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New Waves is a 42.06 metre motor yacht which was built and launched by the Italian yacht builder Benetti in 2015.

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New Waves can sleep up to a maximum of ten guests in her luxury five stateroom layout which features five double staterooms. She also fully accommodates for her crew in separate crew quarters ensuring privacy as well as a relaxed and luxurious charter experience.

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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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No One Needs a Superyacht, but They Keep Selling Them

Billionaires won’t stop buying superyachts. You can even thank Donald Trump .

“Joy,” at sea.  Credit... Bannenberg and Rowell

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By Peter Wilson

• Oct. 8, 2019

L ONDON — The end of summer is a nervous time for superyacht designers, and not because they fear that the owners of their latest creations may be disappointed with the first outings in the Mediterranean.

The worry is about the designers’ next vessels, because this is the time of year when clients whose boats are still in production come back from holidays with a wish list of new features — usually, based on what they saw on their friends’ yachts or at the Monaco Yacht Show , which ended Sept. 28.

“Right now we are quite far down the line in completing a big yacht in northern Europe for one client who has just spent time on a friend’s boat, which is not necessarily helpful,” said Dickie Bannenberg, the head of one of the world’s best-known superyacht design houses, Bannenberg & Rowell . He was in his London studio, an airy two-story space lined with sleek models of its creations.

“The delivery date is in the first half of next year, and that is sooner than it might seem,” Mr. Bannenberg said. “It’s fine when it’s superficial — let’s say they liked the plates or towels on their friend’s yacht — but if you’re not careful it can verge on, ‘Oh, my friend’s gym was like this, can we have something similar?’ or, ‘I would really like to add a submersible vessel.’”

The complex production schedules of these vessels mean shipyards will resist significant changes. “Re-engineering or rebuilding is going to cost a lot of money,” Mr. Bannenberg, 58, said.

Protecting the Picassos

That end-of-summer tension illustrates some inescapable truths about life dealing in the world’s most expensive consumer products and ultimate discretionary purchases. One vessel alone can cost $5 million to $500 million, with annual operating costs of perhaps 10 percent of that.

This is an industry in which problems include protecting the owner’s Picasso collection from salt air, clumsy crew members and faulty sprinklers.

Or maybe you have to decide whether to build one 330-foot vessel (100 meters) or join a trend of the last few years by opting for a “smaller” 200-foot yacht with a 165-foot support vessel to carry a submarine, helicopter, speedboats and other toys. Aviva, a 320-foot yacht launched in 2017, was the first in the world to include a full-size indoor paddle tennis court.

William Mathieson, the editorial and intelligence director of the Superyacht Group, the leading analyst of the industry, said there are about 3,500 active vessels in the world that meet the loose definition of a superyacht by measuring more than 100 feet; just 55 top 330 feet.

Mr. Bannenberg’s father, Jon Bannenberg, who died in 2002, used to say that nobody in the world needs a superyacht, so it was the designer’s task to make them want one.

Jon, a charismatic Australian, is widely credited with inventing the profession of superyacht designer. In the 1960s, he brought together interior and exterior design skills with an understanding of marine engineering to replace what had previously been relatively simple structures sitting on top of hulls designed by naval architects.

He had waves of clients, starting with Greek shipping tycoons in the 1960s. Then came Middle Eastern royals in the 1970s, German and American industrialists in the 1980s, tech titans from the United States in the 1990s and wealthy Russians.

After Jon’s death, Dickie, who had worked as his father’s project manager for 15 years, brought in Simon Rowell, a hotel designer, as the studio’s creative director.

A short walk from Wandsworth Bridge on the River Thames, the studio holds 15 people, who manipulate detailed computer images of planned vessels, pore over design drawings and phone Italy to order marble fittings.

There are usually six or seven projects at various stages of a construction process that takes four to five years, and that often extends to designing stationery and a logo for crew uniforms, as well as commissioning sculptures to go on board. Jon Bannenberg liked to design the cutlery and crockery, flower vases, the light fittings and door handles.

He ran his practice like a Renaissance artist, training a stream of apprentices who now run some of the world’s top studios, and relying on wealthy patrons for commissions.

Those patrons included J. Paul Getty, Malcolm Forbes and Larry Ellison. Projects were discussed with Fidel Castro and the Shah of Iran that never made it to the water.

Almost inevitably, many people rich enough to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a yacht have proved to be controversial. The Australian billionaire Alan Bond was a Bannenberg customer before being jailed for fraud, and so was the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi , who commissioned a 280-foot ship called Nabila. Donald Trump bought that one (and renamed it Trump Princess) in 1987 for a reported $30 million, with a running cost of $2.5 million a year, justifying the expenditure by saying it was “the ultimate toy” and that he hoped it would make other yacht owners feel inferior.

A string of Bannenberg yachts were built for the British businessman Gerald Ronson, who also did jail time for fraud, and the American magnate Bennett LeBow was forced to repay millions of dollars to companies he controlled for loans that were spent on his yachts.

The body of Robert Maxwell, the publisher and fraudster, was found floating off the back of his Bannenberg yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, which was named after his daughter who is now in the headlines over her involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier charged with child sex trafficking.

Mr. Epstein, who died in jail in August, represented the retail tycoon Leslie Wexner during the construction of his 300-foot yacht Limitless, another Jon Bannenberg project.

Five imposing models of Limitless still sit on the walls of the studio. Dickie Bannenberg said he never dealt with Mr. Epstein, though Ms. Maxwell “may have come to a design meeting but I have never met her.”

“It’s a tricky one,” Mr. Bannenberg said. “Legally in any industry you have a requirement to know as best you can the source of your client’s money, so in our contracts our lawyers require us to find the beneficial owner behind the project.”

“The shipyard asks the same questions,” he said. “They won’t just build for Mysterious Corporation of Grand Cayman, they need to know who is behind it.” The ownership of some yachts is a tight secret, with the owner’s passion for privacy and security often extending to teams of private guards in every port.

Adam Ramlugon, a lawyer who specializes in superyachts, said the legal obligations to avoid “dirty money” fall on regulated professions rather than on designers and builders themselves.

“It is the designer’s bank and lawyers who are required to know the source of funds, but any company should be very careful because their bank might decide to stop acting for them if they don’t know the source of some money sloshing around in their bank account,” Mr. Ramlugon said.

Mr. Bannenberg said that “in real life, there is a limit to what we can do.”

He recalled being hired by a Moscow shipyard to do design work for a client whom he and Mr. Rowell met “once or twice including one memorably uncomfortable meeting” in a Majorca villa.

One sign that something was odd was that the meeting was held in what felt like a “safe room.” Mr. Bannenberg said that “a much bigger sign came three years later.”

“After the yacht had been delivered, Simon was a bit terrified to notice a newspaper photo of the client being led away in handcuffs by two Spanish police officers wearing balaclavas. He was allegedly the head of an organized crime gang. How could we know that?”

Mr. Rowell, 50, said that “once or twice” the firm has made its own inquiries and decided to stay away from a potential client, but a lot of these problems, especially white-collar crime, “only become obvious with hindsight.”

Doing More With More

The types of buyers and their demands keep changing. More than a decade of heavy spending by Russian and East European clients began drying up after the Russian annexation of Crimea — “we lost one job half an hour after that,” Mr. Bannenberg said — as Western sanctions on Russian oligarchs have continued to bite.

The rising number of billionaires in mainland China has not yet translated into new buyers, and Mr. Bannenberg believes the Chinese face political and cultural restraints “on being so upfront with your wealth.”

More promisingly, there has recently been a pickup in buying from the United States, Mr. Bannenberg said, “because America still has the most high-net-worth individuals.”

The Trump tax cuts have fueled demand for superyachts, according to industry analysts, and shipyard order books are solid. Notably, this is despite recent softness in top-end sales of art, cars and real estate, amid broader fears of an economic slowdown.

Research by the Superyacht Group shows that after peaking in 2008 and then slumping after the financial crisis, the production of luxury yachts has been stable in recent years, with an annual output close to 150 new vessels.

While Americans remain the biggest buyers, the United States’ own yacht output has shrunk, with the global industry consolidating into fewer shipyards. The Italians now make the most vessels, and Dutch and German builders dominate the top of the market.

The most striking change in the industry is a shift in what the boats are actually for, as a new generation of owners want to do more than show off while anchored off Sardinia.

“The clients that approach us nowadays don’t really want a floating palace,” Mr. Rowell said. “They want a boat they are going to live on and even work on, and use for more than two weeks a year.”

The Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, who died in 2018, is often cited as an example of a more active owner, as he used his yachts for ocean research and roaming the world.

A 600-foot-long monster called REV that emerged from a Romanian shipyard in August took that trend even further: Its Norwegian owner had it designed to double as a marine research vessel capable of supporting 60 scientists. The world’s largest yacht , REV (short for Research Expedition Vessel) can sail around the world without refueling.

“Owners today do realize that these are extraordinary bits of equipment that can go to pretty exciting places that are really difficult to reach, and that changes the way you design the yacht,” Mr. Rowell said. Modern owners sail everywhere from the Northwest Passage to Antarctica.

There is “still a minority of attention seekers, status seekers, whatever you want to call them, who really are happy sitting off St.-Tropez and Cala di Volpe and the Amalfi Coast,” Mr. Bannenberg noted.

There is a movement, he said, “towards a much greater sense of connection between the yacht and the immediate sea, by which I mean swim platforms, ‘beach clubs,’ folding terraces and hull doors that open up to the sea.”

A growing sense of environmental issues is also having an impact, Mr. Bannenberg said. “There are a few yacht-based movements and marine foundations, which are sometimes labeled as a yacht-owner’s guilt trip, that are part of the whole environmental conversation going on at the moment,” he added.

“It all adds up to a much bigger desire to actually interact with the ocean rather than sitting in a glitzy apartment that happens to be floating.”

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Russian billionaire's superyacht makes waves in London

Andrey Melnichenko’s eyecatching £225m Philippe Starck-designed boat moored next to D-Day warship HMS Belfast on Thames

One of the world’s most famous superyachts has arrived in London , mooring up alongside a historic British warship on the Thames in the centre of the capital.

There was no mistaking Motor Yacht A, owned by Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko, as it sailed into the heart of the capital at the weekend, mooring next to the D-Day warship HMS Belfast by Tower Bridge.

Over the years, the £225m yacht, which is 119 metres (390ft) long and boasts three pools and seven luxurious cabins, has been spotted in the playgrounds of the rich and famous and was reportedly put up for sale earlier this year by the wealthy industrialist.

Melnichenko, 44, listed by Forbes magazine as one of Europe’s youngest billionaires with a fortune estimated at $11.4bn (£8.6bn) is said to have made his money through investments in coal, fertilisers and banking.

VIDEO: M/Y A - the $300 million superyacht designed by Philippe Starck - arriving in London yesterday pic.twitter.com/JrcBITdB5E — On The Thames (@ThamesPics) September 4, 2016

Melnichenko, whose 39-year-old wife Aleksandra is a former model and pop singer from Serbia, has reportedly commissioned the even grander Sailing Yacht A from the same designer, Philippe Starck.

Motor Yacht A boasts an unusual upside-down hull among its range of features, which also include three swimming pools that create currents to swim against, with a glass roof looking up into one of the pools, according to superyachts.com .

The vessel has a helipad and master suite encased in bomb-proof 44mm glass, and can accommodate 14 guests and up to 37 crew.

The yacht was named A in order to make the vessel appear first on shipping registries.

When completed in 2008, Motor Yacht A was the sixth-largest privately owned motor yacht in the world, though now is lower down in the top 25.

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NEW WAVES yacht NOT for charter*

42m  /  137'10 | benetti | 2016.

• Amenities & Toys

Special Features:

• Light, airy and modern interior
• Secluded foredeck seating and spa pool
• Spacious drop-down swim platform
• Contemporary artwork and photography
• Expansive master suite

The 42m/137'10" motor yacht 'New Waves' (ex. Drew) was built by Benetti in Italy at their Viareggio shipyard. Her interior is styled by British designer design house RWD and she was completed in 2016. This luxury vessel's exterior design is the work of Stefano Righini.

Guest Accommodation

New Waves has been designed to comfortably accommodate up to 10 guests in 5 suites. She is also capable of carrying up to 8 crew onboard to ensure a relaxed luxury yacht experience.

Onboard Comfort & Entertainment

Her features include beach club, gym and air conditioning.

Range & Performance

New Waves is built with a GRP hull and GRP superstructure, with teak decks. Powered by twin diesel MTU (12V 4000 M93L) 3,460hp engines, she comfortably cruises at 15 knots, reaches a maximum speed of 21 knots with a range of up to 1,633 nautical miles from her 33,387 litre fuel tanks at 13 knots. Her water tanks store around 3,994 Litres of fresh water. She was built to RINA (Registro Italiano Navale) C ✠ HULL ● MACH classification society rules.

*Charter New Waves Motor Yacht

Motor yacht New Waves is currently not believed to be available for private Charter. To view similar yachts for charter , or contact your Yacht Charter Broker for information about renting a luxury charter yacht.

New Waves Yacht Owner, Captain or marketing company

'Yacht Charter Fleet' is a free information service, if your yacht is available for charter please contact us with details and photos and we will update our records.

New Waves Photos

NOTE to U.S. Customs & Border Protection

SIMILAR LUXURY YACHTS FOR CHARTER

Here are a selection of superyachts which are similar to New Waves yacht which are believed to be available for charter. To view all similar luxury charter yachts click on the button below.

46m | Rossinavi

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40m | Sunseeker

from $140,000 p/week

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40m | Benetti

from $165,000 p/week

44m | Timmerman Yachts

38m | Castagnola

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46m | Mengi-Yay

37m | Couach

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38m | Custom

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40m | Sanlorenzo

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The New Wave of Superyacht Owners: Younger, Richer

Belinda Liversedge, communications manager at The Superyacht Group, details the key insights from 2012’s Superyacht Design Summit

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain , a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

Superyacht Design Summit @ CHDC MArch 2012 from Superyacht Images on Vimeo .

Belinda Liversedge, communications manager at The Superyacht Group, details the key insights from 2012’s Superyacht Design Summit

With an average overall design and build time of four years, a superyacht is a work of art, a technical marvel and an unrivalled way to explore hidden corners of the planet. Every inch is maximised for luxury, and there are few limitations on where it can travel, so it is with good reason that an increasing number of ultra high net worth individuals (UHNWIs) see superyachts as the ultimate accessory.

Being a public advocate of superyacht ownership is, however, a little less popular, not least because encouraging such media interest flies in the face of the very privacy that UHNWIs covet on board. It is unsurprising, therefore, that information on this unique sector of the luxury market, such as how large yacht design is evolving – not to mention how these elite consumers are adapting to the economic realities of today – is hard to come by.

It was with great excitement, therefore, that SuperyachtDesign magazine welcomed three of the world’s most eminent superyacht designers – Andrew Winch, Terence Disdale and Tim Heywood – to Design Centre Chelsea Harbour for Designer: Question time. Together the three engaged in a lively debate covering subjects such as the changing tastes of their clients, the owners and purchasers of multi million pound yachts.

As such it was a fascinating and rare insight into the minds and preferences of today’s UHNW consumer and, taking prime spot at London Design week on 13 March, it was a highlight for the superyacht industry, as well as the wider design fraternity who made up the 170-strong audience.

“ With an average overall design and build time of four years, a superyacht is a work of art, a technical marvel ”

A trio of highly esteemed peers and past colleagues, Winch, Disdale and Heywood are British yacht designers who began their careers over 20 years ago working for the legendary Jon Bannenberg. Referred to (with tongue-in-cheek) as the ‘Bannenberg School of Design’ – owing to the fact that so many imminent yacht designers’ careers have started by working with Jon – it was here that the three panelists honed their craft before striking out on their own.

Since then, they have between them designed some of the most beautiful, iconic and awe-inspiring superyachts ever built. Their combined portfolio comprises Eclipse, Al Mirquab, Pelorus, Ecstasea, Ice, Phoenix 2, Imagine and Cloud 9. Editor-in-chief of SuperyachtDesign and Chairman of The Superyacht Group, Martin H. Redmayne chaired the interactive Q&A; session, posing questions and welcoming participation from the audience.

Collectively, the trio identified passion as their overarching driver of personal success, noting that enthusiasm in doing what you’re doing, as well as being happy in what you’re doing, helps to design well. “Our clients respond to that,” suggested Tim Heywood.

Superyacht ECLIPSE, owned by Roman Abramovitch, designed (exterior and interior) by Terence Disdale

Terence Disdale reiterated the need for functionality – not just aesthetic – when it comes to the design of luxury yachts. “When we create something it works, it functions and that’s the key to success. People will then come back to you – projects are recognised as not just a stunning looking thing – it’s something that functions correctly. All three of us come from that school where we don’t create just fantasy – you never see anything on the drawing board that can’t work.”

On the whole clients are younger and richer than ever before. “We had one client in his mid-20s with his first yacht in excess of 90 metres; that type of thing is relatively new,” explained Tim Heywood. “If you’re fortunate to have a long-term relationship with a client you see how they grow and their style of yachting grows and changes.”

People are also starting to see how they can explore other avenues of their wealth, according to Terence. “One client is using a helicopter so he can play golf….another [owner] is using the tender to investigate, for example, a beautiful river estuary where he could never have gone with the mothership.”

“ When we create something it works, it functions and that’s the key to success. People will then come back to you ”

The trio believe superyacht clients have always been attentive to cost but primarily concerned with value and the highest standards of design and functionality. “The value of everything that one does is considered – it was before, and it is now. It might be a lot of money being spent but the clients still want the value,” advocated Andrew Winch. “People want to create more uniqueness, more individuality. If they’re going to spend the money today they want to create something that hasn’t been done before.”

Tim agreed, going on to suggest that despite the credit crunch, buyers remain adventurous and want to do something new and unique. “We are well-known for our textural and innovative finishes, which forms the basis of most of the concepts, and we are fortunate that the majority of this is seen through to completion,” finishes Terence.

When faced with the future, the trio believe sustainability will become more and more influential in design and production. “Yachts are becoming more efficient and creating less fumes and less mess,” explained Tim. “I think that will progress. I see size stabalising in the bigger market at around 120 metres – there are egos that want possibly the biggest yachts. The rules relating to helicopter pads is also making yachts bigger.”

Superyacht Al Mirqab, owned by Qatar’s Prime Minister, built by Kusch Yachts and designed by Tim Heywood with interior designs by Andrew Winch

It’s been widely reported that the top tier of the world’s richest individuals have been largely unaffected by the recession and are still spending vast amounts of money. Whilst this may be true, the SuperyachtDesign Summit showed superyacht owners are arguably nonetheless responsive and connected to the world around them.

Regard for impact on the environment as well as, if not a frugality, then a determination to be creative and push boundaries in response to the economic crisis is also apparent in their choices of superyacht design.

As younger and more adventurous entrepreneurs hit the Forbes billionaire’s list every year, the prevalent segment of this sector of superyacht owners is also telling. With this same latest Forbes list growing (1,226 billionaires in 2012 compared with 140 some 25 years ago) it could be that we see this small sector of ultra luxury consumers grow and more superyacht owners enter the market.

To further investigate Superyachts and Design on Luxury Society, we invite your to explore the related materials as follows:

– Key Insights from The Superyacht Group’s Annual Report 2012 – Yacht Makers Point to Shipyards Further East and South – Paris & Beijing Legitimise Commitments to Design – 7 Must Know Luxury Brand Yacht Collaborations

News reporter

I assist financial, luxury and wealth management media by providing data from SuperyachtIntelligence.com, our analysis portal on the luxury large yacht market. Our data and editors from The Superyacht Report regularly feature in The Economist, Financial Times and this year, BBC TV. I also promote events run by our own Superyacht Events team. These can range from the Superyacht Security Summit, where piracy and cyber crime will be discussed, to worldwide events that focus on specific countries, for example the Superyacht American forum and Italian forum. Finally, I report on the industry for SuperyachtNews.com, our industry news website which covers the diverse and business activity across the sector.

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Turning the tide: the sustainable future of superyachts

"Today's superyacht owners are younger and more in tune with the climate change around us"

“Each year, at least eight million tonnes of plastics leak into the ocean – which is equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean every minute”, reports The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics, a study produced by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the World Economic Forum. If nothing is done, the report estimates that by 2025 the ocean will have a ratio of one tonne of plastic to three tonnes of fish, and by 2050 there’ll be more plastics than fish (by weight).

If that’s not frightening enough, research figures also reveal that more than one million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals are killed by ocean pollution every year. The onus is therefore on each and every one of us – from the fishermen in tiny coastal villages to the massive cruise liners through to the owners of the world’s biggest yachts – to help in the big ocean clean-up.

Thankfully, there are big fish among those leading the charge. During the Superyachts.com Top 100 event held in London earlier this year, discussions focused on sustainability and the steps shipbuilders are taking to protect the marine environment. One major initiative unanimously taken on board is the use of hybrid propulsion to reduce carbon emissions, and this typically requires using two or more energy sources: electric turbines, diesel, LNG (liquid natural gas), battery banks, propellers and waterjets. With the right combination of hybrid systems, yachts can potentially reduce fuel consumption by up to 30 per cent, improve manoeuvrability, and also reduce noise pollution by cruising silently at low speeds.

Feadship’s 83m Savannah (pictured below) is the first superyacht to use an eco-friendly hybrid propulsion platform encompassing propellers and azimuthing thrusters for power, electric motors and diesel engines for drive, and gensets and batteries for energy storage. The shipyard’s new facility in Amsterdam is also designed with eco-friendly features, including more than 2,000 solar panels, LED lighting, a three-tier ventilation system and the innovative use of district heating, which harnesses excess energy from nearby factories.

German yacht builder Lürssen has developed a filtration system that lowers levels of nitrogen oxide (NOx), the gas responsible for forming smog and acid rain, which are both detrimental to the tropospheric ozone layer. Lürssen also pioneered the use of waste engine heat to operate a vessel’s onboard desalination system for drinking water.

Lürssen, Feadship and Benetti have also pledged commitment to ocean conservation by supporting the Blue Marine Foundation (BLUE), a UK-based charity whose mission is to tackle over-fishing and promote marine biodiversity. Its manifesto is to place 10 per cent of the oceans under active and effective protection by 2020, and 30 per cent by 2030. Benetti’s clients are offered two options for supporting BLUE: a one-off payment at the signing of a yacht construction contract, whereby a percentage of the contract price can be donated to the NGO, or an annual donation for every thousand miles sailed.

Yacht owners serious about ocean conservation can join the Blue Marine Yacht Club (BMYC), which is under the patronage of H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco. Being a member helps to create a powerful, environmentally conscious yachting community comprising yacht builders, marinas, brokers, owners and suppliers. Together they can raise awareness and contribute funds to support BLUE’s initiatives, and also have the rare opportunity to witness first-hand the benefits of their contribution by visiting BLUE’s projects around the world.

DESIGNING THE OCEAN’S FUTURE

Cutting-edge yacht designers are also stirring clients towards more sustainable options. “Today’s superyacht owners are younger, and more in tune with the climate crisis around us, and therefore either request, or are open to, innovative, sustainable yacht design,” says Andrew Winch, founder and creative director at Winch Design.

“Wherever possible, design decisions are made to have minimal negative impact on the environment or a positive impact on local communities around the world. Materials will be sourced locally to reduce the carbon footprint from freighting, as profit is fed back into the local economy. Rare accessories must have a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) certificate, to show their provenance and to try and control the overuse of rare materials.”

Composite hulls and carbon fibre masts are also being introduced, and eco-friendly alternatives to teakwood, which is traditionally used for decking and is at risk of becoming endangered, are currently in development. The Winch Design team is also encouraging clients to consider sailing yachts, which offer all the luxuries available from a motor yacht, but with the benefit of generating no carbon emissions under sail.

A NEW WAVE IN YACHTING

A new age in yachting is dawning, as luxury exploration vessels catch the imagination of intrepid clients searching for adventure in remote destinations. Already making big waves in the industry is REV, short for Research and Expedition Vessel. When this 181.6m leviathan, owned by Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke and part of the REV Ocean programme, hits the water in 2021, she will revolutionise the way superyachts are built and used.

REV has been designed to allow up to 60 scientists to conduct scientific research into the entire marine ecosystem using state-of-the-art equipment, while also providing the luxuries and space typically offered by large charter yachts. Facilities include classrooms, an auditorium, two helipads, and the all-important underwater exploration vehicles.

According to Espen Oeino, REV’s designer, “One of the fundamental concepts of the vessel has been to share information being collected and produced onboard, thus setting a new standard for transparency and sharing of scientific data.” For guests, the invaluable experience on board this exemplary vessel is not just about sailing to unusual destinations; it’s about interacting with scientists, learning from their research, and sharing these experiences to encourage others to support REV Ocean’s research programmes. With 30 crew onboard, REV will be available for private charter for up to 36 guests. All proceeds from charters will go towards funding marine research programmes.

Private yacht owners can help by attaching simple systems to their vessels to enable collection of data on water temperature, salinity and oxygen concentration. “Due to the size and scale of the ocean it is near impossible to collect data at all points,” explains Oystein Mikelborg, REV’s operations director, “but if the yachting community contributed regular streams of data from wherever they are cruising it would help fill gaps that research vessels won’t have the chance to fill.”

HEAL THE OCEANS, SAVE THE WORLD

Saving the oceans, let alone saving the world, is a daunting task. This is why organisations such as the BLUE, REV Ocean and other conservation programmes around the world are taking bold steps to get everyone involved. And they need support not just from the yachting community, but also from the private and public sectors – including giant cruise companies and cargo ships, whose vessels have contributed much to the pollution of our seas. Saving our oceans can only be achieved by working together on a global scale. With the superyacht industry leading the way, let’s hope others follow.

Join the fourth edition of BLUE’s London to Monaco annual charity cycling challenge from 17-24 September 2019. The ride is organised in partnership with Just Pedal and there are a variety of distance options available (London to Monaco, eight days; Santander to Monaco, six days; Carcassonne to Monaco, three days; or London to Portsmouth, one day), finishing in time for the Monaco Yacht Show. For more details, visit london-monaco.cc

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New construction on the crest of a wave

Published 05 July 2017

Sixteen years ago, Burgess formed its  New Construction division to project manage the build of superyachts over 40 metres on behalf of owners. Since then, the team of technical project managers, naval architects, and engineers has supervised new build projects in 23 shipyards across three continents for a total value of approximately USD 5.5 billion. Burgess holds the record of having been involved in more new builds between 40m and 180m than any other specialist.

Projects completed in the first decade include AMEVI (80m/262.5ft) and SUNRAYS (85.5 m/280.4ft) at Oceanco, MAYAN QUEEN IV (92m/301.8ft) at Blohm+Voss, VAVA II (96m/315ft) at Devonport Yachts, SAINT NICOLAS (70.2m/230.3ft) and the extraordinary TOPAZ (147.3m/483.1ft) at Lurssen,  BATON ROUGE (62.5m/205.1ft) at Icon Yachts, LUNA (43m/141.1ft), ANNAEVA (56m/183.7ft and  SEANNA (65m/213.3ft) at Benetti, AL MIRQAB (133.2m/436.4ft) at Kusch Yachts and several yachts at both Amels and Turquoise Yachts.

Recent milestone projects include the 180m/590.6ft AZZAM, the world's largest and fastest superyacht built by Lurssen and delivered in 2013, and the 156m/511.8ft DILBAR, delivered in 2016 and classified as the world's largest yacht by gross tonnage. Burgess New Construction was appointed as the owner's technical consultant and project manager on AZZAM to develop the brief and commission the technically complex build, while the Espen Øino designed DILBAR is the second Lurssen new build project over 100m that Burgess has managed for the same owner.

2016 also saw the successful delivery of ALBATROSS (72m/236.2ft) from Delta and  JOY (70m/229.7ft) from Feadship, Royal Van Lent. The prolific extent of the division's impressive project portfolio continues this year with several new deliveries. Last month saw the successful delivery of the CRN built 74m/242.8ft CLOUD 9 for a repeat new build client. Burgess New Construction was appointed owner's representative and played a key role from the early stages, beginning with developing the technical specification and extending through the build to responsibility for technical review, inspection and acceptance, project management, on-site supervision and coordination of consultants.

The 42m/137.8ft Benetti Veloce 140 WILLOW was sold by Burgess as a new build last year and was also delivered to her owner last month.

Delivery of the 110m/360.9ft Oceanco, JUBILEE, the largest yacht built to date in the Netherlands is imminent and her striking exterior styling by Igor Lobanov is already turning heads. Built to the Passenger Yacht Code, Burgess New Construction provided technical consultancy and project management throughout the entire build process. JUBILEE is also offered for sale by Burgess as exclusive Worldwide Central Agents.

Also nearing completion is HASNA (73m/239.5ft) at Feadship, Royal Van Lent with an exterior and interior design by RWD. Built for a long term Burgess client, HASNA's stand-out features include an eight metre green slate tiled infinity swimming pool on the main deck aft, an extensive gym and cardio room in the full beam beach club with opening terraces, a cinema, and crew quarters and facilities in excess of MLC.

Looking forward, four projects are currently under construction in Europe and due for delivery in 2018. Two of these are over 100 metres and the other two inhabit the 75 to 95 metre size range. 2019 will see another vessel in excess of 100 metres delivered as well as a 55+ metre. Several projects between 50 and 120 metres are also under development.

It is a testament to the Burgess  New Construction team's experience in commercial, naval and passenger ship building combined with their project management skills that many superyachts in their new build portfolio are truly ground breaking in terms of design, style, technical specification, and performance.

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What’s behind the new wave of uber-luxe sportfishing vessels?

The American market is driving demand for a new wave of sportfishers as owners look to combine the pastime with superyacht levels of luxury.

The waters off the east coast of the United States are alive with fish. And not just any fish. Large pelagic apex predators, such as sailfish, bluefin tuna, grouper and kingfish, all of which thrive in the oceans around the Florida Keys and Florida’s gulf coast. Nearby, blue marlin and bonefish abound in the balmy waters of the Caribbean and Bahamas. As water temperatures cool in November, big game fishing season heats up, and the diehard sportfishing enthusiasts’ playground is officially declared open.

Sportfishing is more than a time-honoured hobby in the US, it is a serious lifestyle choice. But now, committed and passionate fishermen who typically venture out with like-minded companions are taking their families along for the ride. In addition to exploring further, they are demanding more from their boats, including speed, comfort and space.

Coupled with an uptick in sales in the past year, next-level sportfisher designs have begun to emerge signalling a sign of the times for the typically overlooked sector. According to data provided by BOAT Pro , the sportfisher sector showed 133 per cent growth in 2022 with 26 projects on order or in build entering 2023, most of which are tipping the scales in length.

“There is a lot of interest in sport fishing boats right now, and we’re talking 65 feet and upwards, which just a few years ago was unheard of,” says Randy Ramsey, founder and president of Jarrett Bay Boatworks , a North Carolina custom boatbuilder that has a 19.5 metre and 20.7 metre boat in build.

Third-generation boatbuilder, Michael Rybovich , agrees. “The 20-metre-plus sportfishing boats that are being built today offer comfort, space and speed. It's important for a lot of boaters to get where they want to go fast and is a significant element to what’s causing this uptick, along with a strong resale value.”

In October 2022, Jarrett Bay announced the commission of a high-tech 27 metre custom sportfish with a full tower and open bridge. Currently under construction and bought by repeat owners who are upgrading from their 20.4 metre, it is the second Jarrett Bay 90 to be built, following the delivery of Jaruco in 2017, which taps out at 39 knots. Singled out for her ultra-strong and lightweight titanium propeller shafts, Jaruco was the first sportfish boat to be recognised as a finalist in the 2019 BOAT International Design & Innovation Awards in the Game Changer category. “It’s fair to say that Jaruco was the most technically advanced sportfisher boat ever built,” says Ramsey. “It had the world’s first titanium crop shafts, which saved nearly 2000 pounds in weight. For every 10,000 pounds of weight reduction, we increase the boat’s speed by around one knot.”

To drive performance and efficiency, Jarrett Bay shallowed up the shaft angle with V drives and reduced weight with carbon fibre skins for the hard tops in the tower, as well as a carbon fibre cockpit, fuel tank and cabins. The result was a boat that is 50,000 pounds lighter and six knots faster than anything in her class. “All of our owners want speed,” says Ramsey. “Some of it is competitiveness, but mostly it’s about reaching preferred fishing grounds or changing course more quickly.”

Routinely travelling to fishing grounds 100-plus nautical miles offshore, sportfishers require long range, large fuel capacity and seaworthiness. The most popular length for daytrippers sits around the 10 metre to 12 metre mark, but the appetite for sportfishers twice that size points to a more seasoned owner who, rather than tying up behind their home in south Florida, is looking for a boat that can safely journey deep into the Pacific or beyond.

“We have a lot of customers that are fishing primarily in Central America – Panama and Costa Rica are the hotspots now,” says Rybovich. Similarly, the Pacific Rim countries, such as Brazil, are on Ramsey’s radar, as well as the “explosion of sportfishing in Japan”.

Since Viking released renderings of its new 90 series in August 2022, the American builder has confirmed an impressive 10 sales with the first hull yet to hit the water. The 90 takes its design cues from the Viking 80 and 92 , the latter being its most popular model to date, with 21 models delivered in seven years. It proved that a sportfishing yacht of that size could win consistently on the tournament trail, however, production ceased when an international mandate introduced in 2019 required all yachts with a loadline length over 24 metres to be fitted with new exhaust-treatment technology, called Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR). With engine manufacturers indicating they wouldn’t be SCR compliant until 2022, Viking put all its efforts into the 90, which has a loadline length of 23.2 metres.

It matches a lifting-strake design with a refined driveline and advanced propulsion systems. A 922 litre live well makes it well-suited to serious anglers, while a full-beam master stateroom, a sky bridge helm with companion chairs and a guest lounge combines the style of a superyacht with sportfishing DNA. Something that Rybovich’s III Amigos has in spades.

At 28.5 metres, III Amigos is the largest boat built by Rybovich to date. Possessing all the classic exterior hallmarks of a traditional sportfisher (sharp deadrise forward that reduces as it goes aft with a stable platform at slow speeds), its custom interior by yacht designer Patrick Knowles is anything but.

“You won’t see many first timers buying a boat of III Amigos’ calibre,” says Rybovich, whose American shipyard currently has a 25 metre, 21 metre and 19 metre in the sheds. “That comes with a love of the sport and the ability to know what you need and what you don't. It takes time and, probably in most cases, several boats before you get there.”

With a bespoke dinette styled to match the owner’s customised Ferrari, which in turn was styled after one of his homes in Key Largo, III Amigos is a hybrid conceived for the entire family. “The owner’s design brief was clear,” says Knowles. “He wanted a fish fighter with an interior akin to his Feadship.”

Knowles penned doors that are two and three quarter inches thick with zero profile. There are hand-selected marble bathrooms and a backlit onyx bar with custom stools made from alligator hide and polished stainless steel inlay. “You wouldn’t see anything like that on a typical sportfisher,” he says.

Of course, it would be wrong to think this new breed is in any way confused, says Knowles. “When outside, he didn’t want anything to suggest it was not a 100 per cent pure-blooded sportfishing boat. When inside, he didn't want anything to impact the superyacht experience.”

It is a vision shared by the owner of Cantiere delle Marche ’s new explorer yacht, the Darwin 106 Uptight , designed and equipped to fulfil the owner’s wish to have a large, family superyacht on which to enjoy months-long fishing expeditions. Her profile is typical of an explorer with a forward set superstructure but it is only upon second glance that you notice the swim platform is atypically enclosed to create a fishing cockpit with a fighting chair and other sportfishing paraphernalia. 

“The entire family love fishing and own a fleet of smaller sportfishers, so originally they wanted a mothership,” says Maria Roberta Morso. “That idea evolved into a large sportfisher that facilitates incredible fishing by day and relaxing in comfort by night.”

At 52 metres, the world’s largest sportfisher, Project 406 , currently in build at Royal Huisman , takes the merging of two genres to new heights. Designed by Vripack , the six-deck creation commissioned by a die-hard sportfisherman keen on sharing his passion with his family has given life to a first of its kind.

Though perhaps a one-off build, Project 406 paves the way for owners drawn by the prospect of global exploration on a superyacht built for big game fishing. More than anything though, it underlines how sportfishing in all its forms is stepping up to the evolutionary plate.

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ALPHA WAVES 133' (40m) Benetti Yacht for Charter

Posted March 7, 2023 in Charter by Ashleigh King

The 133’ (40m) Benetti ALPHA WAVES is now for charter with Northrop & Johnson. The luxury yacht will cruise the Mediterranean beginning summer of 2024 and The Bahamas and Caribbean in the winter. Charters start at $225,000 per week, plus expenses.

The 2023 Benetti Oasis ALPHA WAVES has revolutionized the idea of a luxury yacht charter. Her long list of impressive features includes a massive beach club, a stunning elevator with access from her main salon to the sundeck and an overall blend of the indoors and outdoors, courtesy of her open-plan layout and panoramic windows. She is the ideal yacht for a charterer seeking a luxurious experience. Guests can expect to be completely engulfed in elegance from the moment they step aboard.

ALPHA WAVES is ready to take her guests to the world’s most desirable destinations in style. She is fully wheelchair-friendly, including her tender and flat boats, allowing every guest to enjoy the same five-star experience. Five cabins welcome up to 10 guests to spend restful nights onboard. Her main-deck owner’s suite is a private oasis with a king-size bed and a privasitting area and an outdoor balcony. Her additional accommodations include two king-size VIPs and two twin cabins, all accompanied by en-suite bathrooms. ALPHA WAVES carries an experienced crew of eight.

The Benetti’s modern interior design was penned by the New York-based firm Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture, bringing a fresh take on yacht design centered around natural light and ultra-high-quality furnishings and finishes. The charter yacht’s elevated interior is chic while still remaining comfortable. ALPHA WAVES’ main salon is a lovely, informal place for guests to gather and enjoy conversation with one another. The dedicated wellness/gym area forward encourages guests to carve out time for themselves while onboard. This is one of the most valuable amenities of ALPHA WAVES, allowing guests to take time to meditate or get in a workout in the most luxurious setting. A dedicated bar area with four barstools sits forward of the circular sofas, providing the perfect spot for enjoying a pre-dinner craft cocktail or nightcap.

RWD is responsible for ALPHA WAVES’ incredible exterior design. Her fantastic beach club is aft of the main salon, featuring fold-down terraces that sit right on the water. This gives guests the closest experience possible, allowing them to relax right on the water’s edge. An infinity Jacuzzi overlooks the water, offering uninterrupted views of the yacht’s cruising grounds. The charter yacht’s sprawling sundeck invites guests to soak in the Jacuzzi, lay out on the sunpads and enjoy an alfresco meal under the sun or stars. ALPHA WAVES’ foredeck is another dedicated lounging area where guests can enjoy a glass of champagne or a casual meal.

Contact press for more information on ALPHA WAVES. Contact Northrop & Johnson to book a luxury yacht charter  today.

When it comes to selecting a  charter destination  and planning the holiday of your dreams, Northrop & Johnson’s charter brokers will deliver the best selection of  yachts for charter  around the world.

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