Boat Designer – Sonny Levi
photos & details supplied by Ken Ricketts
Levi designed at least 3 launches for the NZ market (refer below)
Designer Bio (straight from his website)
Born in Karachi 85 years ago, Sonny Levi was at school in Cannes when the war broke out.
His father, an interior designer and manufacturer, and an enthusiastic motor yachtsman, moved into Government contract boatbuilding at a shipyard in Bombay. From this early age the young Renato (‘Sonny’ was bestowed by an ayah who could not manage the letter ‘r’) designed boats, inspired by the multitude of local craft in that seafront city.
He joined the RAF and trained in England, studied aircraft design and demobilisation and returned to Bombay, where by 1950 he was chief designer in his father’s busy drawing office. In 1960 he moved to Italy to work for Navaltecnica in Anzio. “I have been very fortunate to have clients who are prepared to take risks” he says today.
“I always tried to be as honest with them as I could when we discussed their projects. And occasionally something didn’t work. This is the problem with original design.”
But for every failure there were a great many ground-breaking successes, and it seems typical of the man to ascribe these to luck and pass on credit to his customers – even if they were signing the cheques.
But when you look at some of the projects he involved them in you begin to see what he means: so many of the designs were at the cutting edge of naval architecture, where success was by no means certain. Like an artist with wealthy patrons, whenever he had an idea for a new work he could usually find someone to pay for it.
Rich playboy powerboat racers would find themselves enthusiastically funding outlandish and dramatic experimental prototypes. Commercial boatyards would be talked into daring new engineering solution on the promise of more speed and efficiency. If Sonny Lei is a problem solver at heart, he is one who has never seemed inclined to solve the same problem twice.
The Levi Boats
#1 Resolute
Built in the mid/later 1950’s, originally 38 ft., she was lengthened somewhere along the way, probably in the 1990’s, to about 42 feet, originally with twin 4-53 GM Detroit Diesels, until a 2012, which were still going fine, but were replaced with 2 larger Yanmars. Resolute belonged to a friend of Ken Ricketts, Ray Bailey, for a period in the mid 70s & is now moored at Westpark Marina.
#2 Ikikai
Little is known about Ikikai, she was circa 40 feet & originally also had twin Detroits.
Both of these first 2 boats, were designs based on boats he designed & were built in numbers, for the Indian Police, as Police Boats, in their era.
#3 Bacardi
Launch date unknown but powered by twin 427 cubic inch ‘Interceptor’ GM V8 petrol engines, circa 400 hp each, these were replaced with 2 x GM Fuel Pincher 4 cycle V8 diesels circa 200 hp each. Barcardi was owned in the 1990’s by another of Ken Ricketts friends, Rick Brown.
All 3 boats were all built for Arthur Jenkinson, who was in the musical instrument business, in Auckland, by Percy Vos, & /or Shipbuilders.
Levi was very radical in his designs, for his day, virtually all his launches were designed as high speed, high performance boats, many of them having a reverse shear, & in the case of Ikikia & Resolute a slanting out tuck that v’ed to a central point in the middle.
Bacardi had a “cathedral” type bow, but she was very quick with those 2 “Interceptor” GM V8s.
