both parties sharing the engineering early. That collaboration, uncommon in 2007, has since become standard practice on features such as fold-down aft bulwarks, which former DAME jury chair Tony Castro helped pioneer on the Galeon 500 Fly in 2015.

What operators should take from this

None of these three products is directly an electric propulsion item, which is fair to acknowledge. Their relevance to this audience is in the priorities they represent. Weight saving at the stern, enclosed and safe winch mechanisms, deck hardware that folds away when not in use, and features that reclaim usable deck length all map onto the constraints electric boat builders face every day.

On an electric tender or day boat, stern weight is not just a handling question; it is a range question. A davit or platform that halves its own weight or hides its mechanism changes how much battery and payload can sit aft. The honest caveat is that all three winners are hardware retrofits and integrations, not propulsion breakthroughs, and none solves the fundamental energy-density problem that still limits electric cruising range. Their value is in the margins: cleaner decks, safer dinghy handling, and weight that stays out of the stern.

The pattern across 1998, 2002 and 2007 is the same one electric boat builders are working through now. Equipment wins when it removes an annoyance, trims weight, and earns its place on the deck rather than fighting the boat’s lines.