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Below Deck: Sailing Yacht (Season 4)

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The Haves and the Have-Yachts

By Evan Osnos

In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking.

For the small, tight-lipped community around the world’s biggest yachts, the Palm Beach show has the promising air of spring training. On the cusp of the summer season, it affords brokers and builders and owners (or attendants from their family offices) a chance to huddle over the latest merchandise and to gather intelligence: Who’s getting in? Who’s getting out? And, most pressingly, who’s ogling a bigger boat?

On the docks, brokers parse the crowd according to a taxonomy of potential. Guests asking for tours face a gantlet of greeters, trained to distinguish “superrich clients” from “ineligible visitors,” in the words of Emma Spence, a former greeter at the Palm Beach show. Spence looked for promising clues (the right shoes, jewelry, pets) as well as for red flags (cameras, ornate business cards, clothes with pop-culture references). For greeters from elsewhere, Palm Beach is a challenging assignment. Unlike in Europe, where money can still produce some visible tells—Hunter Wellies, a Barbour jacket—the habits of wealth in Florida offer little that’s reliable. One colleague resorted to binoculars, to spot a passerby with a hundred-thousand-dollar watch. According to Spence, people judged to have insufficient buying power are quietly marked for “dissuasion.”

For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom.

At the Palm Beach show, I lingered in front of a gracious vessel called Namasté, until I was dissuaded by a wooden placard: “Private yacht, no boarding, no paparazzi.” In a nearby berth was a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot superyacht called Bold, which was styled like a warship, with its own helicopter hangar, three Sea-Doos, two sailboats, and a color scheme of gunmetal gray. The rugged look is a trend; “explorer” vessels, equipped to handle remote journeys, are the sport-utility vehicles of yachting.

If you hail from the realm of ineligible visitors, you may not be aware that we are living through the “greatest boom in the yacht business that’s ever existed,” as Bob Denison—whose firm, Denison Yachting, is one of the world’s largest brokers—told me. “Every broker, every builder, up and down the docks, is having some of the best years they’ve ever experienced.” In 2021, the industry sold a record eight hundred and eighty-seven superyachts worldwide, nearly twice the previous year’s total. With more than a thousand new superyachts on order, shipyards are so backed up that clients unaccustomed to being told no have been shunted to waiting lists.

One reason for the increased demand for yachts is the pandemic. Some buyers invoke social distancing; others, an existential awakening. John Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, who made a fortune from car dealerships, is looking to upgrade from his current, sixty-million-dollar yacht. “When you’re forty or fifty years old, you say, ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ ” he told me. But, at seventy-five, he is ready to throw in an extra fifteen million if it will spare him three years of waiting. “Is your life worth five million dollars a year? I think so,” he said. A deeper reason for the demand is the widening imbalance of wealth. Since 1990, the United States’ supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than seven hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only twenty per cent. In that time, the number of truly giant yachts—those longer than two hundred and fifty feet—has climbed from less than ten to more than a hundred and seventy. Raphael Sauleau, the C.E.O. of Fraser Yachts, told me bluntly, “ COVID and wealth—a perfect storm for us.”

And yet the marina in Palm Beach was thrumming with anxiety. Ever since the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, launched his assault on Ukraine, the superyacht world has come under scrutiny. At a port in Spain, a Ukrainian engineer named Taras Ostapchuk, working aboard a ship that he said was owned by a Russian arms dealer, threw open the sea valves and tried to sink it to the bottom of the harbor. Under arrest, he told a judge, “I would do it again.” Then he returned to Ukraine and joined the military. Western allies, in the hope of pressuring Putin to withdraw, have sought to cut off Russian oligarchs from businesses and luxuries abroad. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains,” President Joe Biden declared, in his State of the Union address.

Nobody can say precisely how many of Putin’s associates own superyachts—known to professionals as “white boats”—because the white-boat world is notoriously opaque. Owners tend to hide behind shell companies, registered in obscure tax havens, attended by private bankers and lawyers. But, with unusual alacrity, authorities have used subpoenas and police powers to freeze boats suspected of having links to the Russian élite. In Spain, the government detained a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar yacht associated with Sergei Chemezov, the head of the conglomerate Rostec, whose bond with Putin reaches back to their time as K.G.B. officers in East Germany. (As in many cases, the boat is not registered to Chemezov; the official owner is a shell company connected to his stepdaughter, a teacher whose salary is likely about twenty-two hundred dollars a month.) In Germany, authorities impounded the world’s most voluminous yacht, Dilbar, for its ties to the mining-and-telecom tycoon Alisher Usmanov. And in Italy police have grabbed a veritable armada, including a boat owned by one of Russia’s richest men, Alexei Mordashov, and a colossus suspected of belonging to Putin himself, the four-hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot Scheherazade.

In Palm Beach, the yachting community worried that the same scrutiny might be applied to them. “Say your superyacht is in Asia, and there’s some big conflict where China invades Taiwan,” Denison told me. “China could spin it as ‘Look at these American oligarchs!’ ” He wondered if the seizures of superyachts marked a growing political animus toward the very rich. “Whenever things are economically or politically disruptive,” he said, “it’s hard to justify taking an insane amount of money and just putting it into something that costs a lot to maintain, depreciates, and is only used for having a good time.”

Nobody pretends that a superyacht is a productive place to stash your wealth. In a column this spring headlined “ A SUPERYACHT IS A TERRIBLE ASSET ,” the Financial Times observed, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”

Not so long ago, status transactions among the élite were denominated in Old Masters and in the sculptures of the Italian Renaissance. Joseph Duveen, the dominant art dealer of the early twentieth century, kept the oligarchs of his day—Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache, J. P. Morgan—jockeying over Donatellos and Van Dycks. “When you pay high for the priceless,” he liked to say, “you’re getting it cheap.”

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In the nineteen-fifties, the height of aspirational style was fine French furniture—F.F.F., as it became known in certain precincts of Fifth Avenue and Palm Beach. Before long, more and more money was going airborne. Hugh Hefner, a pioneer in the private-jet era, decked out a plane he called Big Bunny, where he entertained Elvis Presley, Raquel Welch, and James Caan. The oil baron Armand Hammer circled the globe on his Boeing 727, paying bribes and recording evidence on microphones hidden in his cufflinks. But, once it seemed that every plutocrat had a plane, the thrill was gone.

In any case, an airplane is just transportation. A big ship is a floating manse, with a hierarchy written right into the nomenclature. If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht, and more than two hundred and ninety-five is a gigayacht. The world contains about fifty-four hundred superyachts, and about a hundred gigayachts.

For the moment, a gigayacht is the most expensive item that our species has figured out how to own. In 2019, the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin bought a quadruplex on Central Park South for two hundred and forty million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a home in America. In May, an unknown buyer spent about a hundred and ninety-five million on an Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe. In luxury-yacht terms, those are ordinary numbers. “There are a lot of boats in build well over two hundred and fifty million dollars,” Jamie Edmiston, a broker in Monaco and London, told me. His buyers are getting younger and more inclined to spend long stretches at sea. “High-speed Internet, telephony, modern communications have made working easier,” he said. “Plus, people made a lot more money earlier in life.”

A Silicon Valley C.E.O. told me that one appeal of boats is that they can “absorb the most excess capital.” He explained, “Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and then fifty million on the boat that they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred-thousand-square-foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half-billion-dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.” Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, is content to spend three or four times as much on his yachts as on his homes. Part of the appeal is flexibility. “If you’re on your boat and you don’t like your neighbor, you tell the captain, ‘Let’s go to a different place,’ ” he said. On land, escaping a bad neighbor requires more work: “You got to try and buy him out or make it uncomfortable or something.” The preference for sea-based investment has altered the proportions of taste. Until recently, the Silicon Valley C.E.O. said, “a fifty-metre boat was considered a good-sized boat. Now that would be a little bit embarrassing.” In the past twenty years, the length of the average luxury yacht has grown by a third, to a hundred and sixty feet.

Thorstein Veblen, the economist who published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in 1899, argued that the power of “conspicuous consumption” sprang not from artful finery but from sheer needlessness. “In order to be reputable,” he wrote, “it must be wasteful.” In the yachting world, stories circulate about exotic deliveries by helicopter or seaplane: Dom Pérignon, bagels from Zabar’s, sex workers, a rare melon from the island of Hokkaido. The industry excels at selling you things that you didn’t know you needed. When you flip through the yachting press, it’s easy to wonder how you’ve gone this long without a personal submarine, or a cryosauna that “blasts you with cold” down to minus one hundred and ten degrees Celsius, or the full menagerie of “exclusive leathers,” such as eel and stingray.

But these shrines to excess capital exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society—and all but unseen by everyone else. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the yachting community was straining to manage its reputation as a gusher of carbon emissions (one well-stocked diesel yacht is estimated to produce as much greenhouse gas as fifteen hundred passenger cars), not to mention the fact that the world of white boats is overwhelmingly white. In a candid aside to a French documentarian, the American yachtsman Bill Duker said, “If the rest of the world learns what it’s like to live on a yacht like this, they’re gonna bring back the guillotine.” The Dutch press recently reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was building a sailing yacht so tall that the city of Rotterdam might temporarily dismantle a bridge that had survived the Nazis in order to let the boat pass to the open sea. Rotterdammers were not pleased. On Facebook, a local man urged people to “take a box of rotten eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through.” At least thirteen thousand people expressed interest. Amid the uproar, a deputy mayor announced that the dismantling plan had been abandoned “for the time being.” (Bezos modelled his yacht partly on one owned by his friend Barry Diller, who has hosted him many times. The appreciation eventually extended to personnel, and Bezos hired one of Diller’s captains.)

As social media has heightened the scrutiny of extraordinary wealth, some of the very people who created those platforms have sought less observable places to spend it. But they occasionally indulge in some coded provocation. In 2006, when the venture capitalist Tom Perkins unveiled his boat in Istanbul, most passersby saw it adorned in colorful flags, but people who could read semaphore were able to make out a message: “Rarely does one have the privilege to witness vulgar ostentation displayed on such a scale.” As a longtime owner told me, “If you don’t have some guilt about it, you’re a rat.”

Alex Finley, a former C.I.A. officer who has seen yachts proliferate near her home in Barcelona, has weighed the superyacht era and its discontents in writings and on Twitter, using the hashtag #YachtWatch. “To me, the yachts are not just yachts,” she told me. “In Russia’s case, these are the embodiment of oligarchs helping a dictator destabilize our democracy while utilizing our democracy to their benefit.” But, Finley added, it’s a mistake to think the toxic symbolism applies only to Russia. “The yachts tell a whole story about a Faustian capitalism—this idea that we’re ready to sell democracy for short-term profit,” she said. “They’re registered offshore. They use every loophole that we’ve put in place for illicit money and tax havens. So they play a role in this battle, writ large, between autocracy and democracy.”

After a morning on the docks at the Palm Beach show, I headed to a more secluded marina nearby, which had been set aside for what an attendant called “the really big hardware.” It felt less like a trade show than like a boutique resort, with a swimming pool and a terrace restaurant. Kevin Merrigan, a relaxed Californian with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead pinked by the sun, was waiting for me at the stern of Unbridled, a superyacht with a brilliant blue hull that gave it the feel of a personal cruise ship. He invited me to the bridge deck, where a giant screen showed silent video of dolphins at play.

Merrigan is the chairman of the brokerage Northrop & Johnson, which has ridden the tide of growing boats and wealth since 1949. Lounging on a sofa mounded with throw pillows, he projected a nearly postcoital level of contentment. He had recently sold the boat we were on, accepted an offer for a behemoth beside us, and begun negotiating the sale of yet another. “This client owns three big yachts,” he said. “It’s a hobby for him. We’re at a hundred and ninety-one feet now, and last night he said, ‘You know, what do you think about getting a two hundred and fifty?’ ” Merrigan laughed. “And I was, like, ‘Can’t you just have dinner?’ ”

Among yacht owners, there are some unwritten rules of stratification: a Dutch-built boat will hold its value better than an Italian; a custom design will likely get more respect than a “series yacht”; and, if you want to disparage another man’s boat, say that it looks like a wedding cake. But, in the end, nothing says as much about a yacht, or its owner, as the delicate matter of L.O.A.—length over all.

The imperative is not usually length for length’s sake (though the longtime owner told me that at times there is an aspect of “phallic sizing”). “L.O.A.” is a byword for grandeur. In most cases, pleasure yachts are permitted to carry no more than twelve passengers, a rule set by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which was conceived after the sinking of the Titanic. But those limits do not apply to crew. “So, you might have anything between twelve and fifty crew looking after those twelve guests,” Edmiston, the broker, said. “It’s a level of service you cannot really contemplate until you’ve been fortunate enough to experience it.”

As yachts have grown more capacious, and the limits on passengers have not, more and more space on board has been devoted to staff and to novelties. The latest fashions include IMAX theatres, hospital equipment that tests for dozens of pathogens, and ski rooms where guests can suit up for a helicopter trip to a mountaintop. The longtime owner, who had returned the previous day from his yacht, told me, “No one today—except for assholes and ridiculous people—lives on land in what you would call a deep and broad luxe life. Yes, people have nice houses and all of that, but it’s unlikely that the ratio of staff to them is what it is on a boat.” After a moment, he added, “Boats are the last place that I think you can get away with it.”

Even among the truly rich, there is a gap between the haves and the have-yachts. One boating guest told me about a conversation with a famous friend who keeps one of the world’s largest yachts. “He said, ‘The boat is the last vestige of what real wealth can do.’ What he meant is, You have a chef, and I have a chef. You have a driver, and I have a driver. You can fly privately, and I fly privately. So, the one place where I can make clear to the world that I am in a different fucking category than you is the boat.”

After Merrigan and I took a tour of Unbridled, he led me out to a waiting tender, staffed by a crew member with an earpiece on a coil. The tender, Merrigan said, would ferry me back to the busy main dock of the Palm Beach show. We bounced across the waves under a pristine sky, and pulled into the marina, where my fellow-gawkers were still trying to talk their way past the greeters. As I walked back into the scrum, Namasté was still there, but it looked smaller than I remembered.

For owners and their guests, a white boat provides a discreet marketplace for the exchange of trust, patronage, and validation. To diagram the precise workings of that trade—the customs and anxieties, strategies and slights—I talked to Brendan O’Shannassy, a veteran captain who is a curator of white-boat lore. Raised in Western Australia, O’Shannassy joined the Navy as a young man, and eventually found his way to skippering some of the world’s biggest yachts. He has worked for Paul Allen, the late co-founder of Microsoft, along with a few other billionaires he declines to name. Now in his early fifties, with patient green eyes and tufts of curly brown hair, O’Shannassy has had a vantage from which to monitor the social traffic. “It’s all gracious, and everyone’s kiss-kiss,” he said. “But there’s a lot going on in the background.”

O’Shannassy once worked for an owner who limited the number of newspapers on board, so that he could watch his guests wait and squirm. “It was a mind game amongst the billionaires. There were six couples, and three newspapers,” he said, adding, “They were ranking themselves constantly.” On some boats, O’Shannassy has found himself playing host in the awkward minutes after guests arrive. “A lot of them are savants, but some are very un-socially aware,” he said. “They need someone to be social and charming for them.” Once everyone settles in, O’Shannassy has learned, there is often a subtle shift, when a mogul or a politician or a pop star starts to loosen up in ways that are rarely possible on land. “Your security is relaxed—they’re not on your hip,” he said. “You’re not worried about paparazzi. So you’ve got all this extra space, both mental and physical.”

O’Shannassy has come to see big boats as a space where powerful “solar systems” converge and combine. “It is implicit in every interaction that their sharing of information will benefit both parties; it is an obsession with billionaires to do favours for each other. A referral, an introduction, an insight—it all matters,” he wrote in “Superyacht Captain,” a new memoir. A guest told O’Shannassy that, after a lavish display of hospitality, he finally understood the business case for buying a boat. “One deal secured on board will pay it all back many times over,” the guest said, “and it is pretty hard to say no after your kids have been hosted so well for a week.”

Take the case of David Geffen, the former music and film executive. He is long retired, but he hosts friends (and potential friends) on the four-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot Rising Sun, which has a double-height cinema, a spa and salon, and a staff of fifty-seven. In 2017, shortly after Barack and Michelle Obama departed the White House, they were photographed on Geffen’s boat in French Polynesia, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Rita Wilson. For Geffen, the boat keeps him connected to the upper echelons of power. There are wealthier Americans, but not many of them have a boat so delectable that it can induce both a Democratic President and the workingman’s crooner to risk the aroma of hypocrisy.

The binding effect pays dividends for guests, too. Once people reach a certain level of fame, they tend to conclude that its greatest advantage is access. Spend a week at sea together, lingering over meals, observing one another floundering on a paddleboard, and you have something of value for years to come. Call to ask for an investment, an introduction, an internship for a wayward nephew, and you’ll at least get the call returned. It’s a mutually reinforcing circle of validation: she’s here, I’m here, we’re here.

But, if you want to get invited back, you are wise to remember your part of the bargain. If you work with movie stars, bring fresh gossip. If you’re on Wall Street, bring an insight or two. Don’t make the transaction obvious, but don’t forget why you’re there. “When I see the guest list,” O’Shannassy wrote, “I am aware, even if not all names are familiar, that all have been chosen for a purpose.”

For O’Shannassy, there is something comforting about the status anxieties of people who have everything. He recalled a visit to the Italian island of Sardinia, where his employer asked him for a tour of the boats nearby. Riding together on a tender, they passed one colossus after another, some twice the size of the owner’s superyacht. Eventually, the man cut the excursion short. “Take me back to my yacht, please,” he said. They motored in silence for a while. “There was a time when my yacht was the most beautiful in the bay,” he said at last. “How do I keep up with this new money?”

The summer season in the Mediterranean cranks up in May, when the really big hardware heads east from Florida and the Caribbean to escape the coming hurricanes, and reconvenes along the coasts of France, Italy, and Spain. At the center is the Principality of Monaco, the sun-washed tax haven that calls itself the “world’s capital of advanced yachting.” In Monaco, which is among the richest countries on earth, superyachts bob in the marina like bath toys.

The nearest hotel room at a price that would not get me fired was an Airbnb over the border with France. But an acquaintance put me on the phone with the Yacht Club de Monaco, a members-only establishment created by the late monarch His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III, whom the Web site describes as “a true visionary in every respect.” The club occasionally rents rooms—“cabins,” as they’re called—to visitors in town on yacht-related matters. Claudia Batthyany, the elegant director of special projects, showed me to my cabin and later explained that the club does not aspire to be a hotel. “We are an association ,” she said. “Otherwise, it becomes”—she gave a gentle wince—“not that exclusive.”

Inside my cabin, I quickly came to understand that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again. The space was silent and aromatically upscale, bathed in soft sunlight that swept through a wall of glass overlooking the water. If I was getting a sudden rush of the onboard experience, that was no accident. The clubhouse was designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster to evoke the opulent indulgence of ocean liners of the interwar years, like the Queen Mary. I found a handwritten welcome note, on embossed club stationery, set alongside an orchid and an assemblage of chocolate truffles: “The whole team remains at your entire disposal to make your stay a wonderful experience. Yours sincerely, Service Members.” I saluted the nameless Service Members, toiling for the comfort of their guests. Looking out at the water, I thought, intrusively, of a line from Santiago, Hemingway’s old man of the sea. “Do not think about sin,” he told himself. “It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.”

I had been assured that the Service Members would cheerfully bring dinner, as they might on board, but I was eager to see more of my surroundings. I consulted the club’s summer dress code. It called for white trousers and a blue blazer, and it discouraged improvisation: “No pocket handkerchief is to be worn above the top breast-pocket bearing the Club’s coat of arms.” The handkerchief rule seemed navigable, but I did not possess white trousers, so I skirted the lobby and took refuge in the bar. At a table behind me, a man with flushed cheeks and a British accent had a head start. “You’re a shitty negotiator,” he told another man, with a laugh. “Maybe sales is not your game.” A few seats away, an American woman was explaining to a foreign friend how to talk with conservatives: “If they say, ‘The earth is flat,’ you say, ‘Well, I’ve sailed around it, so I’m not so sure about that.’ ”

In the morning, I had an appointment for coffee with Gaëlle Tallarida, the managing director of the Monaco Yacht Show, which the Daily Mail has called the “most shamelessly ostentatious display of yachts in the world.” Tallarida was not born to that milieu; she grew up on the French side of the border, swimming at public beaches with a view of boats sailing from the marina. But she had a knack for highly organized spectacle. While getting a business degree, she worked on a student theatre festival and found it thrilling. Afterward, she got a job in corporate events, and in 1998 she was hired at the yacht show as a trainee.

With this year’s show five months off, Tallarida was already getting calls about what she described as “the most complex part of my work”: deciding which owners get the most desirable spots in the marina. “As you can imagine, they’ve got very big egos,” she said. “On top of that, I’m a woman. They are sometimes arriving and saying”—she pointed into the distance, pantomiming a decree—“ ‘O.K., I want that!  ’ ”

Just about everyone wants his superyacht to be viewed from the side, so that its full splendor is visible. Most harbors, however, have a limited number of berths with a side view; in Monaco, there are only twelve, with prime spots arrayed along a concrete dike across from the club. “We reserve the dike for the biggest yachts,” Tallarida said. But try telling that to a man who blew his fortune on a small superyacht.

Whenever possible, Tallarida presents her verdicts as a matter of safety: the layout must insure that “in case of an emergency, any boat can go out.” If owners insist on preferential placement, she encourages a yachting version of the Golden Rule: “What if, next year, I do that to you? Against you?”

Does that work? I asked. She shrugged. “They say, ‘Eh.’ ” Some would gladly risk being a victim next year in order to be a victor now. In the most awful moment of her career, she said, a man who was unhappy with his berth berated her face to face. “I was in the office, feeling like a little girl, with my daddy shouting at me. I said, ‘O.K., O.K., I’m going to give you the spot.’ ”

Securing just the right place, it must be said, carries value. Back at the yacht club, I was on my terrace, enjoying the latest delivery by the Service Members—an airy French omelette and a glass of preternaturally fresh orange juice. I thought guiltily of my wife, at home with our kids, who had sent a text overnight alerting me to a maintenance issue that she described as “a toilet debacle.”

Then I was distracted by the sight of a man on a yacht in the marina below. He was staring up at me. I went back to my brunch, but, when I looked again, there he was—a middle-aged man, on a mid-tier yacht, juiceless, on a greige banquette, staring up at my perfect terrace. A surprising sensation started in my chest and moved outward like a warm glow: the unmistakable pang of superiority.

That afternoon, I made my way to the bar, to meet the yacht club’s general secretary, Bernard d’Alessandri, for a history lesson. The general secretary was up to code: white trousers, blue blazer, club crest over the heart. He has silver hair, black eyebrows, and a tan that evokes high-end leather. “I was a sailing teacher before this,” he said, and gestured toward the marina. “It was not like this. It was a village.”

Before there were yacht clubs, there were jachten , from the Dutch word for “hunt.” In the seventeenth century, wealthy residents of Amsterdam created fast-moving boats to meet incoming cargo ships before they hit port, in order to check out the merchandise. Soon, the Dutch owners were racing one another, and yachting spread across Europe. After a visit to Holland in 1697, Peter the Great returned to Russia with a zeal for pleasure craft, and he later opened Nevsky Flot, one of the world’s first yacht clubs, in St. Petersburg.

For a while, many of the biggest yachts were symbols of state power. In 1863, the viceroy of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, ordered up a steel leviathan called El Mahrousa, which was the world’s longest yacht for a remarkable hundred and nineteen years, until the title was claimed by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt received guests aboard the U.S.S. Potomac, which had a false smokestack containing a hidden elevator, so that the President could move by wheelchair between decks.

But yachts were finding new patrons outside politics. In 1954, the Greek shipping baron Aristotle Onassis bought a Canadian Navy frigate and spent four million dollars turning it into Christina O, which served as his home for months on end—and, at various times, as a home to his companions Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Christina O had its flourishes—a Renoir in the master suite, a swimming pool with a mosaic bottom that rose to become a dance floor—but none were more distinctive than the appointments in the bar, which included whales’ teeth carved into pornographic scenes from the Odyssey and stools upholstered in whale foreskins.

For Onassis, the extraordinary investments in Christina O were part of an epic tit for tat with his archrival, Stavros Niarchos, a fellow shipping tycoon, which was so entrenched that it continued even after Onassis’s death, in 1975. Six years later, Niarchos launched a yacht fifty-five feet longer than Christina O: Atlantis II, which featured a swimming pool on a gyroscope so that the water would not slosh in heavy seas. Atlantis II, now moored in Monaco, sat before the general secretary and me as we talked.

Over the years, d’Alessandri had watched waves of new buyers arrive from one industry after another. “First, it was the oil. After, it was the telecommunications. Now, they are making money with crypto,” he said. “And, each time, it’s another size of the boat, another design.” What began as symbols of state power had come to represent more diffuse aristocracies—the fortunes built on carbon, capital, and data that migrated across borders. As early as 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”

Each iteration of fortune left its imprint on the industry. Sheikhs, who tend to cruise in the world’s hottest places, wanted baroque indoor spaces and were uninterested in sundecks. Silicon Valley favored acres of beige, more Sonoma than Saudi. And buyers from Eastern Europe became so abundant that shipyards perfected the onboard banya , a traditional Russian sauna stocked with birch and eucalyptus. The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, had minted a generation of new billionaires, whose approach to money inspired a popular Russian joke: One oligarch brags to another, “Look at this new tie. It cost me two hundred bucks!” To which the other replies, “You moron. You could’ve bought the same one for a thousand!”

In 1998, around the time that the Russian economy imploded, the young tycoon Roman Abramovich reportedly bought a secondhand yacht called Sussurro—Italian for “whisper”—which had been so carefully engineered for speed that each individual screw was weighed before installation. Soon, Russians were competing to own the costliest ships. “If the most expensive yacht in the world was small, they would still want it,” Maria Pevchikh, a Russian investigator who helps lead the Anti-Corruption Foundation, told me.

In 2008, a thirty-six-year-old industrialist named Andrey Melnichenko spent some three hundred million dollars on Motor Yacht A, a radical experiment conceived by the French designer Philippe Starck, with a dagger-shaped hull and a bulbous tower topped by a master bedroom set on a turntable that pivots to capture the best view. The shape was ridiculed as “a giant finger pointing at you” and “one of the most hideous vessels ever to sail,” but it marked a new prominence for Russian money at sea. Today, post-Soviet élites are thought to own a fifth of the world’s gigayachts.

Even Putin has signalled his appreciation, being photographed on yachts in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. In an explosive report in 2012, Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister, accused Putin of amassing a storehouse of outrageous luxuries, including four yachts, twenty homes, and dozens of private aircraft. Less than three years later, Nemtsov was fatally shot while crossing a bridge near the Kremlin. The Russian government, which officially reports that Putin collects a salary of about a hundred and forty thousand dollars and possesses a modest apartment in Moscow, denied any involvement.

Many of the largest, most flamboyant gigayachts are designed in Monaco, at a sleek waterfront studio occupied by the naval architect Espen Øino. At sixty, Øino has a boyish mop and the mild countenance of a country parson. He grew up in a small town in Norway, the heir to a humble maritime tradition. “My forefathers built wooden rowing boats for four generations,” he told me. In the late eighties, he was designing sailboats when his firm won a commission to design a megayacht for Emilio Azcárraga, the autocratic Mexican who built Televisa into the world’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster. Azcárraga was nicknamed El Tigre, for his streak of white hair and his comfort with confrontation; he kept a chair in his office that was unusually high off the ground, so that visitors’ feet dangled like children’s.

In early meetings, Øino recalled, Azcárraga grew frustrated that the ideas were not dazzling enough. “You must understand,” he said. “I don’t go to port very often with my boats, but, when I do, I want my presence to be felt.”

The final design was suitably arresting; after the boat was completed, Øino had no shortage of commissions. In 1998, he was approached by Paul Allen, of Microsoft, to build a yacht that opened the way for the Goliaths that followed. The result, called Octopus, was so large that it contained a submarine marina in its belly, as well as a helicopter hangar that could be converted into an outdoor performance space. Mick Jagger and Bono played on occasion. I asked Øino why owners obsessed with secrecy seem determined to build the world’s most conspicuous machines. He compared it to a luxury car with tinted windows. “People can’t see you, but you’re still in that expensive, impressive thing,” he said. “We all need to feel that we’re important in one way or another.”

In recent months, Øino has seen some of his creations detained by governments in the sanctions campaign. When we spoke, he condemned the news coverage. “Yacht equals Russian equals evil equals money,” he said disdainfully. “It’s a bit tragic, because the yachts have become synonymous with the bad guys in a James Bond movie.”

What about Scheherazade, the giant yacht that U.S. officials have alleged is held by a Russian businessman for Putin’s use? Øino, who designed the ship, rejected the idea. “We have designed two yachts for heads of state, and I can tell you that they’re completely different, in terms of the layout and everything, from Scheherazade.” He meant that the details said plutocrat, not autocrat.

For the time being, Scheherazade and other Øino creations under detention across Europe have entered a strange legal purgatory. As lawyers for the owners battle to keep the ships from being permanently confiscated, local governments are duty-bound to maintain them until a resolution is reached. In a comment recorded by a hot mike in June, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, marvelled that “people are basically being paid to maintain Russian superyachts on behalf of the United States government.” (It usually costs about ten per cent of a yacht’s construction price to keep it afloat each year. In May, officials in Fiji complained that a detained yacht was costing them more than a hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars a day.)

Stranger still are the Russian yachts on the lam. Among them is Melnichenko’s much maligned Motor Yacht A. On March 9th, Melnichenko was sanctioned by the European Union, and although he denied having close ties to Russia’s leadership, Italy seized one of his yachts—a six-hundred-million-dollar sailboat. But Motor Yacht A slipped away before anyone could grab it. Then the boat turned off the transponder required by international maritime rules, so that its location could no longer be tracked. The last ping was somewhere near the Maldives, before it went dark on the high seas.

The very largest yachts come from Dutch and German shipyards, which have experience in naval vessels, known as “gray boats.” But the majority of superyachts are built in Italy, partly because owners prefer to visit the Mediterranean during construction. (A British designer advises those who are weighing their choices to take the geography seriously, “unless you like schnitzel.”)

In the past twenty-two years, nobody has built more superyachts than the Vitellis, an Italian family whose patriarch, Paolo Vitelli, got his start in the seventies, manufacturing smaller boats near a lake in the mountains. By 1985, their company, Azimut, had grown large enough to buy the Benetti shipyards, which had been building enormous yachts since the nineteenth century. Today, the combined company builds its largest boats near the sea, but the family still works in the hill town of Avigliana, where a medieval monastery towers above a valley. When I visited in April, Giovanna Vitelli, the vice-president and the founder’s daughter, led me through the experience of customizing a yacht.

“We’re using more and more virtual reality,” she said, and a staffer fitted me with a headset. When the screen blinked on, I was inside a 3-D mockup of a yacht that is not yet on the market. I wandered around my suite for a while, checking out swivel chairs, a modish sideboard, blond wood panelling on the walls. It was convincing enough that I collided with a real-life desk.

After we finished with the headset, it was time to pick the décor. The industry encourages an introspective evaluation: What do you want your yacht to say about you? I was handed a vibrant selection of wood, marble, leather, and carpet. The choices felt suddenly grave. Was I cut out for the chiselled look of Cream Vesuvio, or should I accept that I’m a gray Cardoso Stone? For carpets, I liked the idea of Chablis Corn White—Paris and the prairie, together at last. But, for extra seating, was it worth splurging for the V.I.P. Vanity Pouf?

Some designs revolve around a single piece of art. The most expensive painting ever sold, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” reportedly was hung on the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-foot yacht Serene, after the Louvre rejected a Saudi demand that it hang next to the “Mona Lisa.” Art conservators blanched at the risks that excess humidity and fluctuating temperatures could pose to a five-hundred-year-old painting. Often, collectors who want to display masterpieces at sea commission replicas.

If you’ve just put half a billion dollars into a boat, you may have qualms about the truism that material things bring less happiness than experiences do. But this, too, can be finessed. Andrew Grant Super, a co-founder of the “experiential yachting” firm Berkeley Rand, told me that he served a uniquely overstimulated clientele: “We call them the bored billionaires.” He outlined a few of his experience products. “We can plot half of the Pacific Ocean with coördinates, to map out the Battle of Midway,” he said. “We re-create the full-blown battles of the giant ships from America and Japan. The kids have haptic guns and haptic vests. We put the smell of cordite and cannon fire on board, pumping around them.” For those who aren’t soothed by the scent of cordite, Super offered an alternative. “We fly 3-D-printed, architectural freestanding restaurants into the middle of the Maldives, on a sand shelf that can only last another eight hours before it disappears.”

For some, the thrill lies in the engineering. Staluppi, born in Brooklyn, was an auto mechanic who had no experience with the sea until his boss asked him to soup up a boat. “I took the six-cylinder engines out and put V-8 engines in,” he recalled. Once he started commissioning boats of his own, he built scale models to conduct tests in water tanks. “I knew I could never have the biggest boat in the world, so I says, ‘You know what? I want to build the fastest yacht in the world.’ The Aga Khan had the fastest yacht, and we just blew right by him.”

In Italy, after decking out my notional yacht, I headed south along the coast, to Tuscan shipyards that have evolved with each turn in the country’s history. Close to the Carrara quarries, which yielded the marble that Michelangelo turned into David, ships were constructed in the nineteenth century, to transport giant blocks of stone. Down the coast, the yards in Livorno made warships under the Fascists, until they were bombed by the Allies. Later, they began making and refitting luxury yachts. Inside the front gate of a Benetti shipyard in Livorno, a set of models depicted the firm’s famous modern creations. Most notable was the megayacht Nabila, built in 1980 for the high-living arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, with a hundred rooms and a disco that was the site of legendary decadence. (Khashoggi’s budget for prostitution was so extravagant that a French prosecutor later estimated he paid at least half a million dollars to a single madam in a single year.)

In 1987, shortly before Khashoggi was indicted for mail fraud and obstruction of justice (he was eventually acquitted), the yacht was sold to the real-estate developer Donald Trump, who renamed it Trump Princess. Trump was never comfortable on a boat—“Couldn’t get off fast enough,” he once said—but he liked to impress people with his yacht’s splendor. In 1991, while three billion dollars in debt, Trump ceded the vessel to creditors. Later in life, though, he discovered enthusiastic support among what he called “our beautiful boaters,” and he came to see quality watercraft as a mark of virtue—a way of beating the so-called élite. “We got better houses, apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are,” he told a crowd in Fargo, North Dakota. “Let’s call ourselves, from now on, the super-élite.”

In the age of oversharing, yachts are a final sanctum of secrecy, even for some of the world’s most inveterate talkers. Oprah, after returning from her sojourn with the Obamas, rebuffed questions from reporters. “What happens on the boat stays on the boat,” she said. “We talked, and everybody else did a lot of paddleboarding.”

I interviewed six American superyacht owners at length, and almost all insisted on anonymity or held forth with stupefying blandness. “Great family time,” one said. Another confessed, “It’s really hard to talk about it without being ridiculed.” None needed to be reminded of David Geffen’s misadventure during the early weeks of the pandemic, when he Instagrammed a photo of his yacht in the Grenadines and posted that he was “avoiding the virus” and “hoping everybody is staying safe.” It drew thousands of responses, many marked #EatTheRich, others summoning a range of nautical menaces: “At least the pirates have his location now.”

The yachts extend a tradition of seclusion as the ultimate luxury. The Medici, in sixteenth-century Florence, built elevated passageways, or corridoi , high over the city to escape what a scholar called the “clash of classes, the randomness, the smells and confusions” of pedestrian life below. More recently, owners of prized town houses in London have headed in the other direction, building three-story basements so vast that their construction can require mining engineers—a trend that researchers in the United Kingdom named “luxified troglodytism.”

Water conveys a particular autonomy, whether it’s ringing the foot of a castle or separating a private island from the mainland. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, gave startup funding to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit group co-founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson, which seeks to create floating mini-states—an endeavor that Thiel considered part of his libertarian project to “escape from politics in all its forms.” Until that fantasy is realized, a white boat can provide a start. A recent feature in Boat International , a glossy trade magazine, noted that the new hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar megayacht Victorious has four generators and “six months’ autonomy” at sea. The builder, Vural Ak, explained, “In case of emergency, god forbid, you can live in open water without going to shore and keep your food stored, make your water from the sea.”

Much of the time, superyachts dwell beyond the reach of ordinary law enforcement. They cruise in international waters, and, when they dock, local cops tend to give them a wide berth; the boats often have private security, and their owners may well be friends with the Prime Minister. According to leaked documents known as the Paradise Papers, handlers proposed that the Saudi crown prince take delivery of a four-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar yacht in “international waters in the western Mediterranean,” where the sale could avoid taxes.

Builders and designers rarely advertise beyond the trade press, and they scrupulously avoid leaks. At Lürssen, a German shipbuilding firm, projects are described internally strictly by reference number and code name. “We are not in the business for the glory,” Peter Lürssen, the C.E.O., told a reporter. The closest thing to an encyclopedia of yacht ownership is a site called SuperYachtFan, run by a longtime researcher who identifies himself only as Peter, with a disclaimer that he relies partly on “rumors” but makes efforts to confirm them. In an e-mail, he told me that he studies shell companies, navigation routes, paparazzi photos, and local media in various languages to maintain a database with more than thirteen hundred supposed owners. Some ask him to remove their names, but he thinks that members of that economic echelon should regard the attention as a “fact of life.”

To work in the industry, staff must adhere to the culture of secrecy, often enforced by N.D.A.s. On one yacht, O’Shannassy, the captain, learned to communicate in code with the helicopter pilot who regularly flew the owner from Switzerland to the Mediterranean. Before takeoff, the pilot would call with a cryptic report on whether the party included the presence of a Pomeranian. If any guest happened to overhear, their cover story was that a customs declaration required details about pets. In fact, the lapdog was a constant companion of the owner’s wife; if the Pomeranian was in the helicopter, so was she. “If no dog was in the helicopter,” O’Shannassy recalled, the owner was bringing “somebody else.” It was the captain’s duty to rebroadcast the news across the yacht’s internal radio: “Helicopter launched, no dog, I repeat no dog today”—the signal for the crew to ready the main cabin for the mistress, instead of the wife. They swapped out dresses, family photos, bathroom supplies, favored drinks in the fridge. On one occasion, the code got garbled, and the helicopter landed with an unanticipated Pomeranian. Afterward, the owner summoned O’Shannassy and said, “Brendan, I hope you never have such a situation, but if you do I recommend making sure the correct dresses are hanging when your wife comes into your room.”

In the hierarchy on board a yacht, the most delicate duties tend to trickle down to the least powerful. Yacht crew—yachties, as they’re known—trade manual labor and obedience for cash and adventure. On a well-staffed boat, the “interior team” operates at a forensic level of detail: they’ll use Q-tips to polish the rim of your toilet, tweezers to lift your fried-chicken crumbs from the teak, a toothbrush to clean the treads of your staircase.

Many are English-speaking twentysomethings, who find work by doing the “dock walk,” passing out résumés at marinas. The deals can be alluring: thirty-five hundred dollars a month for deckhands; fifty thousand dollars in tips for a decent summer in the Med. For captains, the size of the boat matters—they tend to earn about a thousand dollars per foot per year.

Yachties are an attractive lot, a community of the toned and chipper, which does not happen by chance; their résumés circulate with head shots. Before Andy Cohen was a talk-show host, he was the head of production and development at Bravo, where he green-lighted a reality show about a yacht crew: “It’s a total pressure cooker, and they’re actually living together while they’re working. Oh, and by the way, half of them are having sex with each other. What’s not going to be a hit about that?” The result, the gleefully seamy “Below Deck,” has been among the network’s top-rated shows for nearly a decade.

To stay in the business, captains and crew must absorb varying degrees of petty tyranny. An owner once gave O’Shannassy “a verbal beating” for failing to negotiate a lower price on champagne flutes etched with the yacht’s logo. In such moments, the captain responds with a deferential mantra: “There is no excuse. Your instruction was clear. I can only endeavor to make it better for next time.”

The job comes with perilously little protection. A big yacht is effectively a corporation with a rigid hierarchy and no H.R. department. In recent years, the industry has fielded increasingly outspoken complaints about sexual abuse, toxic impunity, and a disregard for mental health. A 2018 survey by the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network found that more than half of the women who work as yacht crew had experienced harassment, discrimination, or bullying on board. More than four-fifths of the men and women surveyed reported low morale.

Karine Rayson worked on yachts for four years, rising to the position of “chief stew,” or stewardess. Eventually, she found herself “thinking of business ideas while vacuuming,” and tiring of the culture of entitlement. She recalled an episode in the Maldives when “a guest took a Jet Ski and smashed into a marine reserve. That damaged the coral, and broke his Jet Ski, so he had to clamber over the rocks and find his way to the shore. It was a private hotel, and the security got him and said, ‘Look, there’s a large fine, you have to pay.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, the boat will pay for it.’ ” Rayson went back to school and became a psychotherapist. After a period of counselling inmates in maximum-security prisons, she now works with yacht crew, who meet with her online from around the world.

Rayson’s clients report a range of scenarios beyond the boundaries of ordinary employment: guests who did so much cocaine that they had no appetite for a chef’s meals; armed men who raided a boat offshore and threatened to take crew members to another country; owners who vowed that if a young stew told anyone about abuse she suffered on board they’d call in the Mafia and “skin me alive.” Bound by N.D.A.s, crew at sea have little recourse.“We were paranoid that our e-mails were being reviewed, or we were getting bugged,” Rayson said.

She runs an “exit strategy” course to help crew find jobs when they’re back on land. The adjustment isn’t easy, she said: “You’re getting paid good money to clean a toilet. So, when you take your C.V. to land-based employers, they might question your skill set.” Despite the stresses of yachting work, Rayson said, “a lot of them struggle with integration into land-based life, because they have all their bills paid for them, so they don’t pay for food. They don’t pay for rent. It’s a huge shock.”

It doesn’t take long at sea to learn that nothing is too rich to rust. The ocean air tarnishes metal ten times as fast as on land; saltwater infiltrates from below. Left untouched, a single corroding ulcer will puncture tanks, seize a motor, even collapse a hull. There are tricks, of course—shield sensitive parts with resin, have your staff buff away blemishes—but you can insulate a machine from its surroundings for only so long.

Hang around the superyacht world for a while and you see the metaphor everywhere. Four months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war had eaten a hole in his myths of competence. The Western campaign to isolate him and his oligarchs was proving more durable than most had predicted. Even if the seizures of yachts were mired in legal disputes, Finley, the former C.I.A. officer, saw them as a vital “pressure point.” She said, “The oligarchs supported Putin because he provided stable authoritarianism, and he can no longer guarantee that stability. And that’s when you start to have cracks.”

For all its profits from Russian clients, the yachting industry was unsentimental. Brokers stripped photos of Russian yachts from their Web sites; Lürssen, the German builder, sent questionnaires to clients asking who, exactly, they were. Business was roaring, and, if some Russians were cast out of the have-yachts, other buyers would replace them.

On a cloudless morning in Viareggio, a Tuscan town that builds almost a fifth of the world’s superyachts, a family of first-time owners from Tel Aviv made the final, fraught preparations. Down by the docks, their new boat was suspended above the water on slings, ready to be lowered for its official launch. The scene was set for a ceremony: white flags in the wind, a plexiglass lectern. It felt like the obverse of the dockside scrum at the Palm Beach show; by this point in the buying process, nobody was getting vetted through binoculars. Waitresses handed out glasses of wine. The yacht venders were in suits, but the new owners were in upscale Euro casual: untucked linen, tight jeans, twelve-hundred-dollar Prada sneakers. The family declined to speak to me (and the company declined to identify them). They had come asking for a smaller boat, but the sales staff had talked them up to a hundred and eleven feet. The Victorians would have been impressed.

The C.E.O. of Azimut Benetti, Marco Valle, was in a buoyant mood. “Sun. Breeze. Perfect day to launch a boat, right?” he told the owners. He applauded them for taking the “first step up the big staircase.” The selling of the next vessel had already begun.

Hanging aloft, their yacht looked like an artifact in the making; it was easy to imagine a future civilization sifting the sediment and discovering that an earlier society had engaged in a building spree of sumptuous arks, with accommodations for dozens of servants but only a few lucky passengers, plus the occasional Pomeranian.

We approached the hull, where a bottle of spumante hung from a ribbon in Italian colors. Two members of the family pulled back the bottle and slung it against the yacht. It bounced off and failed to shatter. “Oh, that’s bad luck,” a woman murmured beside me. Tales of that unhappy omen abound. In one memorable case, the bottle failed to break on Zaca, a schooner that belonged to Errol Flynn. In the years that followed, the crew mutinied and the boat sank; after being re-floated, it became the setting for Flynn’s descent into cocaine, alcohol, orgies, and drug smuggling. When Flynn died, new owners brought in an archdeacon for an onboard exorcism.

In the present case, the bottle broke on the second hit, and confetti rained down. As the family crowded around their yacht for photos, I asked Valle, the C.E.O., about the shortage of new boats. “Twenty-six years I’ve been in the nautical business—never been like this,” he said. He couldn’t hire enough welders and carpenters. “I don’t know for how long it will last, but we’ll try to get the profits right now.”

Whatever comes, the white-boat world is preparing to insure future profits, too. In recent years, big builders and brokers have sponsored a rebranding campaign dedicated to “improving the perception of superyachting.” (Among its recommendations: fewer ads with girls in bikinis and high heels.) The goal is partly to defuse #EatTheRich, but mostly it is to soothe skittish buyers. Even the dramatic increase in yacht ownership has not kept up with forecasts of the global growth in billionaires—a disparity that represents the “one dark cloud we can see on the horizon,” as Øino, the naval architect, said during an industry talk in Norway. He warned his colleagues that they needed to reach those “potential yacht owners who, for some reason, have decided not to step up to the plate.”

But, to a certain kind of yacht buyer, even aggressive scrutiny can feel like an advertisement—a reminder that, with enough access and cash, you can ride out almost any storm. In April, weeks after the fugitive Motor Yacht A went silent, it was rediscovered in physical form, buffed to a shine and moored along a creek in the United Arab Emirates. The owner, Melnichenko, had been sanctioned by the E.U., Switzerland, Australia, and the U.K. Yet the Emirates had rejected requests to join those sanctions and had become a favored wartime haven for Russian money. Motor Yacht A was once again arrayed in almost plain sight, like semaphore flags in the wind. ♦

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Jeff Bezos’ New Yacht Is Finally Ready to Set Sail

Amazon’s founder has been spotted on Koru, a massive schooner with a design that evokes the golden age of sailing in the early 20th century.

By Kevin Koenig

Just in time for the high season of yachting in the Mediterranean, when multimillion-dollar megayachts descend on ports like Monte Carlo and St. Tropez, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has been photographed with his partner Lauren Sánchez on his new boat, Koru, off the coast of Spain.

Mr. Bezos’ vessel is a sailing yacht, a departure from the diesel-powered, floating palaces popular with other billionaires. But it is still massive. At 417 feet, Koru is the world’s largest sailing yacht, according to Boat International , and it cost an estimated $500 million to build, Bloomberg reported . (Parsifal III, the boat featured on Bravo’s reality series “Below Deck Sailing Yacht,” is 177 feet long — less than half the length of Koru — and cost $18 million , according to the website SuperYachtFan.)

A spokesperson for Mr. Bezos did not comment for this article; neither did Oceanco, Koru’s builder. Here is what to know about the boat.

For traditionalists, Koru is refreshing. At a time when yacht design skews outrageous — see the lizardlike, 262-foot Artefact or the otherworldly 463-foot Yas — Koru stands out as a schooner, a sailing vessel with two or more masts. Photos reveal a large sailboat with three masts, an on-deck pool and a voluptuous mermaid on the bow, that bears a resemblance to Ms. Sánchez. But otherwise, the sleek, classic lines suggest the patrician age of yachting in the early 20th century, said Robert B. MacKay, author of “The Golden Age of Newport Yachting: Between the Wars.”

“With the clipper bow and the dark hull and the masts,” Mr. MacKay said, referring to Koru’s concave, pointy forward section, “it reminds me of a boat built in 1930 for J.P. Morgan Jr., Corsair IV. It is almost like a reincarnation. It’s certainly at odds with the stuff the oligarchs are building — those look like bloated Clorox bottles.”

Compared with the world’s very largest motor yachts — built for sheer size and the accompanying bragging rights — Koru could almost be considered quaint. Azzam, one of the world’s largest motor yachts, is nearly 200 feet longer.

The Experience

Koru will be propelled primarily by the wind. “Sailboats are usually greener than most powerboats,” said Don Anderson, a former captain of M5 , the world’s largest single-masted sailboat, at 256 feet. “I’d like to think that Koru will be one of the most ecological yachts out there, with its sails and also with the technology that will be aboard.”

“When you’re on a sailboat, you’re more in touch with the wind and the waves than on a powerboat,” he continued. “You’re more susceptible to the elements, too. But you can leave California, and once you get past the Catalinas you can basically surf downwind all the way to Hawaii. All you need to do is run with the waves.”

Mr. Bezos has been a guest on similar boats, according to Bloomberg: In 2019, he was spotted on Eos , a 305-foot sailing yacht owned by Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg.

Bill Tripp, a Connecticut-based naval architect, said the appeal of this type of boat is clear: “When you are on a powerboat, you ask, ‘Are we there yet?’ and on a sailboat, you’re enjoying the ride and the ocean so much that you don’t ask that question.”

Koru will be trailed by Abeona, a 246-foot support vessel. Superyachts often have support vessels following along behind them. These “shadows,” as they are colloquially known, are for the “toys” — the ATVs, supercars, seaplanes, motorcycles, smaller boats, scuba gear, personal submarines and even helicopters that pleasure boaters might bring on a trip. According to its builder, this model of boat can carry these gadgets along with dozens of crew members. (Ms. Sanchez flies helicopters, and the couple was recently photographed taking a helicopter to board Abeona and then Koru.)

Abeona, a motor yacht, will have enough range to follow Koru from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean — a common course for yachts — on a single tank of gas.

The Kerfuffle

Koru set off a controversy last year — before it was even completed — in a face-off with the Dutch city of Rotterdam. The boat was built at Oceanco’s facility in Alblasserdam, the Netherlands, and needed to pass the historic Koningshaven Bridge, known as “De Hef,” in Rotterdam, to undergo testing in the North Sea.

When the city announced it would dismantle the bridge to allow the boat and its mainmast — an estimated 230 feet tall — to pass through unscathed, locals were angry. They planned a protest to throw eggs at the yacht as it cruised by. In the end, the bridge was not taken apart, and the yacht was towed to a different location to have its masts attached.

Koru is Maori for “coil” or “loop” and refers to the unfurling of a fern frond. The koru design is common in traditional Maori art, where it symbolizes new life, growth and peace. Mr. Bezos included a photo of a koru frond in an Instagram post on Jan. 1, 2022.

Brad Stone, who was the first to report on Koru, in his 2021 book “Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,” said the name was “consistent with where we see him today.”

“He is no longer this single-minded tech guy,” Mr. Stone said. “He’s in media and Hollywood and has a new relationship.”

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Jill Biden Makes an Entrance:  The first lady was glittering in crystals — days after Melania Trump stepped out in pink at a Palm Beach fund-raiser. Together, the pictures offer a harbinger of what is to come .

Creating Works of Ephemeral Beauty:  A YouTube rabbit hole led Blanka Amezkua to a small Mexican town and the centuries-old craft of papel picado  — chiseling intricate patterns into colorful paper flags.

New York Bridal Fashion Week:  Reimagined classic silhouettes, a play on textures and interactive presentations brought fresh takes  to the spring and summer 2025 bridal collections.

A Look at the Fastest Superyacht of Its Time

Meet the ultimate Bond girl: the famed 1980s-era superyacht, M/Y Octopussy . Interior designer Jeff Lincoln takes us aboard the refurbished, retro-chic ship.

It began with a phone call. “Want to check out the Palm Beach Boat Show?” It was late March, and I was working on the home of a longtime client in south Florida. He also happens to be a childhood friend, so when he called with the invitation, it seemed like a fun afternoon diversion. The annual show draws some of the most impressive yachts from all over the world, and if you leave your shoes on the dock, you can come aboard and wander their decks and cabins.

It wasn’t clear to me that my client was seriously considering purchasing a yacht that day. I am not sure if he even knew. He’s an athletic guy and avid fisherman, so I thought at the most he might be considering a new sportfisher.

I’ve been an interior designer for some 30-plus years, so I naturally spent the better part of the show compiling my own “dock appeal” assessments of the boats (free as I am from the financial consideration of such a purchase!). While the smaller boats were primarily bright and well- designed reflections of their intended purposes, I couldn’t help but note that the interiors of most of the larger boats were dull and oddly lacking in soul. Then we came upon the blue-hulled beauty known as M/Y Octopussy . A renowned yacht from the 1980s, the 43-meter vessel was among the fastest superyachts of its kind when she was introduced by Dutch builder Heesen and helped usher in the era of the luxury superyacht (defined today as any commercially crewed yacht larger than 24 meters in length).

There were bigger boats that day, and newer ones too, but none had the sheer presence of this one. The interior—with its low-slung main saloon, five staterooms, and capacious dining areas—was redolent with 1980s riffs on chrome and lacquer befitting its Bond-inspired moniker, along with acres of Art Deco–inflected cabinetry.

“What do you think?” my client asked.

“Now this is a boat with style,” I replied.

To be clear, much of the vessel’s 1980s style bordered on kitsch, but the passing of time suddenly made it appear fresh to my eyes. Besides, those dispiriting forays on those other yachts gave me a renewed appreciation for the funky aesthetic.

He bought her, and a few weeks later, he called to ask if I would help him with refurbishing the interiors.

Octopussy Gallery

I’d designed a boat before this one, a 90-foot Viking sportfisher—not small, but nothing like this elegant vessel. I recalled the Hollywood adage that “nobody knows anything” about making movies. I quickly decided this was also true for yacht interiors and set out to plot my own course and embrace her 1980s lineage. I coated existing cabinetry and millwork in the living areas with bright white lacquer and upholstered unsightly round metal columns in tufted white leather. Against this clean canvas, I layered in lots of blue. (While pairing blue and white at sea may not be the most original idea in the world, I am a firm believer in not doing things because you want to be “designery.” To me, design should be—first and foremost—comfortable and appropriate to its environment. Then you can throw in a few surprises.)

So, in came curvy Vladimir Kagan sofas and vintage polished-steel Karl Springer tables, their flowing forms making communal spaces easy to navigate (in other words, no bruised shins). A couple of Warhols reinforced the vivid palette and the era.

The staterooms, however, were a different story. No amount of clever recontextualizing was going to save these sorry and dated spaces. I reimagined them instead with maximum sleeping capacity and comfort top of mind. All of them except the master stateroom are belowdecks, so I leaned on color to help make the most of limited light.

Today the boat is a happy place for my client and his energetic young family. In Lyford Cay and other Bahamian ports, the kids take daredevil dives from the upper decks while my client and his wife watch from the newly added sky deck. Thanks to her refurbished Rolls-Royce engines, M/Y Octopussy is once again one of the fastest boats of her size on the seas. Catch her if you can. Featured in our July/August 2019 issue.

The Ultimate Yachting Guide

A Yacht's Timeless Design Refresh

What To Wear on the Water This Summer

An Historic Wooden Yacht Returns to Glory

The World’s Most Beautiful Yacht Clubs

VERANDA Insiders' Guide to Yachting

18 Outdoor Fabrics for Summer

7 Luxury Watch Brands Saving Our Oceans

41 Fabulous Mother's Day Gift Ideas

Longines' Kentucky Derby Timepiece Is So Chic

Prince Harry Offers Peek Into His California Home

29 Father's Day Gift Ideas Dad Will Actually Love

84 Luxury Yacht Interiors: Bedroom, Galley and Salon Pictures

Posted on Published: April 13, 2022  - Last updated: June 13, 2022

A yacht is really just a luxury floating home . When you’re talking 70 feet and larger, they’re a lot nicer than my house. As you’ll see in the luxury yacht interiors below, the quality and aesthetics are simply gorgeous. And we merely feature a small handful of such boats. There are thousands and thousands of these worldwide.

Our epic yacht interiors article is split into 5 galleries:  staterooms, guest bedrooms , salons and dinettes, kitchens and bathrooms. The point of this article is to merely give you a glimpse inside these ultra expensive boats… expensive to buy, run and maintain. Be sure to also check out our yacht decks galleries .

Related: Kayak Storage Ideas | Catamaran Apartment | Craftsman Floating Home | Large Floating Home

Yacht Primary Bedrooms (Staterooms)

We kick off our yacht interiors gallery with the stateroom. When it comes to the primary bedroom on these boats, no expense is spared. They are large, comfortable and stunning in design. These bedrooms are bigger than our primary bedroom.

[su_divider]

Yacht Guest Bedrooms (2 Beds)

Many guest bedrooms on a yacht have two beds so that it can accommodate more people. However, they are, as you’ll see below, still very, very luxurious. These are certainly cozy sleeping quarters.

Salon and Dinette Photos

My favorite room on the boat is the salon and/or dinette area. In many cases, the dinette doubles as the living room. Mega yachts have dedicated salons and dining areas. I love these superb lounge designs below in the cabin as well as the upper lounge areas.

I must admit that kitchens on these super yachts are fairly small. I guess the cooking is done by the staff and yacht owners prefer to have more space for bedrooms, deck space and lounge space. That makes sense given there really is limited space. Nevertheless, these kitchens are gorgeous and the yacht designers certainly didn’t skimp with respect to quality.

Most boats dedicate very little space to bathrooms. Not these. The primary bathrooms below are incredible. The smaller bathrooms are guest bathrooms. These luxury yachts are so large and spacious that even the bathrooms are both beautiful and comfortable to use.

Related: Yacht Decks | Gorgeous Mega Yacht Interior Design by Mojo Stumer Associates  | Houseboats

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Look at me..!

Discussion in ' YachtForums Yacht Club ' started by AMG , Aug 10, 2010 .

AMG YF Moderator

Impressive, but I also think it is a little amusing to see this boat in Port Hercules..

Attached Files:

Webcam-picture-13.notari.tv.jpeg.

Marmot Senior Member

Love it! It kind of takes you back to when the first 50 meter boat was seen among the giant 30 meters that looked so awesome in the marina. Where will it end?

Jorge Lang Senior Member

Which brings up a good point. Does anyone know when the Swift 141 will splash and start sea trials? It should make these yachts look like tenders.

ScotL Senior Member

You certainly can't miss her.

KCook Senior Member

Looks as though it could easily tow all the other yachts out to sea!

revdcs Senior Member

KCook said: Looks as though it could easily tow all the other yachts out to sea! Click to expand...

RER Senior Member

Back in the 70's on my first visit to Ft Lauderdale we were walking the docks at Pier 66. When we got to the 'big' (for that era) boats I was in awe of the first 80' Broward we passed. Then as we walked down the dock the boats got bigger and at the end was some huge euro built thing that was larger than anything being built in the U.S. at that time, and I remember thinking man, if I owned that Broward I would keep it someplace else!

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A look at Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg as he oversees Trump hush money trial prosecution

Walter Ray Watson

Alvin Bragg is the first person to bring criminal charges against a former president and the first African American elected Manhattan District Attorney. Bragg faces challenges beyond any one big case.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Jury selection began today in the so-called hush money trial against former President Trump. Overseeing the prosecution is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. As a federal and state prosecutor, he focused on white-collar crimes. Colleagues view Bragg's experience as essential in an unprecedented case. NPR's Walter Ray Watson has this look at the Manhattan DA.

WALTER RAY WATSON, BYLINE: Alvin Bragg's team of five prosecutors brought a 34-count indictment against Donald Trump last year. The former president pleaded not guilty. Afterwards, Bragg held a news conference.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ALVIN BRAGG: Under New York state law, it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and an intent to conceal another crime. That is exactly what this case is about.

RAY WATSON: This is the first-ever criminal indictment against the former U.S. president. The penalty is four years prison if found guilty. In 2022, weeks after entering office, Bragg stopped a previous team of prosecutors from presenting evidence against Trump to a grand jury. Bragg raised doubts. The lead prosecutors quit in protest a month later, and media criticized Bragg's decision. In 2023, Bragg impaneled a new grand jury, which indicted the former president.

TERRI GERSTEIN: I know how careful he is as a lawyer.

RAY WATSON: Terri Gerstein remembers Bragg as her supervisor in the New York Attorney General's office, where she was labor bureau chief. She says he was thorough.

GERSTEIN: He would carefully read all of the pleadings or briefs or memos that we were writing and would look up the cases himself and, like, really, really delve into them.

RAY WATSON: Friends and former colleagues tell NPR that Bragg was no micromanager but a deliberate, smart lawyer, a selfless public servant doing the right things for the right reasons. Details, even small ones, are important to Bragg and not just in legal matters. Attorney Anurima Bhargava leads Anthem of Us, a consulting firm. She's a longtime friend.

ANURIMA BHARGAVA: This year I had a movie premiere. He was working, but, like, he showed up in the back and made sure I knew that he was in the room. And that's the kind of stuff that, like, even if it's for 10 minutes, means something.

RAY WATSON: They met as undergrads at Harvard, where Bragg also earned his law degree. Bhargava says his empathy garnered respect.

BHARGAVA: Alvin was always the person who would go and start a conversation.

RAY WATSON: Nurtured in a storied section of Harlem called Strivers Row, his parents wanted their only child to be open and experience all kinds of people.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Good morning, Abyssinian friends and family.

RAY WATSON: Bragg worships at Abyssinian Baptist Church with his family. He teaches Sunday school. In 2021, then-pastor Calvin Butts III gave Bragg a few moments with the congregation.

BRAGG: Raised in the village of Harlem, I had a gun pointed at me six times - three by the NYPD during lawless stops and three by people who were not police officers. After the first gunpoint stop by the NYPD, I saw our pastor, Reverend Butts, and he guided me through how to file a civilian complaint. That was the beginning of my advocacy.

RAY WATSON: Bragg campaigned and won on his lived experience. He became the first Black person elected Manhattan DA.

JELANI COBB: Alvin Bragg is somebody who grew up in Harlem at the time that stop and frisk was just, you know, a part of life.

RAY WATSON: Jelani Cobb has covered Bragg for The New Yorker.

COBB: For progressive prosecutors in general, I would say him included, their ability to make reform in the system is always counterbalanced by the public's perception of its safety.

KAREN FRIEDMAN AGNIFILO: It really is a time in our history for a person of color to be the district attorney.

RAY WATSON: Former prosecutor Karen Friedman Agnifilo served as second in command to the last Manhattan district attorney, Cy Vance, and says Bragg shows he's got the skills to be a great DA.

FRIEDMAN AGNIFILO: If there were some growing pains in the beginning, you know, that happens, right? It's a tough job. It's a big job.

RAY WATSON: Bragg is tested almost daily. Earlier this year, there was an incident where migrants allegedly attacked police officers in Times Square.

PATRICK HENDRY: Why did these four individuals be released on their own recognizance? Why aren't they in jail right now?

RAY WATSON: Patrick Hendry, head of the Police Benevolent Association, the city's largest police union, as well as politicians and media, criticized Bragg because suspected migrants were freed without bail. Prosecutors were charged later after a thorough investigation. Bragg defended his office.

BRAGG: We do not tolerate people assaulting police officers, but in a court of law, our profound obligation is to make sure we have the right people charged with the right crimes.

RAY WATSON: Karen Friedman Agnifilo says critics and the public often lack information prosecutors are privy to. She says being a politician is not the main focus for the DA.

FRIEDMAN AGNIFILO: Although you are an elected official, you really have a higher calling, if you will, or a higher purpose that you have to serve, which is justice.

RAY WATSON: You are an officer of the court first, she says. The unprecedented case that Manhattan DA Bragg doubted, delayed and later revived will put him to the test. Jury selection has begun. Walter Ray Watson, NPR News.

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Ahpo: Behind the build of Lürssen's striking 115m superyacht

A seriously experienced team has built Ahpo , a Caribbean-inspired family superyacht with an eye for perfection, says Cecile Gauert.

"Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.” This quote, attributed to Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci, should be a maxim in the superyacht world, where, with each new build the bar seems to rise yet again.

Only four or five shipyards globally can get close to this perfection, says Robert Moran, whose company was involved from contract to delivery in the creation of the 115-metre Lürssen Ahpo , the brokerage firm’s 61st new build project.

The details on Ahpo are the story. “We have thousands of materials, different woods, different kinds of GRP, paint, alloy, cable trays – so many cable trays – and also in the interior, so many different kinds of stones, woods, carpets, mother-of-pearl and wallpaper, it’s unbelievable, and I guess not countable,” says Tanja Peters, the project manager for Lürssen, who worked closely with the owners’ team.

Ahpo reunited owner Michael Lee-Chin, design firm Nuvolari Lenard , the Lürssen shipyard and Moran Yacht & Ship , the same team that had worked on the creation of the 86-metre Quattroelle , delivered in 2013. Moran had previously sold the Jamaican-born Canadian businessman and philanthropist the 58.5-metre Capri in 2003, which he kept for five years before embarking on the construction of Quattroelle . The owner loved it but received an offer he could not refuse shortly after taking delivery, giving him a bit of time to think about the next step.

This new build is a big step forward in terms of size (she is 5,257 gross tonnes compared to Quattroelle ’s 2,925) and complexity. “The boat is magnificent inside and outside because it is not just an improvement on Quattroelle , but it is an entirely different world inside and outside,” says interior designer Valentina Zannier of Nuvolari Lenard. “When you step up from an 86 to 115, it may sound like 29 metres is not that much, but on a boat, it is huge.”

While conventionally powered, the yacht boasts advanced systems, such as super-efficient HUG after-treatment filters complementing the now mandatory SCR system, a dynamic positioning system, controllable-pitch propellers for precise manoeuvring at low speed and four massive Quantum fins, among others. In addition, its heat-recovery system is an efficient way of redirecting heat generated by the engines and generators’ normal operation to warm the swimming pool, spa pool and other water systems. It works exceptionally well and saves thousands of kilowatts, according to one of Ahpo ’s engineers. Finally, optimal noise insulation yields impressive library-quiet sound levels in the guest areas.

“Our new construction team, led by Sean Moran, spent a lot of time writing the specifications for the insulation. Fortunately, working with Lürssen, their background is military, so they are ahead of the game,” Robert Moran says. “The decibel levels of this yacht are incredible.” At anchor, they range from a little over 31dBA in the owners’ suite to just 40dBA in the main saloon.

The yacht’s two custom 12-metre IC Yacht guest tenders, plus rescue tenders and a suite of water toys are hidden in a forward garage to save the transom area for an exceptional beach club/spa that leaves guests wanting for nothing. “It’s the most amazing spa I’ve ever seen on a yacht,” Moran says.

And, because there is no coming back from the views it offers, glass is an ever-present feature on Ahpo as well. Glass surfaces include massive doors wrapping around an aft deck winter garden where the captain says the owners spend most of their time on board.

“You literally walk in a garden that is enjoyable outside but is also covered, so you can have a formal lunch or dinner there. It is an outstanding feature that you don’t see often,” says Zannier, who worked closely with the couple to develop an interior vision that they readily embraced.  She felt at ease with them, which gave her the freedom to unleash her creativity.

“When you already know a family, you don’t really need a brief because there is already an empathy there,” she says. “Madame is a delicious person, very feminine, so you won’t see anything straight and sharp.”

A large team is on board when I catch up with Ahpo in May, although it’s not apparent as they are scattered through the yacht’s six large decks, but Captain Nathan Mischewski is keeping a  log and an eye on the tight schedule. The goal is to bring Ahpo to tip-top shape to meet with the owners at the Monaco Grand Prix, and there are a few opened panels and sections of covered flooring. A perfectionist himself, he occasionally shakes his head as he walks me through the new yacht at the MB92 shipyard in Barcelona. “It’s a shame you can’t come when it’s all set up because it has a different vibe,” he says.

To my eye, Ahpo seems very close to perfect, from superlative guest areas to sizeable crew spaces and a gleaming engine room visible from a glass corridor leading from the beach club to the guest lobby and lift. It is no exaggeration to say you could eat off the floor in the two-level engine space. “We are always chasing perfection. This attitude permeates our entire process, from luxury areas all the way through to the engine room,” Moran says.

Project manager and engineer Robert Miller even named the two MTU 20V 4000 engines (as he previously did on Quattroelle ). I look at “Federica” closely; despite two transatlantic crossings and several months of active duty, the engine looks brand new.

There is a personal touch on board, a good vibe, you’d say. In the crew area, an informal picture collage celebrates a few special occasions on board with the entire crew and several with “the boss”, tall, fit and a bright smile on his face.

While he values his privacy, which influenced the layout, the owner is “a vastly experienced yachtsman”, according to Carlo Nuvolari, who understands that keeping the crew happy is vital to everyone’s well-being on board. Up to 53 people can share space on Ahpo , including the pilots of two helicopters. The yacht has a crew gym and a comfortable lounge that’s separate from the spacious crew mess, which could accommodate everyone in one seating.

The team of Nuvolari Lenard – with Zannier as the creative mind behind the nature-inspired, exquisitely intricate interior created with the owners – designed the yacht built under the project name Enzo. This code name was a nod to one of Lee-Chin’s passions – Ferraris.

The owner signed the contract in 2017 with one stipulation, Moran says: the yacht had to be ready for his mother’s 89th birthday on December 15, 2021. When Covid-19 hit, the shipyard had to adjust the schedule to reduce the amount  of crew working on the boat all at once, but work never stopped. In late 2021, Ahpo left Rendsburg, Germany, for the owner’s native Jamaica and got there on December 13 in time for the planned celebration.

A lot of Ahpo , a term of endearment meaning grandmother, is about family. Although she will charter on occasion – for 2.5 million euros a week plus expenses – Ahpo was designed for family use. The family’s strong bonds are poetically represented, for example, in the chain-link motif that decorates the stairs linking the two levels of the owners’ apartment. Two identical bedrooms with different colour schemes for twin girls are close to their parents’ bedroom oasis, a supremely comfortable space in a blend of gelato colours with two private terraces and two spectacular bathrooms with handmade metal bathtubs from Catchpole & Rye, mosaics inspired by the work of Gustav Klimt and crystal chandeliers by Lasvit in the style of Baccarat. For senior members of the family, the designer created a spacious and ultra-restful lower deck cabin.

Another big part of the yacht is fitness and wellness. The owners’ private duplex includes a gym that puts to shame most luxury hotel gyms, with furniture in red lacquer, attractive synthetic flooring, TVs hidden behind mirrors, equipment by Technogym and bikes by Peloton, plus custom-made dumb-bells provided by Gym Marine. All of it is personalised for Ahpo with the Nuvolari Lenard-designed logos. Aside from input from Gym Marine, Moran says the owners had considerable say into the design as they are very active and live a healthy lifestyle. The side decks on the sky lounge deck are exceptionally wide, like a proper promenade on a cruise ship, and  100 metres all around, allowing the owners to take walks in the fresh air without returning to shore.

The owner enjoys looking up at one of the yacht’s defining features, a great mast. “That mast is huge; you can put the whole crew inside. It’s three levels, and there’s so much storage up there,” the captain says, providing a sense of scale to the yacht’s crowning feature.

About all that the owner said in terms of guidance for the exterior design was, as Nuvolari recounts, “‘You know me, you know what I like, make it more beautiful [than Quattroelle ].’ He also asked if we could make one feature that ties the two designs, and those are the semi-circular windows.” However, these are so distinctive that when the first photos appeared, it was an immediate tip-off to the small but enthusiastic group of people following the yacht industry that it had to be the “new Quattroelle ”.

So, when they created the exterior for Ahpo , the Nuvolari Lenard team, including designer Simone Feltrin, strived to make an elegant ship – because a yacht of 100 metres or more, Carlo Nuvolari says, is a ship. “Nowadays in yachting we see many extravagant things looking to architectural buildings  for inspiration.” However, he and his business partner, Dan Lenard, disagree with this trend. “A boat is a boat, a yacht is a yacht,” Nuvolari says. For the yacht’s finishing top hat, they studied the funnels of vessels of the 1950s and 1960s.

Another characteristic feature is the bow, which is quite defined with the yacht’s logo at the tip but is just long enough to give the yacht the right proportions. “Long flowing lines are a signature of our designs,” says Nuvolari, who adds that the bow is just part of the whole. “We never look at one single item, but we look at overall proportions. After a few proposals, we found that this offered the right balance, and it goes well with the concept of a serious ship.” It’s truly amazing to consider that the yacht appears lean and graceful with deck heights of 2.4 metres and 2.7 metres in some places and six decks stacked one on top of the other. No mean feat.

A contrast of black and white paint emphasises the swooping wraparound decks and creates a visual cascade from the top to the forward fully certified helipad (one of two on board), with a similar feature aft. This signature helps make Ahpo recognisable from anywhere.

On the inside, “the main theme of the boat is nature,” says Zannier, who incorporated plants beyond the winter garden. Most are excellent fakes because plants don’t do so well in salty air, but no matter, it works beautifully.

In the spa, created by interior outfitter List, the theme of nature is ever-present. “It is all about curves, leaves and waves, and the main feature of this area, including the massage room and the beauty salon, is bamboo,” Zannier says. The bamboo (fake leaves on natural stems) is encapsulated between two glass panes, and it is backlit, creating a beautiful backdrop for a bar and the massage room. “It is very relaxing and very Zen,” she says accurately. In the hair salon, the bamboo was hand-painted on wallpaper by the artists of the fine wallpaper and ceramics company de Gournay. On the spa’s ceiling, huge leaves made of walnut are lit with a border of LED lighting. “There are no spotlights in the leaves themselves because we prefer not to use them extensively, so we always try to find alternative light sources,” the designer says.  Teak stripes undulating behind a plunge pool guide the water that falls with a quiet gurgling sound. The wellness space also includes a Turkish-style hammam with vibrant mosaics by Sicis and a fountain in ivory onyx and mosaics. Fibre optics in the ceiling create myriad little stars. Azul macaubas and sodalite are two of the stones found here and repeated throughout the yacht, including on the mullions. The curvaceous sauna has Himalayan salt bricks inserted into its walls.

Another delectable space is the 12-seat cinema. Sicis created three portraits of the owners’ favourite actors and artists – Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jr – from photos they selected, in black and white fabric mosaics that add a touch of vintage Hollywood to the elegant space with a starlit ceiling.

The decor incorporates numerous personal references. For instance, the desk in the boardroom – unconventionally positioned aft on the main deck – is an oval table with a top done by Based Upon that incorporates an old map of Jamaica engraved in bronze among blue resin. On the walls, more mosaics represent Jamaica’s famous Blue Mountains.

Elsewhere, birds – cranes and flamingos – and feathers take flight. One of many stunning pieces on board, and one that the Lürssen project manager singled out as one of the great achievements in the interior is the spiral staircase. Vedder made the complex balustrade that represents an olive tree growing over several decks, piece by piece. On the wall is a bas-relief that runs over five decks, each with its own colour theme. The staircase wraps around an elliptical sculpture whose central column supports delicate feathers handmade of crystal that appear to fall to the floor. The steps themselves incorporate backlit calacatta marble, leather and Tai Ping silk carpeting.

There is much more to this beautiful yacht, including the grand dining room with a spectacular custom table made by List. Its glass top was created by DKT Artworks using the French technique of verre églomisé with a theme of water lilies, which is repeated in the chandelier and on the doors.

The design book is as thick as a phone book and, incredibly, the finished product is very close to the original renderings. For the owners, the result was love at first sight, and they spent 65 days on board after delivery. Such level of details, and perfect combination of technology and craftsmanship – nay, art – can only be seen in the superyacht world these days.

“Anybody can build a plane, anybody can build a house, but a yacht of such detail and such quality, I think is the pinnacle of achievement,” Moran says. And as the story goes, details make perfection.

First published in the August 2022 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.

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Superyacht Training

The Skills That Could Benefit You on Yachts

Depending on the yacht position you’re after, it’s always helpful to have certain skills that will give you the edge over other crew members vying for the same job. Remember that your personality and dynamic with the rest of the crew also plays a huge role in getting picked to crew a luxury yacht. The  top additional skill that is most useful  across job duties (besides being a super patient people’s person) is  waitering or bartending .

Here are some general skills that might be helpful for entry-level yachting positions:

Interior Crew –  Stewardess/Steward (entry level)

Housekeeping – who knew that making your own bed and tidying up would have it’s benefits!

Attention to detail and organisation – you have to love making lists.

Any restaurant/service experience

Barista/coffee

Laundry – high focus on ironing and proper care of different types of fabrics

Floral knowledge – knowing different kinds of flowers and being able to create beautiful flower arrangements.

Wine experience – sommelier skills highly advantageous, but should have at least a basic knowledge of wine varietals, glasses and notes.

Organisation and admin experience a plus

Bonus skills : childcare, yoga, massage/spa experience, event planning

Exterior Crew –  Deckhand (entry level)

Water sports experience (surf, kite boarding, flyboarding, wakeboarding, jetski, etc. Having been an instructor is a major plus)

Experience driving tenders/inflatable

Scuba diving – bonus if you’re an instructor

Being able to tie lines (“ropes” as land people call them)

Knowledge of common knots – previous scout badges could be well rewarded here!

Swimming (should be obvious when working on the water)

Some hospitality (must be good with people) – all crew on yachts are in some form of hospitality

Bonus skills : electrical, plumbing, IT, carpentry, etc. Things are constantly breaking and having those skills are valuable on yachts, even those with engineers.

Galley – Crew Chef Or Sous-chef

Provisioning – the ability to plan food & drinks and control stock accurately

Knife skills

Galley (kitchen) organisation

Knowledge of different cooking styles

Ability to adapt to allergies and food restrictions

Willing to work within a set budget

On-time meal preparation

Experience cooking at a restaurant

Culinary training a plus!

Health and safety knowledge

Bonus skills : knowledge of new cooking techniques (like sous-vide) and cooking experience at fine dining restaurants (award-winning a plus)

Engineer – Junior Engineer Or Deck/Engineer

Basic knowledge of engineering

AEC course recommended

Broad knowledge in plumbing, electrical, AC, engines, and machinery

Organisational skills and ability to follow a maintenance schedule

Natural curiosity and problem-solving

Bonus skills : carpentry, painting, construction

The skills above are not an exhaustive list, but make for a great starting point. Once you’ve got your skills defined, be sure to include them in your yacht CV! Yacht CVs are different than most land-based jobs as they are specially tailored to the yachting industry. If you need assistance in  creating a yacht CV , get in touch with us!

Needing more?

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RYA/MCA Online

1. what are the basic requirements you need to be eligible to work in the yachting industry, 2. what is the stcw and why do i need it, 3. what is the eng1 medical certificate, 4. what land based experience will help me find a super yacht job, 5. what are the different departments onboard, 6. what crew training is required for me to work as a junior deckhand.

• Yachtmaster/Coastal Skipper Theory
• Yachtmaster/Coastal Practical
• Specialist Super Yacht Training Course (Deck Hand Training Course)
• RYA Power Boat Level II
• RYA Personal Watercraft Course
• RYA Competent Crew Certificate
• RYA Day Skipper Theory and Practical Certificates
• VHF Radio Operator’s License

7. What crew training is required for me to work as a junior stewardess?

• Stewardess Course
• Proficiency in Designated Security Duties (PDSD)
• MCA Food Safety Level 2
• RYA Powerboat Level 2

8. How do I book my training courses?

9. how do i get my first job on a yacht, 10. are these courses worth it, or am i just wasting my money, 11. will i get hired for my first job from south africa, 12. what is daywork, 13. what are the best locations to get a yacht job, 14. how much can a motor yacht stewardess or deckhand earn, 15. what are the negatives of working on a yacht, 16. what are the positives of working on a yacht, 17. is working on a super yacht for everyone, 18. what is the minimum age to work on a yacht, 19. is accommodation provided when i am completing my yacht training in cape town.

VALLETTA SUPERYACHTS.

A BOUTIQUE SUPERYACHT AGENCY IN MALTA

A boutique Superyacht Agency in Malta, a familiar face, ready to assist you.

We provide expertise in Superyacht Agency and Yacht Support in Malta. Whether you're a captain looking for a reliable agent for Customs Clearance ahead of your visit to the Maltese Islands or an owner looking into reducing expenditure or into registering your yacht on the Maltese Flag Register/ Malta VAT Deferral or a shipyard looking to support warranty work aboard a yacht in transit. We’re here to assist and to help you amplify your possibilities and opportunities. Superyacht Agents | EU Temporary Importation | Malta VAT Deferral | Malta Flag Registration | Provisioning | Bunkers | Onward Supply Relief | Technical Support VALLETTA SUPERYACHTS - YOUR SUPERYACHT CONCIERGE IN MALTA.

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As the authorised Benetti Service Network point in Malta captains may assure themselves of a seamless service from Valletta Superyachts in-tune and supported by the shipyard's technical office

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Find out about the advantages of flying the Maltese Flag on your Superyacht with attractive VAT deferral options within an EU domicile. 

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Find out about our organization, mission, our methods, and why we are your most reliable agent and superyacht concierge in Malta.

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