A true icon of modern ocean sailing, the 100ft Nomad IV was designed as the ultimate yacht for a fast-paced, exhilarating and comfortable cruise around the world. Now she’s ready for another circumnavigation…

Instantly recognisable with her scarlet hull, faired deck saloon and towering white rig, Nomad IV occupies a unique space in our sailing consciousness. Touted as the world’s fastest 100ft cruising yacht when she was unleashed – to double-award-winning acclaim – on a slack-jawed world in 2013, the yacht went on to dazzle as a consummate all-rounder with pace, space, comfort and control.

In 2015, Nomad IV won line honours and overall laurels in the RORC Transatlantic Race before embarking on a five-year global tour with her owner and four crew in 2019. What a package and there’s a reason why Nomad IV is now seriously for sale.

‘We are building Nomad VII, a 125ft, full-carbon catamaran,’ explains Philippe Delamare, captain since he joined for Nomad IV’s world tour in 2019. ‘I've been around the world with Nomad IV, 55-60,000 miles, and I've never been overtaken, not once. This catamaran, Nomad VII, is even more powerful.

‘That's why the owner is selling, he needs challenges. He’s getting closer to retirement and wants a new boat for a new life. He wants to spend the next 10 years going around the world with a bit more space. A new challenge.’

Nomad IV marked a high-profile step into the fast-cruising limelight for Vannesbased designers Finot-Conq, masters of the Imoca scene from the 1990s to the mid-2000s. Nomad IV wasn’t their first performance cruiser though. There was something of a template in Ourson Rapide, a 60ft lifting-keel fast-cruising yacht delivered in 2009. Indeed, she was partly responsible for the conception of Nomad IV.

‘The owner originally wanted to build a catamaran,’ says Pierre Forgia, designer and partner at Finot-Conq. ‘Finally, he settled on a fast, comfortable 100ft monohull, very wide. Look at other 100ft projects at the time, they are about seven metres. This is 8.25m, that was the owner’s brief. He was very impressed with the Imoca boats, and he went sailing on Ourson Rapide, a water-ballasted full-carbon cruiser we made. That was also a reference. He wanted a very wide cockpit so he could have lots of guests and the boat had to cross oceans.’

The brief was a tall order. It had to deliver thrilling performance, which meant raceboat-building levels of weight-saving and tanks for nine tonnes of water ballast, equivalent to 100 people of 90kg on the rail. It also had to offer comfort, refined accommodation for up to 12 guests in five cabins along with four crew in two cabins, a cockpit that could entertain up to 50 guests and shallow draught to access anchorages.

It was those demands that drove the hull to its prodigious beam, as Forgia explains: ‘It was to have maximum volume below but also, for us, it makes power. The beam gives us power, space and stability for comfort. He was also very interested in a deck saloon and on this boat it’s like a block of glass with a little roof on it. When you are inside this deck saloon your vision is 360 degrees. That wasn’t in the brief but the owner was really happy with it.’

RINA-classed construction, by Italian yard Maxi Dolphin, features full pre-preg carbon, Nomex cored, with solid laminate around the APMfabricated keel, which lifts hydraulically to reduce draught from 5.9-3.5m. Hull, bulkheads and the 13-tonne Weldox fin-and-bulb keel were FEA-designed to minimise weight, just 53 tonnes’ displacement.

The sailplan was optimised for light-wind Med sailing, which means huge sail area: 689sqm upwind, with a 397sqm flat-top main, and 1,397sqm down, all set on a 45m-tall Lorima high-modulus carbon mast and boom with halyard locks to reduce compression, saving weight in construction. With a three-reef main, J1, J2, ORC jib, code 0, code 5 and gennaker, she has the gears to deal with any conditions. With such a small crew, the yacht had to be easily handled. That fell to Cariboni for the hydraulics and Magic Trim mainsheet, Harken for the nine hydraulic winches and capstan, and Reckmann for the furlers. Can you really control that much sail area with such a small crew?

‘Yes, it's all push-button,’ says Delamare. ‘The gennaker is a bit more than 700sqm but we set it with only the captain and the first mate. If there are just two of us and we are using the code 0, when the wind gets close to 20kts, we furl and drop. If there are more people on board, we can keep it up longer. But all the manoeuvres are hydraulic and you have the autopilot of course. Putting all those sails into the sail locker, it's a job, but it's okay.’

That ease of operation came into its own during the world tour, with a crew of between four and six. Nomad IV left Spain to cruise around Rio de Janeiro, before heading down to Ushuaia then on to Antarctica: ‘It was a blast,’ enthuses Delamare. ‘Then we did Tierra del Fuego and went up the Patagonian Channel in Chile, across the Pacific to Easter Island and Tahiti.’

After six months in New Zealand, four of which were spent on the hard for a repaint, new teak decks and a long checklist of other improvements, the yacht headed back to Tahiti to cruise French Polynesia. From Tahiti they sailed non-stop to Panama: ‘We had some manoeuvres but it was a starboard tack from Tahiti to Panama for 17.5 days – incredible,’ Delamare recalls.

Having transited the Canal and cruised the West Indies, they headed across to the Med. ‘That’s when I reached my fastest speed on Nomad IV of 28kts,’ adds Delamare, ‘It’s not the best. During the 2015 RORC Transatlantic Race, the owner did 33kts and 480 miles in 24 hours. I did 400 miles, which was not too bad.’ In winning that race with a time of 10d 7h 6m 59s, Nomad IV set a record that stood for seven years, until ‘It was beaten in 2022 – by Comanche, so it's okay,’ he concedes.

Forgia remembers her sea-trial performance: ‘We had a 30kt Mistral and I think we got to 25kts? When you drive her, she’s very reactive, a great sensation at the wheels. She feels like a small boat,’ which is a credit to the JP3 steering system and Isotop rudders.

‘For a crossing we have a proper crew with proper sailors,’ Delamare continues. ‘We usually offload the cook and the stew and have three more sailors, so five, sometimes six crew. When the owner is on board he's the fifth crew. The rest of the time there are four people on board: captain, first mate, cook and stew, which is enough for normal weekly charters, daysailing, that's what we do.’

As you would expect of an owner who clearly cherishes a yacht built with the guiding philosophy of comfort and efficiency, maintenance has been comprehensive and unstinting, with class and Maltese flag surveys complete. ‘There’s not much to do,’ Delamare understates. ‘All the electronics are the normal B&G on NMEA2000. Simple. All the hydraulics are Cariboni, so very wellknown and you get support from Cariboni. We changed 80 per cent of the hydraulic pipes the last winter because they were 10 years old. We clean the Condaria air conditioning system, check the hydraulic oil and clean the hydraulic tank. We have one Idromar watermaker, 180 litres per hour, and every two, three years we send that back to the manufacturer, otherwise we service it ourselves.

‘Last year, we removed the mast for a 10-year rig check. We sent all the ECsix to Future Fibres in Spain to check everything. We decided to change all the terminations and the bushings and repaint the rig as well so it was a bit more time consuming. The owner buys one new sail every year so that takes a bit of time, to have a proper sail, make alterations and then test it, but the owner likes to have a very competitive boat.’

Recent kit includes a 2018 Williams SportJet 345 tender in the garage, retractable Maxpower bow thruster in 2023, 350hp Yanmar main engine in 2020, 19kW Onan genset in 2022 and 13kW Onan in 2023, making the yacht ‘better now than she was in 2019, that’s for sure,’ according to Delamare. Nomad IV is ready to go round the world again, if that’s part of the new owner’s plans. ‘The people that will buy this boat are the people who charter it, they want to have fun. Maybe they want to sail around the world but don't have 10 years to do it, they might have only two years. They want to see plenty of nice places, but they need to do it at 12kts, rather than six or seven.’

Delamare has only one caveat for the next owner. ‘There are running backstays, nine tonnes of water ballast, a 45m mast, so the boat is very powerful. I think the next owner will be a keen sailor who will immediately fall in love with such a yacht.’