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VIDA Yacht – Precious Superyacht

It was built by Heesen Yacht Builders in 2019 with naval architecture by Omega Architects. She acts as a mothership to the owner’s sports fishing fleet.

The interior design was a collaborative effort from three major design houses; Francesco Paszkowski, Margherita Casprini, and BE Design Associates.

VIDA is a luxury home on the water for the owner and his family to enjoy during fishing tournaments and expeditions.

VIDA yacht interior

Francesco Paszkowski  worked on the interior design for the VIDA yacht in collaboration with Margherita Casprini.  BE Design Associates  also contributed to the VIDA’s interior at a later date.

There is accommodation for 12 guests in 6 cabins, in one master suite, two VIP suites, one double, and two twins. The VIDA has a capacity of 13 crew members on board for a luxury experience for guests.

The VIDA yacht features a contemporary yet sophisticated style with the best quality materials like travertine, Calacatta marbles, and Alpilignum teak. The colors of the decor are earthy and bring a sense of livable luxury.

This was important to the owner, as he wanted a floating home for him and his family to enjoy while on fishing expeditions.

Indoor/outdoor seating is abundant throughout the 55m yacht, which offers plenty of space for guests to enjoy fine dining and socialize together.

She also features a large beach club that makes sunbathing and lounging by the water easy for guests.

The beach club also features a gym. She has a pool with LED lights that match the ambiance created by lights on the hardtop roof of the VIDA.

VIDA yacht exterior

The exterior of the VIDA yacht was designed by  Omega Architects , boasting a sharp and masculine exterior that makes her stand out on the water. 

Heesen Yachts  built her in their Netherlands-based shipyard and delivered her to the owner in 2019.

Her imposing exterior features a white steel hull and aluminum superstructure. VIDA was designed to be a fishing boat that wasn’t cramped so that everyone on board could enjoy fishing expeditions and tournaments.

VIDA yacht specifications

The VIDA yacht is a 55m superyacht with a 9.6m beam and a 3.15m draft. The yacht has a displacement of 740 gross tons and is powered by twin MTU engines.

With a range of 4500 nautical miles, she has a cruising speed of 13 knots and a maximum speed of 16 knots.

She has a Lloyd’s Register classification. VIDA acts as a mothership to a fleet of fishing boats. She had to be large enough to serve as a filling station for the other sportfishing boats in the owner’s fleet to accommodate this feature.

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Willis Custom Yachts' plans will reignite Stuart's boatbuilding heritage, create jobs

Stuart's legacy of boatbuilding dates back 100 years. It was 1921 when Curt Whiticar built his first boat, launching Whiticar Boat Works and what would become a mecca for the construction of some of the world's finest high-performance sport fishing yachts.

Since then, Stuart has become synonymous with world-class sportfishing thanks to brands such as Monterey, Billy Knowles, Gamefisherman, Garlington-Landeweer, Jim Smith, L & H, Tribute and American Custom Yachts.

The latter, in the Treasure Coast Commerce Center in west Stuart, was acquired by  Willis Custom Yachts  earlier this year, but terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

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Willis Custom Yachts is a new entity formed from Willis Marine Inc. , a boatbuilding company founded by Mark Willis of Stuart in 1990. American Custom Yachts was founded in Stuart in 1991 by Dominick LaCombe.

The new company plans to add 75 jobs soon, and more in the years to come once it starts to build the center console brand Venture Boats in a new manufacturing facility. The company plans to build that in two or three years on the vacant land across the South Fork of the St. Lucie River from the company's main yard.

But first, the boat must be redesigned to compensate for added outboard motors, said Doug West, president and general manager of Willis' yacht services.

Willis Custom Yachts

The sale of the waterfront property along the South Fork of the St. Lucie River and Okeechobee Waterway, and in between the bridges for Interstate 95 and Florida's Turnpike, gives Willis Custom Yachts:

• 64 acres on both sides of the waterway
• 34 acres of working boatyard
• About 300 feet of frontage along the waterway
• 25 wet slips with 8 feet of depth
• 2 haul-out wells

The new company announced plans to add:

• 220-ton marine lift
• 150-ton marine lift (new)
• 90,000-square-foot yacht-construction building
• On-site restaurant
• New construction facility for Venture Boats, a center console brand now owned by Willis Custom Yachts.

Willis Custom Yachts also will build a new waterfront facility east of Northwest Flagler Avenue near the Roosevelt Bridge in Stuart to facilitate new yacht-customer deliveries.

“I am very excited to have waterfront access of this magnitude," Willis said. "It changes the game for us and will vastly enhance our ability to provide the highest quality service and support to all of our customers.”

Willis Marine sportfishing boats

Over the last 30 years, Willis has developed a reputation as being a builder of one of the finest sportfishing yachts on the ocean. His partner, Brooks Smith, founder and CEO of InComm Payments , a global financial technology company, is an avid angler and longtime Willis customer.

Willis, originally from North Carolina, began his career in the fishing and boating industry early in life, obtaining his captain's license at age 19. He got an engineering degree from Western Pennsylvania University. After graduating, Willis pursued his passion for fishing in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where he built his first boat.

Willis Marine has built and launched 15 boats since being founded, including well-known boats on the sailfish and marlin tournament circuits such as Katie M, Lucky Punch, NuCo2, Uno Mas and the second Bone Shaker, which originally had been the Katie M.

Custom sportfishing boats of 60-90 feet in length cost owners millions of dollars and often take 2-3 years to build one boat. A 63-foot boat built by Willis in 2001 is currently offered by a broker for $2.9 million. 

What changes are coming?

The next Willis boats — 61-90 feet and designed to perform in fishing scenarios in seas around the world — will be rolling off the production line at a faster rate in coming years, West said.

"Smith is big into technology and innovation. We are going to introduce in the new boatbuilding facility a lot of machinery so we can reduce the build time significantly. That will allow us to build six boats at a time instead of one," West told TCPalm.

West joined Willis from Lauderdale Marine Center, where he worked in the yacht service industry since 2015. Before that, he worked for the family of Wayne Huizenga with Blockbuster and AutoNation. In 2005, Wayne Huizenga Jr. bought Rybovich , a boatbuilding and yacht repair and service facility in Riviera Beach. The next year, Huizenga Jr. called West about coming to Rybovich to get operations in shape.

West said Willis' main focus will be to complete the project begun in 2020 by American Custom Yachts, hull No. 22, a 68-footer named Cambeaux, and to finish hulls No. 15 and 16, two 70-footers. West said three new orders already have been placed.

Ed Killer is TCPalm's outdoors writer. Sign up for his and other weekly newsletters at profile.tcpalm.com/newsletters/manage . Friend Ed on Facebook at Ed Killer , follow him on Twitter @tcpalmekiller or email him at [email protected] .

Catch Me If You Can

Sport fishing for marlin and sailfish has become more sophisticated than ever. with satellite boats  strategically placed and yachts acting as the motherships, tournaments have turned into scenes  from battlestar galactica..

Tall, tanned, and sporting polarized sunglasses, Brooks Smith strides past dozens of multimillion-dollar billfishing boats docked at the packed marina in Los Sueños, Costa Rica. Catchy names like Big Oh, Reel Pushy , Morgasm , and Pelagic Magic are painted in elaborate designs on the transoms of the docked vessels. Soon this place will be empty and all these ships will be trolling the calm, warm waters of the Pacific to compete in one of the most famous billfish tournaments in the world—The Los Sueños Signature Triple Crown.

It’s early, 6:15 a.m., and the sun is just starting to hit the spotless stainless steel and glass of the fleet, giving the marina a magical glow. At the end of the dock, Smith bangs a quick left and steps aboard his 60-foot Bayliss yacht with the name Uno Mas airbrushed across the back. As he sits down in the sleek, teak stateroom (accessed through a push-button, air-powered sliding door), his crack team of deck hands have already released the lines. Uno Mas eases out of her slip, one step in an almost automatic routine Smith performs more than 100 days a year.

Fishing at this level does not come cheap and the sport has changed quite a bit since the days of Ernest Hemingway and Zane Grey. Back in the 1920s and ’30s, macho men caught billfish in small boats, sometimes landing huge fish using just a handheld line and fishing their baits hundreds of feet deep.

Today, the sport is as macho as ever (though there are many tournaments with a female division as well), but it’s less about muscles and more about the size of your bank balance. Last year, a 510-pound black marlin on the final day of the Cabo San Lucas Bisbee’s Black and Blue Billfish Tournament was worth a whopping $3 million. But that’s just a drop in the bucket.

Elite billfish anglers like Smith and his competitors spend millions of dollars to build bigger, faster boats and outfit them with high-tech gizmos like the full-circle color sonar Furuno CSH-8L Mark-2 (furuno.com).

The $80,000 unit can cost tens of thousands to install, but it’s deadly accurate and can spot a fish within 800 feet of the boat, as well as small baitfish that marlin and sailfish dine on. “The radar is so advanced,” says Marlin magazine Editor-in-Chief Sam White, “that a captain can spot one or two birds feeding on fish 8 to 10 miles away.”

There are advantageous ways to spend money off the boat too. From a small office in West Melbourne, Florida, a company called ROFFS (roffs.com) provides custom NOAA and NASA satellite analysis starting at $60. The analysis provides and explains to the anglers the best spots to fish on any given day. “It is a big ocean, and you don’t want to waste your time, fuel, and money searching for fish and guessing where the best conditions are,” says ROFFS President Matt Upton, who processes over 19,000 requests a year and has helped set six International Game Fish Association (IGFA) world records, two United States records, one Bahamas record, one Gulf of Mexico record, and 27 state records. Upton’s team of five fisheries and satellite oceanographers looks at a variety of factors, including sea surface temperatures, bottom structure, weed lines, water mass boundaries, and ocean color chlorophyll indicators to get a precise picture of where the fish will be.

While technology has advanced above water, down below, Smith’s prey has stayed the same for millions of years. When man wasn’t even standing upright, billfish hunted the earth’s waters. The great blue marlin (the world all-tackle record off Kona, Hawaii, stands at 1,376 pounds) cruise the surface at around 1 to 3 knots, preferring water temperature in the range of 75 to 81 degrees—the sort of water found in Los Sueños.

Blue marlin can dive more than 2,000 feet down to stuff themselves on squid before rocketing back to the surface. Known to swim extraordinary distances, a marlin tagged near Puerto Rico popped up 120 days later offshore of Angola, Africa, 4,776 miles away.

Immortalized by authors such as Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, they have long captured the imagination of fishermen appreciating what these fish can do and what it takes to capture one. Writes author Philip Caputo in “The Ahab Complex,” published in The Key West Reader, the marlin “can defend themselves against anything that swims,” adding that their only natural enemy, the mako shark, loses a fight most of the time and that “a marlin’s bill has pierced 22 inches of solid wood.”

To pursue such a prize, the human enemy goes to great lengths, and with better success than the mako. A suitable billfish boat is essential, and no other craft in this elite group of sport fishermen is more widely known for pushing the tech envelope than Jaruco—a 90-foot Jarrett Bay Boatworks (jarrettbay.com) model owned by angler Ralph de la Torre. The Boston-based CEO of Steward Health Care Systems LLC named it after the town where his parents were born in Cuba. “It’s probably the most advanced sport fishing boat in the world,” says Randy Ramsey, president of Jarrett Bay. “The engineering of the boat alone costs $5 million. It was a challenging process.”

Three years in the making, almost everything on Jaruco, including the stringers, the bulkhead, and the water and fuel tanks are made of carbon fiber. Even Jaruco’s six toilets are carbon fiber. “If you have ever worked on one around your house, you know that porcelain is pretty darn heavy,” laughs Ramsey, whose company is based in Beaufort, North Carolina. Stainless steel is the standard material on other boats for the shaft that runs from the engine to the propeller. On Jaruco, a drive shaft made of titanium saves 1,700 pounds in weight. The end result is a boat that is nimbler and weighs 40,000 pounds less than a typical 90-footer. Jaruco can cruise at 45 knots—as fast as a 65-footer, says Ramsey.

For Ramsey, the technological innovations are thrilling and “we incorporate a lot of those innovations into the new boats that we are building.”Smith, who favors custom boat designs, currently owns three sport fishing boats—all called Uno Mas. He has his 60-foot Bayliss based full time in Costa Rica and he owns another 68-foot Bayliss and a 77-foot Willis. Having multiple boats makes it a lot easier to fish competitively around the world and ensures that “we don’t have to move a boat thousands of miles in just a few days,” says Smith. “It’s also less wear and tear on the boats.”

In Los Sueños, Smith taunts marlin at the surface by pulling blue and pink rubber squid behind the boat to entice the fish to bite. Four to five anglers are in the back of the boat armed with reels carrying over 600 yards of braid backing and 25-pound test monofilament connected to modern Alutecnos reels costing upward of $1,000 each. The anglers fish with dead ballyhoo (rigged to swim naturally as if alive), which the marlin and sailfish love to nibble on. When a billfish bites, the anglers must have a subtle touch to hook them. Captains only fish with anglers who have mastered the art of these techniques in order to win tournaments.

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American Custom Yachts Facility and Assets Acquired by Willis Custom Yachts of Stuart Fl

Willis Custom Yachts is proud to announce the acquisition of American Custom Yachts Assets in Stuart, Florida

Doug West Willis Custom Yachts +1 772-221-9100 email us here

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