You can leave all the wet gear and chaos there and go inside dry and clean,” she says. “Being longer, it has a deckhouse and it’s much more comfortable to be in the deckhouse at high latitudes. And she says the amenities of the Oyster were very similar to the 34-metre Royal Huisman she currently owns ( Billy Budd III). Not that this stopped her taking the boat to both Baffin Island and South Georgia. She loved the Oyster and would have stuck with her, she says, but for the fact that an aluminium hull is better for high latitudes where ice is a danger.

“It was like two births in one day for him,” says Rapisardi. The build of Billy Budd II took three years and the day she was launched, Martin’s first child was born. It required daily discussion with project manager Andrew Martin – I was a nightmare for him.” We wanted aesthetically horrible but very useful mast steps. “But a roll bar on an Oyster is something horrible. “I asked Skip if I could copy his ideas, and he agreed,” she says. It was the year after the abortive attempt on the Northwest Passage, and she was brimming with ideas from that first encounter with Skip Novak. “I was interested in the contrast between law and justice,” says Rapisardi. Although the captain concedes that Budd had moral right on his side, the law demands his execution. In the book, Budd is a crewman who accidentally kills a cruel ship’s officer who sought to falsely incriminate him. This was the first boat to bear the Billy Budd name, as homage to the tragic hero of Herman Melville’s last, unfinished book. In a way that seems unlikely these days, a 17-year-old Rapisardi borrowed the boat to sail with her boyfriend and they circled the Italian coast.

Nowadays people find a 30ft sailing boat small.”īut the real breakthrough came a year or so later, when the family bought an Arpège – the nine-metre live-aboard that helped cement Dufour’s name as a serious boatbuilder. “It was a very small boat, without a toilet – very sporty,” remembers Rapisardi. This was a 6.3-metre Jeanneau Captain, which he kept in the then Yugoslavia for cruising the Adriatic. In the meantime, her father had bought a bigger boat. I chose to become a lawyer because it was quicker than becoming an engineer.” So when I was 19, I started to work with him to become independent if necessary. “My mother died when I was very young and my father was not so healthy. “I was quite obliged to be a lawyer because my father was an engineer in the patent authority,” she says. She explains how she had to make a quick decision when she finished school because her father fell sick. Her firm now employs 50 people and is one of the best-known teams in Italy. This sort of sangfroid has served Rapisardi well in a stellar career as a patent lawyer. “The guy came into my office but I managed to keep cool, like you do in the Arctic.” Rapisardi fought the case and won on behalf of the luxury brand in the first case of its kind in Italy against so-called cyber-squatting. At stake was the use of the domain name which the printer refused to sell. There is a pause, then she launches into the story of the bitter fight between fashion house Giorgio Armani and an Italian printing company of the same name. This issue of fear comes up again later in the interview, when I ask Rapisardi whether she has ever fought any high-profile legal battles.

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