Maryline: What is Seakeeper's best kept secret?

Kelsey Barrett: Ooh, these days it's probably Seakeeper Ride. It's our newest product and people don't know about it as much as the Seakeeper Gyro yet, but once they feel it, it's just as wow.

Maryline: Sea Keeper Gyro stabilizer on a twenty three foot Center Console, game changer or overkill?

Kelsey Barrett: Who game changer for sure.

Maryline: what is the biggest myth about stabilizers in one sentence?

Kelsey Barrett: People think they don't need them until they experience in them.

Maryline: What is the cost of the smaller Seakeeper gyro unit and the biggest one?

Kelsey Barrett: The Seakeeper 1 is for boats 23 to 30 feet and it is 17,400. And the Seakeeper 40 is for boats in the 85 to 110 foot range and it is $365,400.

Maryline: And what is one boat model classical current that you wish had a seakeeper on it

Kelsey Barrett: Ooh, that's hard because on Seakeeper Gyro specifically, we've got more than 300 brands that install our product from the factory. But I have a Boston Whaler 150 Montauk that we keep in my garage and take my little family out. I would love if we had a Seakeeper for a 15-foot boat. But so far, not yet. And I think I'd have to remove my fuel tanks. So I don't know, we'll see.

Maryline: Welcome back to full displacement. With their gyroscopic stabilizer, Seakeeper built a market that was non-existent and did it in roughly 10 years. Stabilization is no longer a luxury that's reserved for a 60-foot yacht and up. It's actually installed in some of the smaller Santa consoles on the market now. And I have Kelsey Barrett with us today. She's the director of brand and creative with Seakeeper. welcome Kelsey.

Kelsey Barrett: Thanks so much. I'm really excited to talk to you today.

Maryline: you've been with Seakeeper for over eight years, and you're gonna be here to tell us how a spinning flywheel in a sealed box does what Finns never could, which is to actually hold a boat steady when the engines are off. So we're gonna talk about this idea with you, and I'd love to start with the origin story of Seakeeper. How did that look back in 2008? And how did you become the market leader in so little time?

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah, so our two founders, Shep McKinney and John Adams, both had different expertise. Shep was working for Hinckley, where he created their fly-by-wire joystick. And John was an expert naval architect. So they came together to develop a stabilization product that would be for the every boater. So gyroscopes four boats have been around for a hundred years, but they were huge.

Maryline: I actually did not know that.

Kelsey Barrett: were huge. So it would be if if this was the gyroscope in a picture, the little person standing next to it was about this big, but they were for big, big, big ocean crossing ships. And they wanted to take that technology and make it reasonable and affordable for a small boat. So they started in a garage in Solomon's, Maryland, and steadily grew from there. They started in 2002 and then launched our first product in 2008. So it took some time to really perfect the product that we launched with. Of course, 2008 was the recession. So it was pretty hard to get this new technology into the marine industry. The marine industry is typically pretty stuck in its ways, and boaters are notorious. salty, so they think I don't need that. Boats are on the ocean, they're supposed to roll. So we got told time and time again from builders that this was never going to take off. At the time our products were called the series. So we had the M8000 and the M7000 were our first units. So that is 8,000 newton meter seconds or 7,000 newton meter seconds was which is how you measure gyroscopic power, kind of like horsepower to an engine. Now we name our products the Seakeeper 7.5 or the Seakeeper 9. And so they really had to work hard and go door to door and ultimately. what sold it was the consumer. So we ended up doing all of our marketing for the end user who ended up going to the builder and demanding that they incorporate our product because they recognized its value and didn't want to boat without it once they'd felt it.

Maryline: Is there one brand shipyard that you recall helped really pull Seakeeper forward at the time? What was the first one?

Kelsey Barrett: Azumet. Azumit was our first builder in Europe, in Italy. And so we actually have an office now in Italy. but Azumit was our first customer and to this day remains one of our big guys and and we really love their team.

Maryline: Wow, okay, very cool. So tell us now, someone comes to the boat show, right? Doesn't really know much about the gyro stabilization and wants to understand how that works. Can you tell us your short answer to, hey, how does this work, Kelsey? What do you tell your clients?

Kelsey Barrett: Sure. So every one of our gyroscopes is a sphere and it's a vacuum-sealed sphere. So inside that sphere, you have a heavy metal steel flywheel spinning. Our fastest one spins at 10,000 RPMs. That creates a powerful gyroscopic torque that forces that sphere to precess. That means tilt fore aft inside the boat. It is affixed to the structure of the boat. So when it creates that powerful gyroscopic torque, it exerts It to port and starboard. So when we're at a boat show, we actually have a little mini handheld gyroscope that you can see the flywheel spinning. And when you hold it in your hands, it's got kind of two rods off the side of it, and you can feel it pushing back at you. So when a wave pushes up, the gyroscopic force pushes down. And the way that we so the gyro little handheld one, it spins all the way around. That's what a gyroscope naturally wants to do because of the physics of it. And what we do is we have a hydraulic brake arm that dampens that precession and so we control how the the forces are distributed throughout the boat so we're able to match the wave period and apply just the right amount of force to port or starboard in order to eliminate that roll

Maryline: Wow, it's very advanced. And again, for our audience who may be completely new to this, you work with manufacturers to install Seakeeper on boats right at the factory. But you also have retrofitted solutions for boats. And when you do this install, obviously you need space for it. But there is no through hulls right? When we talk about gyro stabilization. Okay.

Kelsey Barrett: Absolutely. Yeah. So it's it's as fixed to the structure of your boat. And if your boat doesn't have the structure necessary for installation, we can build it in. so it's retrofitable on just about any boat from 23 feet to 200 plus feet. and it doesn't have to go on the center line, so it can be off center. If you have a larger boat and let's say your generators on one side, you could put the seakeeper on the other or offset by a fuel tank.

Maryline: interesting. I didn't realise that. Okay.

Kelsey Barrett: the weight doesn't have to be directly on the center line. for it to work. And it doesn't necessarily have to be any specific place in the boat. We prefer midship aft so that the the bow when you're running doesn't put undue pressure on the unit and the bearings. But it can work anywhere. We've had people put it under their berth. We've had people in a smaller boat replace their head. So it can go kind of wherever you have space for it and we can really get creative with what that looks like.

Maryline: And so you hinted that obviously gyroscopic devices are not new, but what Seakeeper has done is, if I understand correctly, you perfected the software around it, right, to make it work properly. And then you mentioned vacuum. Can you explain the vacuum effect and why it's there and and why it's superior?

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah, so so both hardware and software perfections kind of had to be made to be able to introduce it to a small boat audience. The flywheel spinning inside that vacuum enclosed sphere is really kind of that thing that allows it to go into smaller boats because spinning your flywheel in a vacuum means you've eliminated air resistance. So once you get your your flywheel spooled up, It wants to keep spinning because it's not spinning against anything. So it immediately cuts the power requirements by about two-thirds by being able to spin it in that vacuum. It allows you to cut the weight because you're able to spin it up faster. So angular momentum is created by a number of factors. So we wanted to have the most efficient and most powerful gyro for any given boat. And that is often what we're working on in terms of improvements. For example, we just launched the 7.5. That's 700, 7,500 newton meter seconds of force. And it will eventually replace our Seakeeper six. And it's in about the same envelope, significantly more performance, but doesn't require more space on board. So that's our goal is to give the most performance to every customer in the smallest smallest package. And the only way to do that is through spinning the flywheel in a vacuum at extremely high speeds. And then the third factor of that is if you spin it in a vacuum, things spinning really fast create heat. So you have to find a way to remove heat from inside the sphere so it doesn't overheat. And we have a patented cooling system that is a seawater glycol combination that dissipates the heat from the sphere so that you don't need airflow to the unit to keep it cool, which an air air-cooled gyro wood. So all of those things kind of together give us the highest performing gyro in the smallest package. And that is because of some of the hardware technology on top of that software technology that you mentioned.

Maryline: Was that cooling system from the start, or is that something you learned along the way in order to make it smaller, it had to be cooled in a different fashion?

Kelsey Barrett: No, that's where we started. We Seakeeper has a a a long history of not coming to market with something that isn't gonna wow. we are

Maryline: Okay. Respect.

Kelsey Barrett: we don't really have do anything. and so that's why, you know, launching in two thousand two and and coming to market in two thousand eight, they took that time to really perfect the system that we could make at the time and have been improving on that ever since.

Maryline: Yeah, understood. Okay. So we're gonna kind of break down the key things to keep in mind when considering a system like Seakeeper, whether on a new boat or on an existing boat. I just wanted to highlight in case it wasn't clear for our audience, and again, different walks of life, different types of cruisers and different experience levels. So the key benefit of a Seakeeper is that it works at all speeds, including zero. And for a lot of people, whether fishing or cruising for comfort, for performance, you just You just want to have a resting place that's comfortable, right?

Kelsey Barrett: Yep, really, you are correct. It it really shines at rest. That is when it is the most impressive. We do almost all of our demos while the boat is sitting still because that's when you feel the most of the wave action. When you're running, performance of the gyro is still going to be there, but it dissipates as you go faster and the boat is a little bit more stable naturally. But sitting

Maryline: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kelsey Barrett: at rest, whether you're sitting there with your family and you're grilling out, whether you're cruising at really low speeds. That motion is still felt. If you are, I don't know, bottom fishing and you're sitting there with your rods and you're not kind of bouncing off the gunwale. Sea keeper is, and and after being here for eight and eight and a half years, every time you feel it turn off, it's almost like you forget that that's what boating felt like prior to Seakeeper. e everybody that I work with still gets a big smile that second the gyro turns on and everybody on board is like, my gosh, that's impressive. it's a really cool experience and and at rest, like you said, is is where it is most impressive.

Maryline: Alright, very cool. And in terms of underway two, stay tuned because we're gonna talk about another product from Seakeeper that you may have not heard about that Kelsey will tell us more about that works beautifully in in complement of the the gyro. So as far as you know, someone new to gyro trying to figure out if this is the right solution for them. so we talked about being best at rest and and lower speeds for boat sizes. Where do we start? What how many feet of boat are we talking here generally?

Kelsey Barrett: About twenty-three feet is the smallest and that would get the Seakeeper one.

Maryline: Okay. And their claim is that you can eliminate ninety five percent of the role. You you stand by that?

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah. Yes, we don't undersize. So we don't want to sell a gyro just to sell a gyro. We're selling the experience of stabilization. And so we're not gonna let someone put a small gyro, we're not gonna take the money of somebody who wants to put a smaller gyro on their boat than is actually going to provide stabilization. we have an entire performance library of sea trials on our website, and you can sort by boat brand, you can sort by seakeeper model, and we Done thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of refits. so you probably can find a performance report from your boat that that you can be sure it's really gonna work on your boat, or something like it. You know, center consoles all have a lot of the same properties. If it works on one center console, it's gonna work on another. So there's proof out there. And like I said, thousands of customers that are that are willing to support those performance elimination claims. and then performance

Maryline: Okay.

Kelsey Barrett: varies based on sea state too, right? So If you're in super choppy five foot seas you might not see that 95%, but you're gonna see 80, you're gonna see 78. and then as it gets a little bit, you know, two foot seas, you might hit that 95%. So it's important to know that performance does vary by boat and by conditions, but we are always aiming for high levels of of roll elimination.

Maryline: And then you were hinting to retrofits. I actually see often questions from future owners or current owners on owners group. So there was a gentleman from the Swift Twaller Owners Group that was looking to install potentially a unit on his Swift Twilder 41 or 44, I don't recall. If someone's looking for that specific Swift Twaller install guidance, where do they turn to? Obviously, having all these testimonials are great, but if I'm looking for direct, you know, suggestions as to what size Where does it go? What can I expect? Of course, performance we just touched on. Do they connect with a dealer? Can you just tell us briefly how you would go about investigating the options for your boat?

Kelsey Barrett: Mm-hmm. On our website, we have a refit database. So it is being fueled by other customers who register their Seakeeper. So you can see the refits that we've done, what makes models, what what product went on board, what dealer completed that. You can also look at our dealer map and see what dealer is closest to you. If it's a boat they haven't done before, they can come out and spec the boat and have that conversation directly, or you can reach out to us and talk to one of our salespeople directly before you decide on. dealer we can help you make that decision we try to be very reachable we try to put enough information for you to do to do your own research online if that's what you prefer and then also dealers and our own sales staff is available to walk you through that process

Maryline: Very cool. So talking about again trying to weigh the pros and cons of stabilization, if it's right for you, we talked about power draw, which actually is I wouldn't say nominal, but it's greatly reduced by the solution that that you offer. I think you had given me the figure of one, to three kilowatt for the smaller units. obviously it goes up as the size of the Seakeeper goes up. any thoughts on that? any examples or stories that you can share that speak to the power draw and whether or not it is a limiting factor in real life?

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah, so power is absolutely something to be considerate of. a lot of times we'll add a battery to the house bank to run the Seakeeper specifically so that it isn't using your house batteries. there are customers who are going lithium now, so that's an option too, if the additional battery space is a problem. and then there are safeties in place that the seakeeper will never drain you. but you can sit for hours in many cases, depending on your battery setup. And we have a battery calculator on our website so that you can kind of put in the configuration of your power situation. Plus it understands what the seakeeper is going to draw. So we can determine do you need more battery available or not. So, and and we'll help you through that process too, right? So whether that's talking to a dealer or talking to our sales reps, we're not going to sell you a seakeeper if you can't power it without helping you through that understanding ahead of time. but it does, it does draw power. It does need the power to work. But then if you're running, it's being charged by the the engines running your alternators. So there is a period of time where you can sit not running your engines and your seakeeper is not going to overdraw you ever without, you know, first letting you know that it's getting close.

Maryline: Sounds good. and I'll put the link in a description to the resources you shared for the power calculator and the refit database, which is awesome, I'm sure, for a lot of people considering this edition. cause it does sound like an expensive add-on until you realize how much it extends the usability and the enjoyment of your boat. So a lot of the times this is what it comes down to is just really maximizing that that time.

Kelsey Barrett: And that resale value too, right? You know, Seakeepers become

Maryline: That's true.

Kelsey Barrett: so popular now that boats with Seakeepers sell faster than boats without them. And we get customer comments often that are that are asking us, hey, you know, I'm looking at these two boats. This one comes with a seakeeper and this one doesn't. I like to understand, can I put a seakeeper on this one? And the seakeeper is part of their buying decision, which of course we love. but making the decision to purchase a seakeeper isn't just an investment in your own. enjoyment of the boat. It can also help you when you're ready to upgrade later for your next boat.

Maryline: Yeah, absolutely. And another, you know, in the interest in f full disclosure, we have to share as well that there is a a spool up time that is required for your seakeeper to work. And maybe you can speak to that. I don't actually know what the time is and does it vary by unit size? Can you tell

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah.

Maryline: us more about that?

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah, so that steel flywheel that is heavy, it does take time to get up to speed. 10,000 RPMs is really fast. more often than not, your spool up time is not that big of a deal because you turn it on when you get to the boat, you're packing up the boat, you're filling up the cooler, you're getting everyone on board, and then you're exiting through the inlet or whatever it is. By the time you get out, it's up and spun. for the bigger units that have a bigger, heavier flywheel, it does take longer to spool up. And for the smaller units, it's very short. So it's not been something that we've gotten a ton of complaints about. It's obviously a necessary factor for the product, but it is something that we're addressing in future product launches, always looking to improve the products from a performance and efficiency standpoint, and decreasing that spool up time is on the radar, absolutely.

Maryline: So forgive me for not knowing this in our prep conversation. I probably could have asked you this. is there an idle or standby mode for the seakeeper where it's not fully engaged and then getting it from idle to fully running? Perhaps it's shorter?

Kelsey Barrett: So your Seakeeper has a locked and unlocked. there's a certain time period where we're expending all of the power and energy to spool up the gyro right in the beginning. When it hits a certain percentage of fully spooled up, we allow you to then activate stabilization. And then it will continue spooling up from that point on. So once you're at full spool up you have the option to lock and unlock your seakeeper. And when I say that, remember how I was showing that preset? session, it

Maryline: Sure. Mm-hmm.

Kelsey Barrett: must be processing back and forth in order to exert the force port and starboard. So if you lock it in place, it's not stabilizing. And that's how we do our demos with people is we've got the product fully spooled up, but we lock it in place and then a big wave hits and you unlock it and it starts doing that.

Maryline: Okay, got it. That's very clear now. Perfect.

Kelsey Barrett: that also it determines your warranty hours. So every seakeeper comes with a two-year, two thousand-hour standard warranty. And there's extended warranty options as well if you wanted to increase that, but it's only measuring the hours that your seakeeper is unlocked and actually stabilizing. So if you have it locked for any reason, it's not adding to those 2,000 warranty hours.

Maryline: Okay. Yeah, that's very, very clever. Okay. Awesome. And then when it comes to deciding, of course, the last topic I wanted to cover with you is determining the size. So I understand your retrofitting database can tell us more about size, but can you outline for us the most common sizes and typical boat models that you would see for starting with a seakeeper one? What kind of boat is that for? What's the rough price of a seakeeper for the smaller end of the market? And then we can go up from there.

Kelsey Barrett: Sure. So we have I don't even know how many products anymore. There's anywhere from ten to thirteen as we introduce new ones and and retire older models.

Maryline: And for our audience who may be watching this podcast on YouTube, we're gonna share our screen here to show you that product lineup. go ahead, Kelsey, tell us more about the different units.

Kelsey Barrett: Sure. So our product lineup starts with the Seakeeper one, which you can see there on the left. That is for boats as small as 23 feet to about 30 feet. It retails for $17.4. And that's important to include that it doesn't include installation. So that cost would come from your dealer. And then as you kind of scroll down, you'll see the additional products. And we'll just call out a middle product. One of our newer models is the Seakeeper 10.5.

Maryline: Okay.

Kelsey Barrett: That is for boats 50 to 62 feet, and that's 133.9. And then all the way down at the bottom, our biggest unit right

Maryline: Uh-huh.

Kelsey Barrett: now is the Seakeeper 40, and that is 365.4 for boats around 110 feet. Also important to note is that all of these are combinable and their performance is additive. So if you don't have enough space for the Seakeeper 10.5 on board as a single unit, you could have two Seakeeper 5s, and that you equals almost the same amount of performance as the Seakeeper 10.5. So if you only have space for smaller units, you can do a different configuration. And then the same for bigger boats. So you were looking at the Seakeeper 40. We have boats that might have two or three Seakeeper 26s or two Seakeeper 40s

Maryline: Gotcha.

Kelsey Barrett: or boats that are bigger than that 80 to 110 foot range that you see for the 40.

Maryline: And going back to the question earlier, we talked about placement. would it be optimal to actually break up if the space allows to have two seakeeper units as opposed to a larger one? Not necessarily.

Kelsey Barrett: You would typically go for the single larger one if you can. It's gonna be cheaper

Maryline: Okay.

Kelsey Barrett: to get a single unit than it is to get two units. Ideal location is, aft of midship and centerline, but that's not necessary. it just would take a little bit more logistics to make sure that it is not weighing down one side of the boat, but you can counterweight it with other things on board.

Maryline: Okay, very good. I wanted to touch next on a few specific questions that relate to the gyros specifically because it is such an expensive piece of equipment and the labor costs can run pretty high. We talked about the advantage of having a boat already equipped and and how it helps the resale value, but there's another point to consider which is you know the downtime that you may have to have this equipment installed and where you may have to take your boat to get it done. can you speak to how people make the retrofit work in their boating plans or what you have found works for for real boaters if you have a story to share that that's helpful too?

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah, absolutely. we actually call kind of it's a little bit different in Florida, which is where I'm located because boating is year-round. but we talk about refit season, being that time period either right before you launch your boat in spring or right before you wrap your boat for the winter for people who have to winterize their boats is a perfect time, and that's when people are typically getting work done. it also depends on the size of your boat. A small center console can get a refit in a couple of days. pending that the dealer you've chosen has the availability. It's not a super involved process. Some of them do get installed below deck, which is a little bit more involved, but you can also affix them to the top of the deck, which is a very simple process for our dealers. The bigger the boat,

Maryline: Really? Okay, I didn't actually realize that was a thing.

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah, the especially with the Seakeeper one, the sphere doesn't actually hang down below the bottom plane of the unit. So it just goes right on board and there's no cutting in general. You could put it beneath your seat in a leaning post, is where we have most of ours for our demo boats that we use, which is largely just so people can see them and we can put a nice plexi cover over them so you can watch it working. for a bigger boat, that's typically when your work is getting done, anyways. A lot of our dealers are yards for other work as well. If you're Having a repower, if you're having your boat bottom painted, whatever work you're having done on board, a lot of our dealers can also then do the seakeeper work at the same time. So if you're gonna haul your boat out, that's the time to think about if you have a larger vessel, getting the seakeeper installation done while you're having other work done so it doesn't set you back anytime. Maintenance-wise, especially as we get more and more sophisticated and introduce new products, the maintenance actually becomes less. But generally, we we suggest annual maintenance for your seakeeper. unit and like I said with some of those newer units the 7.5 being the one that comes top of mine it has let less maintenance than some of our older units as well so maintenance is not we obviously recommend that you do it but it's not something that should cost you a lot of time on the water or disrupt any of your boating days

Maryline: So as a boat buyer now looking to purchase a pre-owned boat that has a seakeeper, I wanted to verify with you what are some of the good questions to ask or records to look for. So we talk about maintenance. Obviously, we talked a bit about what that entails, but beside the cooling unit, what else needs to be maintained on a seaker that you would expect to see record from a dealer, let's say, to to review the unit, what's it what does that entail?

Kelsey Barrett: So seakeepers actually require pretty minimal maintenance because everything, the critical components are kind of sealed inside that sphere. so the closed loop, hydraulic circuit, and the cooling circuit are really the two things that need to be serviced and checked in on. So if you're buying a used boat that has a seakeeper on board, you want to make sure that it has been maintained over the course of the previous owner's lifetime, ownership. and then I think it would be a good question to ask about the warranty. The warranty is transfer. So as long as it's within its two years, 2,000 hours, you can acquire that. And while you're still in that period, that's when you can also purchase an extended warranty if you want to extend that as well.

Maryline: Do you have to transfer any sort of account of your seakeeper unit or is there no such thing? So you just kind of read the hours of the unit just like you would on a generator?

Kelsey Barrett: It's all done by serial number. So we see the serial number

Maryline: It's spicier.

Kelsey Barrett: associated with your your gyro, and we can understand from that as well as the data off of the actual unit for hours run.

Maryline: So you'd have like plug a little computer just like they do with cars. I don't have actually a display for my hours.

Kelsey Barrett: you can see your hours on your display. Yes. Yep. And you can see your soil number

Maryline: you can. Okay. Thanks for for confirming that. and as with, you know, any equipment on a boat, whether from the factory or aftermarket, you know, you would be having a surveyor go through the entire boat and ensuring that the unit is mounted properly, that nothing has disintegrated or been damaged or been tempered with. So this is the kind of work that we do as yacht brokers, assisting our clients when they're reviewing a boat. And there's a lot too that you can see at the showing stage that before you go down the road of making an offer and then having a survey on a boat that potentially has issues, I'll put the link to the video that we produced that explains all the things you can review on your own. So thank you for allowing us to ask those questions on what to expect from a a used seakeeper, I suppose. So at this stage, I'd like to pivot a little bit and tell our audience about more than the Seakeeper Gyro. We hinted to that earlier. So behind the known Seakeeper product, there's also something called Seakeeper Ride. And it's obviously a different technology for a different problem. It's supposed to really help the underway motion. And I mean, some of our audience may be more familiar, perhaps depending on where they're coming from, with a zip wake. Product, right? So it's a different take of a similar problem that you can tell us more about. My understanding it's roughly for about 20 to 55 feet to eliminate up to 70% of the underway motion. So you've shared with me some of that story. Would you tell our audience how actually this came about? And if if I remember the development for that product came before the

Kelsey Barrett: What's up?

Maryline: gyros stabilizer, is that right?

Kelsey Barrett: Yes, yeah. So that is that was the first product idea that Shep and John had when they started the company. And that's what they were working towards from a technology perspective. They were kind of simultaneously working on the gyro product, which completed first, and so we put all of our energy into that and came back around 2019-2020 to the idea of underway stabilization. So Seakeeper Ride is a transom mounted system. So it consists of two controllers for smaller boats on either side of an engine, picture an outboard, mounted to the transom where your trim tabs would be. And that's kind of where the similarities with trim tabs and other transom mounted systems

Maryline: Uh-huh.

Kelsey Barrett: stop. what is so unique about our system from a hardware perspective? The design is actually a curved blade. So picture this is the back of your boat, and it's a curved blade that is mounted right at the bottom of the boat. And the curved blade has a rotary actuator that is driving that blade into the water and it is going right into the water line at the running surface of the boat while the boat is underway. So it's important that it's only an underway product. Your boat has to be moving at least 10 miles an hour for it to be doing anything. And then full benefits kick in around 20 to 25 miles an hour, depending on the on the boat. It is going to eliminate underway pitch, so that's the up and down bow slamming roll, like the gyro does, and yaw, which is kind of that pivot around a single point. and you often experience that in a following seat when the waves are coming behind you and they kind of push your vote. and an interesting thing about Eliminating pitch and roll is you're inducing yaw when you do that. So not only are we inducing yaw by eliminating some motions, we're then having to correct and eliminate the motions that are being induced by by making those changes. yeah, so this picture you can see here is ride off. And then if you click that ride on button, you'll see the boat just kind of level out. And that's what it feels like. and so

Maryline: The arm. Mm-hmm.

Kelsey Barrett: Our kind of differentiator, and like I said, we do not come out with products that don't well, is the speed in which the product functions. There is a software module that's usually installed somewhere around the helm that has all of the sensors on board that we're collecting motion data nonstop. We're taking up to a thousand measurements every

Maryline: Mm-hmm.

Kelsey Barrett: single second. And in that same second, making up to 100 adjustments of those blades. So they're maybe moving at 300 millimeters per second, and they deploy just over an inch into the water. and so a lot of those adjustments, those hundred adjustments, are micro adjustments so that every time you feel a wave,

Maryline: Mm-hmm.

Kelsey Barrett: It is corrected before the person feels it on board. so we're able to eliminate real underway motion. And it has been difficult to explain to someone what that experience is. a lot of the products that are currently on the marketplace, from automatic trim tabs to interceptor style systems, are just simply not moving fast enough. and it took us a while to come up with the controls in order to make that happen, but you have to move as fast as the wave moves. You have To meet that speed. You can't be too slow because if you are, you're correcting for a motion that's already passed, which means you're inducing additional motion. So if the wave comes up like this, let's call it roll. Your boat is here, the wave comes up and pushes down. The way that you would respond to that is by deploying your

Maryline: Right.

Kelsey Barrett: blade down here to put lift at this side of the transom. But waves are cyclical. So if you correct too slow, the wave's going the other way. The motion is changing, that the boat rolls over the wave. And if you're still deployed, you're tilting it over more. So that speed is incredibly important. and it's frustrating from a branding perspective to see other transom-mounted systems claim to do the same thing that you know you're doing. Better.

Maryline: Welcome to the world of marketing.

Kelsey Barrett: yeah, so we got all of those systems and we put them on identical boats as our product and ran them side by side next to our product and have the results published on our websites that show what real motion elimination looks like from Seakeeper versus some of the other products that claim to do what we do. They are eliminating the workload of having to use manual trim tabs. They are automating that. They're constantly moving, they're deploying into the water, but they're not doing it fast enough to provide true stabilization. And people don't know what that feels like until you're on board. And then people are like blown away. It's a very cool product to show off.

Maryline: And you have to feel it. So I guess my my next question is, Kelsey, when and where can we actually test this for ourselves if we are a boater and we wanna just come and experience the magic? Where'd we go?

Kelsey Barrett: we are usually at most of the major boat shows with a demo boat that we will allow people to get on board and feel it for themselves. and we have a map on the ride.sekeeeper.com website that shows where all of our dealers are and where all of their demo boats are. So we have a few of our own boats. We are based out of Fort Myers, Florida, and we have some boats in Florida. we have a boat in Italy, we have some boats in the Northeast, and then we have dealers that have their own boats as well. And I think on this one if you go under the explorer tab schedule a demo so you can let us know that you want to take a demo and we'll help you find it. Otherwise a little bit further down there is a map that shows some pins where our dealers have demo boats that you could get on board.

Maryline: Is so cool. I do want to get a demo. I'm gonna find out the closest to Annapolis. Look at that. Perfect.

Kelsey Barrett: the Annapolis boat show is coming up. Annapolis Harbor Boat Yard. There you go.

Maryline: That's right.

Kelsey Barrett: They will be at the Annapolis boat show with a demo boat.

Maryline: Awesome. Well, we will be there. We'd love to go for a ride and and show what that's like.

Kelsey Barrett: Absolutely.

Maryline: And so to come back to the gyro plus the seakeeper ride, what kind of a difference can you expect then as a boat owner? do you have performance data you can share?

Kelsey Barrett: Yes, we have performance data for both products. And then even more recently, we introduced our latest software update that ties the two together. So now rather than two products that are working independently to solve challenges on board, they are integrated so that they recognize each other. And there are things that the gyro does incredibly well and things that the ride system does incredibly well. And because they're able to recognize that the other product is on board, they allow each other. To focus on the things that they are strongest at, which actually increases underway performance by about 40% with our latest software update. So they both, and of course, Ride doesn't do anything for you at rest. So that is still where the gyro shines. But both of them working together underway eliminates 40% more emotions than we were seeing before by having the two products just focus independently.

Maryline: Okay, very cool. Pretty amazing. I'm gonna

Kelsey Barrett: And that's a free software update. so if you already have both products, you have a free software update to increase your performance without spending another dollar.

Maryline: How do you actually upgrade your software on your device from Seakeeper?

Kelsey Barrett: Mm-hmm. We've got it online where you can download it onto a micro USB and you put it in your software module. it's a really

Maryline: Okay. So just like just like your charts. Yep. Awesome. next I I wanted to ask you about What's coming to market if you can share? Whether Seakeeper has some things you know, on the back burner. what what can you share about with the the future of the technology for existing product or perhaps new products that aren't yet out?

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah. So for on the gyro side, on Seakeeper's side, the name of the game is better performance. We are always trying to make more performance in a smaller package. That is what we are obsessive over. It isn't about necessarily always introducing the gyro product to a new market, but taking care of the customers and the boaters that we currently already serve. So our upcoming product launches all kind of fall into that world of offering more. Performance and better, better, better, better, better for everything that we do. We are obsessive about performance being the thing that is most important to us for everything. for ride, it's a relatively newer product. We do quarterly software updates, and that's where we can introduce performance benefits from a software perspective to current owners. and then we're looking to go bigger. so right now it is about 19 feet to approximately 55 feet. Feet that is a you know some wiggle room there. I was just on a 57-foot Spencer that had our biggest system. it actually has two Seakeeper Sixes from the gyro side, and it has a Seakeeper Ride 1500 system, which is our largest system currently. we want to go to bigger boats. We want to provide that same wow that you can provide to a small center console to big sportfish and yacht owners, pending that they operate at certain speeds. So that's

Maryline: Sure. And w what about commercial applications? Because when we talk bigger boats, is that a thing that Seakeeper is pursuing?

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah, commercial vessels are absolutely a target for both seakeeper and for sea keeper ride. It takes longer for purchase decisions to be made in those worlds. And most of our marketing targets the recreational buyer, but we absolutely have had commercial customers on both sides. and the benefits of the products for those people are just a little bit, I mean, they're the same benefits, but they view them in a little bit different light. So when you think of a a person who works on a boat that's moving at speed ride, eliminating the damage to the operator from a physical perspective. So that pounding of somebody on their knees and their spine every time a boat, you know, hits the water, it makes them more comfortable and it increases their longevity and being able to operate in those those conditions.

Maryline: Well, I would say it probably protects the captain and the boat, right? Like the boat itself is seeing less

Kelsey Barrett: Yeah, sure. Yeah. And then

Maryline: abuse.

Kelsey Barrett: Gyro, we think of the slipping and you know by loose footing or moving equipment. one of our kind of famous installations or infamous, I guess you could say, there are a group of boats by a company called SEMA Technologies in the they operate on wind farms in the North Sea. And the North Sea is notoriously rough. We actually use data from the North Sea to test every single one of our gyros in factory acceptance testing before they leave the factory. Every single unit goes through a factory acceptance testing process we call FAT. And that is recorded data from the North Sea. And there's a handful of commercial vessels that work on the wind farms up there that

Maryline: Mm-hmm.

Kelsey Barrett: rely on Seakeeper. It's a dangerous job. And Seakeeper keeps their boat safe as they have to pull the boat up to a wind farm in order to service it.

Maryline: Wow, that's incredible. and so Kelsey for your goals of growth too, of course, you're going to continue to expand the DDo network. Can you tell us about the DLO network for both the products that you currently distribute as well as the Elite program?

Kelsey Barrett: Sure. Yeah. So Seakeeper and Sea Keeper Ride both have a different dealer map. There are some dealers who work on both products and some that have selected specialization in just one or the other. But we have dealers all around the globe. Together, probably 500 dealers globally across both products. we are in the remote islands of Mauritius. We are off the coast of Australia and in New Zealand, we are in Asia, we are in Europe, we are in North and South America, all over the place. and I have heard of stories of our corporate technicians having to get specific vaccines so that they can travel to get to a remote location and service somebody's We are going to make sure that have your back wherever you are located across the globe. And so we have our regular dealers, we have elite dealers, and elite dealers have built their entire business off of Seakeeper and or Seakeeper ride. And it is all they do. So they are super experts, you could say, on installing and servicing our products. And those are denoted on our maps as well that you can see who those dealers are.

Maryline: Awesome, terrific. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. What else is there to say? We'll see you at the Annapolis Power Boat Show. We'll see you at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show as well at the end of October. So

Kelsey Barrett: Yep, we will be there.

Maryline: if you want to see a demo of Seakeeper, Seakeeper Ride, I'll put those resources below and you can see Kelsey at those events. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we'll see you on the water. Fair winds.

Kelsey Barrett: Thank you, bye bye.