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Rotterdam Won’t Dismantle Bridge to Allow Jeff Bezos’ Superyacht Through

The Dutch city faced an uproar as it considered dismantling a section of a 95-year-old bridge. Now the boat’s builder has decided not to apply for a permit.

By Claire Moses

Jeff Bezos will not be able to sail a new, more than 400-foot-long superyacht through the waters of the Dutch city of Rotterdam anytime soon.

The port city faced an uproar months ago as it considered dismantling a section of a 95-year-old bridge to allow the Amazon founder’s yacht to pass. But now the boat’s builder, the Dutch company Oceanco, has decided to refrain from applying for a permit, according to a Rotterdam City Council member.

It was unclear how Mr. Bezos’ yacht would leave the area or whether Oceanco would finish the boat. The company did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday and Thursday. An Amazon spokeswoman did not immediately return a request for comment.

The yacht was supposed to sail through the Koningshaven Bridge, known locally as “De Hef,” over the summer and was on track to become the largest sailing yacht in the world at 417 feet, according to the superyacht industry publication Boat International. The bridge does not have enough clearance for the yacht , which was being built in a nearby town.

Because Oceanco is no longer seeking an application, the middle part of the bridge will not be removed for now, according to a public letter from the councilman, Vincent Karremans . The dismantling process takes about a day, as does putting it back together, according to Peter van Druten, a spokesman for the city of Rotterdam.

De Hef opened in 1927 and was the first vertical lift bridge in the Netherlands, but it is no longer in use. It has been dismantled before — most recently in 2017 for a renovation, Mr. van Druten said. The bridge is “an icon for the city,” he said.

The full cost of the dismantling would have been covered by Oceanco, the city said, and the bridge would have immediately been restored afterward.

City officials told reporters in February that Rotterdam had agreed to briefly dismantle the bridge to allow Mr. Bezos’ yacht to go through. But after backlash, they walked back that statement and said a decision had not been made.

A Facebook event at the time invited residents of the city to throw eggs at the boat. “Dismantling De Hef for Jeff Bezos’s latest toy? Come throw eggs … !” the event’s organizer wrote in February.

Then last month, the Dutch newspaper Trouw reported that Oceanco had decided not to apply for the permit out of fear of vandalism and threats.

“That’s worrisome — the ship builder is just doing his job,” said Dieke van Groningen, a Rotterdam council member for VVD, the Dutch liberal party.

Responses so far were mixed. Some people applauded the fact that the city would not have to bend to the will of Mr. Bezos. Facebook posts by the Dutch public in response to the news included sentiments like: “Class! Keep your spine straight for such oligarchs,” and “Let him get that thing with his own rocket.”

“We’re happy it’s not happening,” said Marvin Biljoen, a councilman for GroenLinks, the Dutch Green Party. “The bridge is a national monument, which shouldn’t be altered too much. That you could still do that with money anyway bothers us.”

But others believed it would have been a good opportunity for the city.

“I talk to a lot of residents of Rotterdam,” Ms. van Groningen, the VVD councilwoman, said. “They’re incredibly proud that these kinds of ships sail through our city.”

Rotterdam is the biggest port in Europe and a main hub for shipbuilding, including superyachts.

“This is the Netherlands at its best,” Ms. van Groningen said. “It’s about the image of the port, and you should be proud of that.”

Claire Moses is a writer for The Morning based in London. Before joining The Times in 2017, she worked at BuzzFeed News and other news outlets. She is originally from the Netherlands. More about Claire Moses

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Jeff Bezos’ unfinished mega yacht was towed away from a Dutch shipbuilding yard before dawn Tuesday just weeks after Rotterdam residents threatened to pelt the luxury vessel with eggs if the city went through with plans to dismantle a landmark bridge to make way for the $500 million ship.

The 417-foot long, three-masted yacht, which goes by the name Y721 , was relocated from the Oceanco shipyard in Alblasserdam to the Greenport yard just 24 miles away in Rotterdam, according to the German-language daily Der Spiegel.

Video of the towing was posted to YouTube by Dutch yacht enthusiast Hanco Bol.

“We never saw a transport going that fast,” Bol writes of what he witnessed. It took less than three hours for the ship to travel southwest along the Noord canal even though it normally requires nearly twice as much time to traverse the route, according to Bol.

He speculates that Oceanco, the company that was commissioned to build the yacht, chose the timing of the move in order to keep it under wraps given the considerable publicity it has generated.

Rotterdammers who were furious about plans to dismantle “De Hef” bridge , also known as Koningshaven, had threatened to pelt the yacht with eggs if it made the journey.

Bol writes that the yacht’s route was designed to avoid traveling through the Rotterdam city center and underneath “De Hef” — even though it would have saved more time.

Oceanco last month announced that it had dropped its request for the Rotterdam city council to approve the temporary dismantling of the bridge.

The company had indicated that Bezos, the Amazon founder and second-richest person in the world, was willing to foot the bill for the removal of the middle section of the span so that the yacht would be able to sail through the Nieuwe Mass River.

Bol speculates that Oceanco intentionally avoided towing the unfinished yacht underneath “De Hef.”

“I think that was intentional,” he told Der Spiegel. 

“When I was standing on one of the bridges, they shined a searchlight on me, so it wasn’t easy for me to take pictures.”

According to Dutch media reports, it will take several more months for the ship to be completed.

The Post has reached out to Amazon and Oceanco seeking comment.

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Jeff Bezos' superyacht will see historic bridge dismantled

• Published 3 February 2022

Rotterdam has confirmed it will dismantle a historic bridge to allow a superyacht built for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to fit through.

The record-breaking luxury yacht is being built by Dutch firm Oceanco and was linked to Mr Bezos last year.

The vessel is reported to be 417ft (127m) long and too tall to fit through the Koningshaven Bridge.

A spokesman for the mayor confirmed the plan to reporters, with Mr Bezos set to foot the bill through Oceanco.

Reports emerged in Dutch media on Tuesday that the middle section of the Dutch city's bridge, known locally as De Hef, would be temporarily removed to allow the 130ft (40m) high boat to sail through.

The move is controversial because the steel bridge has a long history, and is now a national monument. It previously went through a major renovation which saw it out of action from 2014 to 2017, when officials said it would not be dismantled again.

The AFP news agency quoted the mayor's office as saying the jobs created by the construction of the vessel prompted the plan, and pledged the bridge would be rebuilt in its current form.

"It's the only route to the sea," a mayoral spokesman added.

The sentiment was echoed by Rotterdam's local authority project leader Marcel Walravens, who said it would not be practical to finish the yacht's construction elsewhere.

He told the Rijnmond website the project was "very important" from an economic perspective and cited Rotterdam's reputation as the "maritime capital of Europe".

"Shipbuilding and activity within that sector are an important pillar of the municipality," he said.

• BACKGROUND: Jeff Bezos and the secretive world of superyachts
• CONTEXT: Wealth of world's richest 'doubled in pandemic'

Mr Walravens told a local newspaper the project will likely happen in the summer, with officials hoping the section can be removed and replaced within a couple of weeks.

Details about the luxury custom yacht order being built by Oceanco emerged last year. The firm remains tight-lipped about its clients but a Bloomberg biography about Bezos in 2021 appeared to confirm rumours that he would be the owner.

Known as Y721, the vessel will be the largest of its kind in the world , according to Boat International. It is rumoured to boast plenty of luxury features with an accompanying "support yacht" on order with a helicopter landing pad.

The move was criticised by local green politician Stephan Leewis on Twitter , who described "tear[ing] down our beautiful national monument" as "a bridge too far".

Forbes estimates the Amazon founder is worth more than $175bn (£130bn) and currently ranks him as the third richest in the world. Aside from being a giant in the e-commerce industry, Bezos also owns the Washington Post newspaper and space company Blue Origin.

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Wealth of 10 richest men 'doubled in pandemic'

• Published 17 January 2022

Jeff Bezos and the secretive world of superyachts

• Published 14 May 2021

Rotterdam Now Won't Dismantle a Historic Bridge for Jeff Bezos's Superyacht

The Amazon founder's new sailing yacht is too tall to pass under the historic Koningshaven bridge.

"We’re happy it’s not happening," Marvin Biljoen, a councilman for GroenLinks, the Dutch Green Party, told the New York Times . "T he bridge is a national monument, which shouldn’t be altered too much. That you could still do that with money anyway bothers us."

Last week, Oceano quietly towed the yacht up the river in the early hours of the morning to a different shipyard, and now, Bezos's boat is nearly completed. The YouTube channel Dutch Yachting shared a video of the boat, and it has three large masts completed:

Expect the superyacht to be on the open seas soon.

Original 2/7/22 : The European port of Rotterdam will dismantle part of its iconic Koningshaven bridge for Jeff Bezos. The billionaire's new yacht is being built in Alblasserdam, in the western Netherlands, and will be too tall to pass under the bridge.

"It's the only route to the sea," a spokesperson for the mayor of Rotterdam told AFP , confirming the news of the bridge's dismantling. According to Dutch news , ship builder Oceanco convinced the city to dismantle part of the bridge. The Rotterdam mayor's spokesperson also confirmed that Bezos would pay for the dismantling and rebuilding of the bridge.

In November, Oceano's chairman, Omani businessman Dr. Mohammed Al Barwani, spoke of the 127 meter (416 feet) sailing yacht the company was working on without mentioning Bezos. Later, Boat International identified the 127m yacht as the one commissioned by the Amazon founder.

The Koningshaven bridge, known locally as the De Hef bridge , was built in 1877. During World War II, the bridge was significantly damaged and rebuilt, subsequently recognized as a historic monument. Between 2014 and 2017, the bridge underwent a restoration, and officials promised it would not be dismantled again.

"From an economic perspective and maintaining employment, the municipality considers this a very important project," Marcel Walravens, the leader of the proposed dismantling project, told Dutch broadcaster Rijnmond . "Rotterdam has also been declared the maritime capital of Europe. Shipbuilding and activity within that sector are therefore an important pillar for the municipality." Walravens says the project will likely take place sometime this summer.

Dennis Tak, a Labor Party city councilor, said he was OK with the dismantling of the Koningshaven bridge because Bezos is paying for it, and it would create jobs. "As a city, this is a great way to take some of his money," Tak told the New York Times .

Dutch residents are not happy, however; they plan to throw rotten eggs at Jeff Bezos's superyacht as it passes through the Rotterdam harbor. Business Insider reports Rotterdam locals are planning an event called "Throwing eggs at Jeff Bezos' superyacht" in protest.

"Calling all Rotterdammers, take a box of rotten eggs with you and let's throw them en masse at Jeff's superyacht when it sails through the Hef in Rotterdam," the event description reads on Facebook. "Rotterdam was built from the rubble by the people of Rotterdam, and we don't just take that apart for the phallic symbol of a megalomaniac billionaire. Not without a fight!" 3,300 people have RSVP'd as going, and 11,600 are interested in the event.

When Bezos's yacht, known as Y721, is delivered later this year—after the bridge is dismantled—the boat will become the world's largest sailing yacht, a title that has been held for nearly a century by American socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post's 1931 boat Sea Cloud .

Along with making history as the largest sailing yacht, Bezos's Y271 is the longest yacht to have ever been built in the Netherlands, and Oceano's largest ever superyacht. It is also rumored to come with a "support yacht," also called a shadow vessel. The superyacht likely cost more than $500 million to build, per Bloomberg .

Bezos is also reportedly the owner of the Flying Fox, a $400 million megayacht.

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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The Dutch vow to egg Jeff Bezos' yacht if a bridge is dismantled to let his boat pass

Rachel Treisman

Rotterdam residents appear to be up in arms over a plan to temporarily dismantle the Koningshaven lift bridge, popularly called "De Hef." Remko de Waal/ANP/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Rotterdam residents appear to be up in arms over a plan to temporarily dismantle the Koningshaven lift bridge, popularly called "De Hef."

It's not exactly smooth sailing these days in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, where locals are voicing their objection to a plan that would temporarily dismantle a historic bridge to enable the passage of a record-breaking yacht reportedly owned by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

In fact, some are already making plans — albeit in jest — for what they will do if the project comes to fruition: throw eggs at the yacht as it traverses the water under the Koningshaven Bridge, known locally as "De Hef."

Some 13,000 people are "interested" and nearly 4,000 have said they will attend a Facebook event titled "Throwing eggs at superyacht Jeff Bezos," which has been shared more than 1,000 times in the week since its creation.

Tens Of Thousands Sign Petition To Stop Jeff Bezos From Returning To Earth

"Calling all Rotterdammers, take a box of rotten eggs with you and let's throw them en masse at Jeff's superyacht when it sails through the Hef in Rotterdam," wrote organizer Pablo Strörmann.

He told the NL Times that the protest started as a joke among friends and has quickly gotten "way out of hand." (The English-language news site also notes that this isn't Strörmann's first campaign to go viral.)

The news of De Hef's potential disassembly, however brief, has clearly struck a chord with both locals and international observers.

It all started last week when Dutch broadcaster Rijnmond reported that the city appeared willing to grant a request to dismantle the decades-old steel bridge so that Bezos' yacht could pass through.

De Hef was built in 1927 as a railway bridge, with a midsection that can be lifted to allow ship traffic to pass underneath, according to The Washington Post . It was replaced by a tunnel and decommissioned in 1994, but was saved from demolition by public protests and later declared a national monument.

The ship's three masts are apparently too high for the bridge's roughly 130-foot clearance.

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The sailing yacht in question was reportedly commissioned by the billionaire Amazon founder and is currently being built at the Oceanco shipyard in the Netherlands, according to Boat International . It will consist of three masts with aluminum and steel construction and will measure more than 415 feet in length.

"Once delivered, not only will she become the world's largest sailing yacht but she will also hold the title for the largest superyacht ever built in the Netherlands," it added.

The waterway where the bridge sits is the only way the ship can get from the shipyard in Alblasserdam to the open seas, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation . So Oceanco asked Rotterdam officials to temporarily remove the middle section of the bridge.

City spokesperson Netty Kros told the CBC that "the applicant" would cover the costs of the project but did not clarify whether that refers to the yacht's owner, the shipbuilder or both. Bloomberg reports that Oceanco will foot the bill. NPR has reached out to Amazon and Oceanco to confirm these details.

The city appeared to agree to the arrangement last week, with municipal project leader Marcel Walravens telling Rijnmond that the project would proceed for logistical and economic reasons. He said an exact plan was being developed but estimated it would take about a week to prepare and another week to "put everything back in place."

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"At the Koningenne Bridge, we can press a button, and it opens. That's not possible here because De Hef has a maximum height," Walravens said, according to a translation from the NL Times . "The only alternative is to take out the middle part."

That prompted an immediate backlash from locals, lawmakers and social media users, with the Rotterdam Historical Society pointing out that city officials had promised never to dismantle the bridge again after completing a major restoration in 2017.

Officials then walked back the reports, with Rotterdam's mayor telling a Dutch newspaper on Thursday that "no decision has yet been taken, not even an application for a permit," according to The Guardian .

He said the municipality would consider an application and assess the potential impacts, like whether the dismantling can be done without damaging the bridge and who would cover the costs.

Postcard from Rotterdam

Proponents of the plan say the project will bring more economic opportunities to the region, while critics say there's a double standard at play.

"Normally it's the other way around: If your ship doesn't fit under a bridge, you make it smaller," Strörmann told the NL Times. "But when you happen to be the richest person on Earth, you just ask a municipality to dismantle a monument. That's ridiculous."

With a net worth of more than $188 billion, Bezos is the third-richest person in the world behind Tesla founder Elon Musk and French businessman Bernard Arnault, according to Forbes' real-time list .

Hypothetically, if the project does come to pass, and locals do show up with eggs, just how hard of a moving target would the yacht be? The website Curbed set out to find out.

After examining several studies and making a few calculations, reporter Clio Chang says an egg would have to travel about 238 feet to hit the hull — "a difficult, but not impossible, feat."

This story originally appeared on the Morning Edition live blog .

• shipbuilding
• Netherlands

Watch CBS News

Mayor denies Dutch city will dismantle historic bridge for Jeff Bezos' yacht

By Megan Cerullo

February 4, 2022 / 2:05 PM EST / MoneyWatch

A Dutch city has not agreed to temporarily disassemble a bridge built in 1927 to make room for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ' mega-yacht, CBS MoneyWatch has learned.

A spokesperson for the mayor — and the city — on Friday told CBS MoneyWatch that Dutch press reports that Rotterdam would disassemble an historic bridge to make room for Bezos' boat were false, and that it has not received, or approved any such request. 

If Bezos or custom yacht-builder Oceanco asks for an accommodation, the city will consider it.

"The company that built the ship didn't yet ask for a permit so there is not an issue at this moment. When they ask for the permit, then we have to make a decision if we allow it or not, and how, and things like that," the spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch.

Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb also denied earlier press reports, telling Dutch paper Algemeen Dagblad that "No decision has been made yet," noting that neither Bezos nor his yacht's maker have applied for a permit to take down part of the bridge. 

The Amazon founder's $500 million boat, built by Netherlands-based Oceanco and scheduled to be completed soon, measures 417 feet long and must pass through Rotterdam, under its landmark bridge, to reach its owner, NL Times reported . The problem? The Koninginnebrug bridge, a steel bridge nicknamed De Hef, isn't tall enough to accommodate the ship's three masts, which exceed the 130 feet of clearance the bridge offers.   

Dutch press reports said that the city would remove the central section of the bridge to make way for the yacht, the largest ever built in the Netherlands. 

At this point in time, city officials in Rotterdam, who have been in contact with Oceanco regarding the construction of the superyacht, only know that "there is a big ship that has to go through the ocean some day," a spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch, adding that they anticipate receiving a request to make room for the boat to pass under the bridge. 

The spokesperson noted that the city has in the past had to deconstruct parts of the bridge to accommodate large vessels. 

"This is not the first time we have to do something about this bridge so that a big ship can go through. Once every few years a big ship has to go through to the other side," the spokesperson said. "So it's not unusual, in a way."

Rotterdam officials were said to have yielded to the billionaire, the world's  second-richest person , given the significance of the project to the local economy. Rotterdam council project leader Marcel Walravens called the construction of the superyacht "a very important project" economically, according to local broadcaster Rijnmond . Dismantling the bridge was the "only alternative," he said. 

Oceanco had agreed to pay for the cost of dismantling operation, Rotterdam spokesperson Frances Van Heijst told the NL Times. It's unclear if Bezos, who is worth roughly $176 billion , would pay for any of the disassembly cost.

The shipbuilder did not respond to a request for comment from CBS MoneyWatch. 

Aboutaleb, the mayor, said the controversial undertaking remains under consideration, but that Bezos still lacks the official approval to move forward. He also said Bezos' wealth and status will not influence his decision. 

"That has absolutely nothing do with this decision. It's about the facts. I want to know them first," Aboutaleb told the Dutch language newspaper.

"It's not an issue of what is going through the bridge," the city spokesperson reiterated. "It's not like if it's a ship for Mr. Bezos all of a sudden the rules are changing. But if there is a call for a permit, we will make a decision based on facts and not emotions. But we are not at that stage at this moment," the spokesperson said.

Some locals oppose altering the bridge on behalf of one of the richest people on the planet. Protesters have organized an event on Facebook at which they vowed to gather to throw eggs at Bezos' yacht when it passes under the bridge, scheduled for June. 

"Rotterdam was built from the rubble by the people of Rotterdam, and we don't just take that apart for the phallic symbol of a megalomaniac billionaire. Not without a fight!!" event organizers wrote on Facebook. 

• Netherlands

Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News Streaming to discuss her reporting.

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It’s Official: Rotterdam Will Not Dismantle Historic Bridge for Jeff Bezos’s Superyacht

By Katherine McLaughlin

Five months ago when it was announced that Jeff Bezos had plans to dismantle a historic bridge in Rotterdam so his half-a-billion-dollar superyacht could make it out of the Koningshaven channel, frustrated residents from the Dutch city came up with a plan of their own: Throw rotten eggs at the Amazon founder and his watercraft. 

Last week, according to a report in The New York Times , it became apparent that neither proposition will come to fruition. The company responsible for building the ship, Oceanco, reportedly told the Rotterdam City Council that it will not be requesting a permit to temporarily take apart the Koningshaven Bridge, known locally as De Hef, or “the lift” in Dutch. It was unclear how, or if, the massive yacht will make it out of the port city. 

For the vessel to pass through, the central lift span would need to be removed, which would take about a day according to city officials. 

Bezos hired Oceanco to build the custom vessel, but its three large masts are too tall to safely pass under the bridge. In order to get the boat into the open ocean, the company toyed with the idea of dismantling only the middle part, then putting it back together. Though it was never a done deal (Rotterdam officials briefly confirmed they would allow the bridge’s deconstruction, then quickly retracted the statement saying the decision was still up in the air), when word first spread that the bridge could’ve been taken apart, the sheer possibility was enough to cause public outcry. 

Lift bridge decks can accommodate heavier materials, and, as such, are popular options for railways. 

De Hef, finished in 1927, is a vertical lift bridge designed by architect Pieter Joosting. Originally part of the Breda-Rotterdam Railway, the bridge was saved from demolition even after the railway suspended use in 1993. De Hef has a long history with the city, and was the first of its kind built in Western Europe. It was also the first structure restored after the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 during World War II. Though it has been dismantled in the past—most recently in 2014 for repairs—at least for now, it will stay put. 

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Rotterdam to dismantle part of historic bridge so Jeff Bezos’s massive yacht can pass through

Rotterdam has agreed to temporarily dismantle part of its historic Koningshaven Bridge so that Jeff Bezos’s 417-foot-long , three-mast yacht can pass through the waterway sometime this summer, according to a spokeswoman for the city.

The Dutch company Oceano has been building the massive vessel for an estimated $500 million in the nearby city of Alblasserdam. Once completed this year, the ship, known as Y721, will be the world’s largest sailing yacht, according to Boat International .

But to reach the open seas it must first pass through Rotterdam — considered the maritime capital of Europe — and the city’s historic steel bridge, locally known as De Hef, which has a clearance of just over 131 feet.

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Originally built in 1927, De Hef was a railway bridge and the first of its kind in Western Europe, with a central span that could be lifted to allow ship traffic to pass underneath. It was decommissioned in 1994 after being replaced by a tunnel, but later declared a national monument. The bridge underwent a major restoration from 2014 to 2017, after which the city said it would not be dismantled again, according to the Dutch broadcaster Rijnmond , which first reported on the yacht agreement.

Although the exact plans, timetable and costs have not been set, Oceano and Bezos will pay to dismantle the bridge, Rijnmond reported.

Frances van Heijst, the Rotterdam municipality spokeswoman, confirmed by phone that the city would not be footing the bill. She said the shipbuilder bears the cost of hiring a company to carry out the bridge’s deconstruction and reassembly, but that she could not provide an estimate or breakdown of the cost as “a lot of details need to be worked out.”

Representatives for Bezos and Oceano did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bezos, estimated to be one of the world’s richest people, owns The Washington Post. Last year, he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, the online retail giant he founded.

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Van Heijst said by email that the city agreed to remove the middle part of the bridge after receiving the request and weighing the economic costs and benefits.

“On the one hand, [there is] the economic importance / employment due to the construction of this ship,” she said. “On the other hand, our concern for De Hef.”

Were permission to dismantle the bridge not provided, Oceano would likely have to sail a half-finished yacht under De Hef and then complete construction elsewhere.

“From an economic perspective, we attach great importance to preserving employment,” van Heijst said.

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Marcel Walravens, a municipality official working on De Hef related issues, told Rijnmond that he considered the removal of the middle part “maintenance” as afterward the bridge would be restored to its original form.

Others are more concerned.

“Jobs are important, but there are limits with what you can and should do with our industrial heritage,” Ton Wesselink, the head of a local history society, Historisch Genootschap Roterodamum, told the website Dutch News .

The Dutch company building Jeff Bezos' megayacht scrapped its request to take apart a historic bridge following public outcry and threats to egg the ship

• The shipbuilder behind Jeff Bezos' megayacht has scrapped plans to dismantle a historic bridge.
• Bezos' yacht was too tall to pass underneath the bridge, but public outcry halted the plans. 
• The company worried locals would vandalize the ship as it passed by, Dutch newspaper Trouw reported.

The Dutch shipbuilder constructing Jeff Bezos' megayacht scrapped its request that a historic bridge be dismantled to accommodate the Amazon founder's vessel. 

Oceanco, a Netherlands-based custom yacht builder, informed the city of Rotterdam that it would no longer be requesting a permit to remove the center portion of the Koningshaven Bridge, known locally as De Hef, to allow Bezos' yacht to reach the North Sea. That is according to a letter written by a city official and translated from Dutch to English using Google Translate. 

While the city didn't rule out the possibility of a future permit to dismantle the bridge, Oceanco isn't going forward with the plan for the time being, the letter says.

It seems that Oceanco may have abandoned its plans to take apart the bridge following public outcry earlier this year. Dutch newspaper Trouw obtained documents from the city through a freedom of information request that showed the shipbuilder was taken aback by the uproar and had opted to drop its plans. 

"As a result of the reports, shipyard employees feel threatened and the company fears vandalism," Trouw reported, according to a translation. 

It's unclear how the yacht will now be transported if it doesn't fit under the bridge, though Trouw reports that Oceanco could choose to finish it at a shipyard closer to the sea.

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The company did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. 

A $500 million megayacht

Bezos' yacht saga began back in February, when  Dutch broadcaster Rijnmond reported that the 417-foot vessel would need to pass through Rotterdam — and underneath De Hef — on its way out to sea.

But Bezos' ship appears to be sail-assisted, which means it has three large masts, masts that are too tall to pass underneath the bridge despite its clearance of over 131 feet. The shipbuilder's solution was to temporarily remove the center portion of the bridge, then replace it once the vessel passed through. 

Frances van Heijst, a spokesperson for the municipality of Rotterdam, confirmed to Insider at the time that the city is able to grant permission to the maritime sector to take a ship to sea. But van Heijst told the Washington Post that the city would not pay to dismantle the bridge and reassemble it — that cost would fall to Oceanco.

Objections to the plan were swift. Locals began organizing an event on Facebook to throw rotten eggs at the yacht when it passed by, describing Bezos as a "megalomaniac billionaire." 

The existence of Bezos' megayacht was  first reported in Brad Stone's book , "Amazon Unbound," in May 2021. Photos and videos published last October showed the yacht in a shipyard in Zwijndrecht, Netherlands — though the vessel was clearly unfinished, it appeared to have a black hull and multiple, massive decks.

Currently known only as Y721, the yacht is predicted to cost $500 million and is expected to be "one of the finest sailing yachts in existence," Stone reported.

Watch: Jeff Bezos on regulating giant tech companies: 'I expect us to be scrutinized'

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Bezos Didn't Even Need to Dismantle Bridge to Move Yacht

Turns out, there were plenty of options for moving the world's largest yacht that didn't involve taking apart the koningshaven bridge in rotterdam..

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ big fancy new boat slipped silently from its berth at a Dutch shipyard in the wee hours of Tuesday morning without needing to dismantle any major historical pieces of infrastructure. Instead, the mega super yacht was towed a little out of its way to another shipyard without its mast.

Apparently, that was always an option.

The vessel, with the catchy name Y721, has been under construction for years and still has many months to go before it’s in the hands of one of history’s wealthiest individuals. Built by Oceanco at a shipyard in Alblasserdam, Netherlands, the company originally announced the masts of the yacht would be too tall to fit under the almost 100-year-old Koningshaven Bridge, which caused quite the controversy in the Netherlands . Oceanco applied for a permit to dismantle the bridge and reassemble it once the Y721 had passed through downtown Rotterdam, all at Bezos’ expense.

Known to locals as De Hef, the former railway bridge is a national heritage site. It was heavily damaged by Luftwaffe bombing during WWII. During renovations in 2017, Rotterdam’s city council promised residents the bridge would never again be dismantled. When Oceanco applied for the permit to do exactly that, the Dutch reacted with anger and a promise to lob eggs at the megayacht as it passed through their city, which over 3,000 people signed up on a Facebook group to do. Some went even further, threatening the company with violence should the bridge be dismantled, according to the German publication Der Spiegel . Rotterdam eventually denied the Oceanco the permit to dismantle De Hef.

Instead, the Y721 slipped out of its original shipyard around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning without its three towering masts and under the power of several tugs to head three hours to the Greenport shipyard in Rotterdam. Footage of the Y721 making its way to its new home was captured by Dutch Yachting :

It took three hours for the yacht to make it to Greenport, a trip that usually takes vessels twice as long under tow. The yacht even took a longer, more complicated route to avoid the bridge altogether, even though without its masts it could have slipped beneath the De Her undeterred. At Greenport, the masts will be installed and the ship will be tested at sea. The testing phase provided another wrinkle in the plan to dismantle the De Hef: After initial testing in open water, yachts often have to return to shipyards for improvements and repairs, which would have required even more bridge dismantling.

The 417-foot superyacht cost Bezos an estimated half-a-billion dollars to build and, when finally underway, will earn the title of largest sailing vessel in the world. Oceanco specializes in “green” sailing yacht and motorized vessels.

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Jeff Bezos to dismantle historic Dutch bridge for $450 million yacht

The koningshaven bridge was built in 1878 and repaired after bombing in world war ii.

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'Making Money' host provides insight on Wednesday's stock market activity.

Jeff Bezos will pay for Rotterdam to partially dismantle a nearly 145-year-old bridge so he can sail his $485 million super yacht out after finishing construction on the vessel. 

The Oceanco shipyard in Alblasserdam near Rotterdam has nearly completed the construction of Y721 , the former Amazon CEO’s yacht, but the vessel is too big to sail out with the bridge as it is. The builders asked the local council to remove the bridge’s central section so the yacht can pass. 

Jeff Bezos' superyacht in the Oceanco shipyard. The $485 million vessel will have a height over 130 feet.  (Courtesy Tom van Oossanen/IG: @tomvanoossanen)

"It's the only route to the sea," a spokesman for the mayor of Rotterdam told AFP , adding that billionaire Bezos, 57, would pay for the operation. The super yacht, which will be the largest boat built in Oceanco and one of the largest ever built, requires a 130-foot clearance, at least, to pass through. 

SHIRTLESS JEFF BEZOS COZIES UP TO GIRLFRIEND LAUREN SANCHEZ ON YACHT DURING ST. BARTS GETAWAY

The Koningshaven Bridge, known to locals as De Hef, dates from 1878 but was rebuilt after the Nazis bombed it in 1940 during World War II. The local council replaced the original swing bridge design after several traffic jams and collisions, changing it to a lifting bridge. 

The local council completed a major repair on the bridge in 2017 and promised not to dismantle the bridge again. 

KIM KARDASHIAN, PETE DAVIDSON HAVE DINNER AT JEFF BEZOS' LA MANSION

The shipbuilders dismissed suggestions that they sail a partially-finished vessel down the river and finish it elsewhere. Marcel Walravens, who managed the renovation, said it would prove impractical. 

"If you carry out a big job somewhere, you want all your tools in that place," Walravens told Rijnmond . "Otherwise you have to go back and forth constantly."

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Walravens noted that the municipality considers the project "very important." 

"Rotterdam has also been declared the maritime capital of Europe," he explained. "Shipbuilding and activity within that sector are therefore an important pillar for the municipality."

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Stepping On Board Italy’s Largest Sailing Yacht Sybaris

By Ben Roberts

The launch of a new yacht often signifies the realisation of a dream. For Bill Duker, that dream is 20 years in the making. From the days of sitting with his son drawing their dream yacht, to working with the finest designers and builders to make it happen. This is Sybaris, one man’s dream turned Italy’s largest sailing yacht.

Shortly after her technical launch and mast stepping operations, we arrived at the Perini Navi Group ’s Picchiotti shipyard in La Spezia to step on board the 70 metre ketch during her official launch ceremony.

This is Perini Navi’s most advanced project since the creation of the Maltese Falcon, which was launched at Perini Navi's Turkish facilities in 2006 and still stands as their largest yacht to date.

The subtle nature of Sybaris , even with her imposing 72 and 61 metre main and mizzen masts, is astounding. The performance under sail has the makings of a cutting-edge classic, and the resounding core of her creation is to house art, while becoming a masterpiece herself.

“We wanted to build a boat that combined great art in the interior, put it in a setting that the interior of the boat itself was a piece of art, and then set that interior within a superyacht that was also a masterpiece. Not only a masterpiece of beauty, but a masterpiece of performance.” Explains Sybaris Owner Bill Duker during the ceremony.

Style & Performance Drawn by the Perini Navi Technical Design studio, with considerable input from Bill Duker's team, Sybaris is sleek, sculpted and a notable evolution of the Perini Navi style with a less pronounced sheer line and more vertical bow.

Philippe Briand’s extensive experience was injected to optimise the naval architecture and make the most of the incredible 5,842m2 sail plan. This pedigree combination of designer, builder and architect has created a comfortable and stylish vessel which brings sailing back to the hands of the owner through cutting-edge technology..

A first for Perini Navi, Sybaris is equipped with two variable speed generators that supply power to the ship’s main grid, and stores excess energy in battery packs. This technology makes Sybaris a silent runner, allowing those on board to navigate and use battery power for hours without the smells and sounds of the diesel generator.

“As Perini Navi’s second largest sailing yacht launch to date, Sybaris raised numerous technical and aesthetic challenges, ” says Burak Akgül, Managing Director of Sales, Marketing & Design. “But where there’s a will there’s a way, and the result is a uniquely beautiful sailing yacht that pushes the boundaries of design in every conceivable way.”

Life Under Sail On deck, Sybaris provides an unprecedented amount of space. Her giant fly bridge measures up to 117m2 and reflects the truly sophisticated lifestyle inside and out. The exterior spaces lead seamlessly into the interiors, with PH Designs imbuing the yacht with an effortlessly cool demeanour in what is the studio’s first ever yacht project.

Titanium is a running feature throughout the yacht, formed by specialist craftsmen - brought in from the world of F1 - to create everything from exterior railings, leading into the striking interior ceilings and fixtures found across Sybaris.

The interior itself, matches the style and demeanour of Sybaris perfectly. The open plan-layout provides unbroken space which is filled with custom-designed furniture, storage and decorations which provide a clean, modern style that acts as a muted backdrop to the bold works of art from the owners private collection, set to be installed in the coming weeks.

Instead of built-in credenzas, for example, the 151m2 main salon features sculpted pillars milled from solid titanium to support ‘floating’ travel trunks clad with alligator skin. “The effect is modern with a remote reminiscence of Old World travel,” says founder of PH Design, Peter Hawrylewicz. “The allure lies in the confluence of these two temperaments.”

A dramatic sculptural feature is the central staircase leading down to the lower deck and up to the fly bridge. Made of titanium with glass balustrades and treads of bleached American oak, the Class-approved laminated glass panels alone weigh over 600 kg each, requiring reinforced beams fore and aft of the stairwell to support the structure.

To blur the boundary between the inside and outside environments, the titanium ceilings panels in the main salon continue through the glass sliding doors into the aft cockpit and softly bounce the illumination from the LED lighting recessed within.

The same reasoning has been applied to the flooring, where the extra-wide planks of teak in the cockpit are mirrored in the oak floorboards of the main salon. This is just one area which perfects the theme of the minimalist materials used, principally titanium, bleached oak and Bianco Assoluto marble with hints of bronze in the custom-built furnishings.

This is a yacht built for the pursuit of pleasure, with each design and construction party working under the vision of Bill Duker, who commented: “It’s been for me more than a creation of a high performance yacht, more than the creation of a beautiful piece of art, it’s been the thing that’s bound me and my son.”

We look forward to bringing you more on the interior of Sybaris in a dedicated interview with her designers, more about the journey of Sybaris’ creation and a closer look on board during her debut at the upcoming Monaco Yacht Show in September.

"It’s been for me more than a creation of a high performance yacht, more than the creation of a beautiful piece of art, it’s been the thing that’s bound me and my son." Bill Duker - Owner of Sybaris

"It’s been for me more than a creation of a high performance yacht, more than the creation of a beautiful piece of art, it’s been the thing that’s bound me and my son."

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Step aboard 230-foot sailing superyacht Sybaris, owned by William Duker

The same owner as the newly listed $65M Apogee penthouse

The reason William Duker just listed his Apogee penthouse (for $65 million) in Miami Beach is to travel around the world on his marvelous sailing superyacht.

Meet the 230-foot Sybaris, which is currently docked near the Miami Beach Marina off Terminal Isle. Launched in May, it is one of the largest sailing yachts on earth, and came to life after Duker beat cancer, per Boat International .

He set out to build a statement vessel.

“The boat kept growing in order to bring the lines down and make it look as sleek as it does. We thought it’d be a 56 metre, but then I started thinking that it had to be special, it had to be different. And there are already 10 or 11 or so 56 metres; I didn’t want hull number 12. I wanted something people could see from half a mile away and say, ‘Hey, there’s Sybaris ’,” Duker says.

Check out Duker’s favorite features.

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A glimpse of the S/Y Sybaris – the 70m sailing yacht with the Best Interior this year

Inside S/Y Sybaris – the 70m sailing yacht with the Best Interior this year.

Perini Navi 70m S/Y Sybaris won “Best Interior Award” at 2016 Monaco Yacht Show. From 28 September to 1 October 2016, the 26th Monaco Yacht Show celebrated the best that Superyachts have on offer with 34,000 participants from around the world.

Delivered to her owner, American Bill Duker, earlier this month Sybaris sailing yacht is the latest addition to Perini Navi’s fleet of 61 superyachts . Designed and built by Perini Navi, with input from Philippe Briand on the hull lines and sail plan, the 70m ketch is the largest sailing yacht ever built in Italy (877 GT) and second in the Perini Navi fleet to the iconic Maltese Falcon (88m).

Combining Perini Navi’s continuous research into new technical solutions, the original design was thoroughly revisited and has resulted in an extraordinary yacht, one which captures the advanced engineering and styling that define a Perini Navi. The 70m S/Y Sybaris was presented with the ‘Best Interior’ award for her stunning interiors masterminded by PH Design of Miami.

The brand new sailing yacht built by the Italian shipyard was awarded for the design and bespoke work made on her interior areas made by the yacht designers Peter Hawrylewicz and Ken Lieber. The award was given on stage to her owner Bill Duker.

“A Perini is not only a yacht, it is a style of life and Sybaris proves this,” commented Fabio Boschi, President of Perini Navi on the occasion of the press presentation onboard Sybaris.

Perini Navi also showcased the 38m S/Y Dahlak. Both Sybaris and Dahlak feature Perini Navi’s latest generation sail handling and stored power systems.

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Bill Duker Luxury Yacht – Sybaris

Luxury Sailing Yacht Sybaris is a 70 m / 229′8″ sailing vessel. She was built by Perini Navi in 2016.

With a beam of 13.24 m and a draft of 4.54 m, she has an aluminium hull and aluminium superstructure. She is powered by MTU engines of 1930 hp each. The sailing yacht can accommodate guests in cabins and an exterior design by Philippe Briand.

Commissioned for serial yacht owner Bill Duker, Sybaris is one of the largest yachts built by Italian yard Perini Navi to date, second only to the 88 metre Maltese Falcon.

Luxury Sailing Yacht Sybaris Awards

Monaco Yacht Show 2016 – Best Interior

Show Boats Design Awards Best Interior Layout & Design

Show Boats Design Awards Best Lighting Design

Show Boats Design Awards Newcomer of the Year PH Design

Her carbon-fiber rig includes two masts, which measure 72 and 62 metre’s respectively. Naval architecture, exterior design and sail plan optimization are all by Philippe Briand, while her interiors were styled by PH Design. Accommodation is for 12 guests, split across six cabins, and her total interior volume of 870 gross tonne’s also allows for a crew of up to 11.

Luxury Sailing Yacht Sybaris Interior

The subtle nature of Sybaris, even with her imposing 72 and 61 metre main and mizzen masts, is astounding. The performance under sail has the makings of a cutting-edge classic, and the resounding core of her creation is to house art, while becoming a masterpiece herself.

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Rich Guy Yachts Just Keep Getting Longer

“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,” american yachtsman bill duker said..

In case you need an even stronger indication that normal people are being taken for a ride in late-stage capitalism: historic inflation is being accompanied by a worldwide boom in the number of billionaires. All these new members of the ultra wealthy are buying super, mega and “giga” yachts to set them apart from land-based poors.

There are so many deeply incredible and infuriating pieces of information from this New Yorker story about the world of private yachts that I’m going to encourage you to spend time reading the whole in-depth piece. Here’s a few bits that caught my eye, like describing a different kind of embarrassment of riches: having too small a yacht.

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.

Or this portion, describing the amount of both pollution and wealthy self-awareness generated by these giants:

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.”

But what these big-ass boats really represent to their ultra-wealthy owners is the largest waste of money possible, or as Silicone Valley CEO put it, ““absorb the most excess capital.”

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.”

Check out the whole story to see how the other side lives. It might motivate you to sharpen up the old guillotine blades while you’re at it.

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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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Bill Duker Wikipedia, Software, Billionaire, Yacht, Miami, Net Worth

By sayyed ayan

Published on: September 20, 2023

Table of Contents

Bill Duker Wikipedia, Software, Billionaire, Yacht, Miami, Net Worth – Bill Duker is a name you might not have heard of, but he’s a man with a lot going on in his life. He’s a lawyer, a businessman, and a philanthropist, all rolled into one. Let’s take a closer look at the different aspects of his life.

Bill Duker Early Life & Family

Bill Duker wasn’t born into a regular family. He grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, where the world of business was a common topic at the dinner table. This early exposure to business had a profound impact on young Bill. He was fascinated by the intricacies of running a business and was determined to make his mark in this world.

Bill Duker Education

To make that mark, Bill knew he needed a solid education. He completed his Bachelor of Arts (BA) from a prestigious university, setting the foundation for his future success. However, he didn’t stop there. Bill’s ambition led him to Harvard Law School, where he excelled academically, graduating with honors. His academic achievements paved the way for a promising career in law.

Bill Duker Professional Life

Bill Duker’s journey in the professional world has been marked by hard work and determination. He started his career as a lawyer, working at different firms before deciding to take the entrepreneurial route. He founded Amici LLC, a company that provides support and services to businesses. This step into the business world was a significant one for Bill, and it opened up new avenues for him to explore.

Bill Duker Personal Life

In his personal life, Bill Duker is a man deeply in love with his wife, Sharon. Their relationship is a source of strength for both of them, helping them weather even the toughest storms. Bill often speaks of Sharon as his soulmate, and their bond is evident in the way they support and care for each other. For Bill, Sharon is the light of his life, and he cherishes every moment they share.

Bill Duker Yearly Earnings, Monthly Income, and Salary

Bill Duker’s annual income is approximately $15 million, translating to a monthly income of around $1.2 million. On a daily basis, he earns roughly $41,000. These figures might seem staggering, but they reflect the demands and expenses that come with a career in law. Bill’s dedication to his work and his commitment to justice are what drive these earnings.

Bill Duker Age, Height, and Weight

Bill Duker is currently 68 years old. He stands at 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs around 78 kg. His age and experience make him a seasoned lawyer who has assisted numerous people with their legal issues. His height and weight are just numbers; what truly defines Bill is his kindness and his willingness to help those in need.

Business Ventures

Amici LLC is just one of Bill Duker’s business ventures. He has also been involved in other businesses, including a software development company and a real estate investment firm. These ventures speak to his versatility and ability to navigate diverse industries. It’s clear that Bill has an entrepreneurial spirit and a knack for making smart business decisions.

Bill Duker Philanthropy

Beyond his professional success, Bill Duker is also known for his philanthropic endeavors. He’s a man with a big heart and a strong belief in giving back to the community. He’s donated to numerous charities and causes, demonstrating his commitment to making the world a better place. Bill understands the importance of using his wealth and influence for the greater good.

Bill Duker Social Media Accounts

In conclusion, Bill Duker is a multi-talented individual who has made a name for himself in the worlds of law, business, and philanthropy. His journey from a family of entrepreneurs to a successful lawyer and entrepreneur is a testament to his hard work and determination. Moreover, his dedication to justice, love for his wife, and commitment to giving back to the community make him a well-rounded and admirable figure. While his net worth and income are impressive, they are merely a reflection of his dedication to his various pursuits. Bill Duker is a man who exemplifies the power of determination, education, and a giving heart.

Who is Bill Duker, and what does he do?

Bill Duker is a lawyer, businessman, and philanthropist. He is involved in various business ventures, including founding Amici LLC, and he’s known for his commitment to justice and charitable contributions.

What is Bill Duker’s net worth?

Bill Duker’s net worth is estimated to be $3 million.

How much does Bill Duker earn annually, monthly, and daily?

Bill Duker earns around $15 million annually, which translates to approximately $1.2 million per month and about $41,000 per day. However, it’s important to note that lawyers often have substantial expenses.

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New cape coral yacht club designs: most on council like a coastal, key west vibe.

Given three different design options for the new Yacht Club Community Center , most of the Cape Coral City Council is leaning toward a coastal, Key West-flavor architecture.

At a committee of the whole meeting on Wednesday, the city sought direction from the council on a design direction for the outside of the community building.

"It's a concept, just like we do with anything else, and as we are designing, things may come up that we want to shift and be nimble (on)," said Cape Coral City Manager Michael Ilczyszyn.

James Pankonin with Kimley Horn, a consulting firm focusing on public and private developments, presented the information about the look of the community building.

Cape Coral's Yacht Club Community Park, which includes a yacht basin, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a ballroom, and a beach, has been a popular attraction and staple for the city since the 1960s but is set to undergo major renovations after Hurricane Ian delayed the original plans .

The current plans include a new two-story community center to replace the ballroom, removing the tennis courts, rearranging the area to accommodate a four-story parking garage, a new restaurant, and a new resort-style pool.

The city is also preparing for the demolition of the Yacht Club and its facilities in April as it awaits permits.

No estimates could be provided for the price of the new building.

"It will really come into how much of certain materials are needed and construction methods," Ilczyszyn said.

The city will have that information once they have 30% of the construction design.

Two public meetings for the designs are planned for April 2 and May 7.

After getting public input, the city will vote to amend its contract with Kimley Horn to approve all these changes.

The plan is to have these changes approved or introduced before the summer hiatus.

Previous Coverage Demolition of Cape Coral's Yacht Club slated for April will cost almost $1 million

Cape Coral community news Courtyards of Cape Coral South sets bingo fundraiser for residents still affected by Ian

New Designs for the Yacht Club building

John Bryant with Sweet Sparkman Architecture and Interiors, a Sarasota-based design firm, said the goal with the new designs was to maintain the experience of the original Yacht Club.

The majority of the council preferred option one.

Design one:

Bryant described the first option as "coastal vernacular" and similar to the park buildings at Lake Kennedy and Yellow Fever Creek.

"So it's sort of informed by the current architectural work in 2024," Bryant said. "Kinda Key West."

Councilmember Dan Sheppard and Mayor John Gunter preferred option one.

Gunter said the design was the most pleasing for him.

Councilmember Keith Long liked option one and said he liked the Key West aesthetic.

Councilmember Tom Hayden liked option one.

Design two:

Option two is more informed by the current Yacht Club and would have a stone base and mid-century feel to it, according to Bryant.

"There's certainly opportunity to kind of further develop this option to have even more of the existing Yacht Club feel, but a different vibe, feel than option one," Bryant said.

He also said option two might be more expressive the closer they try to recreate the aesthetic of the old ballroom building.

Councilmember Jessica Cosden liked design two as it incorporated design elements of the old building though she lamented how similar it looked to the first design.

"I wish we could have done more, but I know it's hard with a two-story building, to make it look the same as a very unique one-story building.

Councilmember Bill Steinke said two would be his choice as well, but was wary of additional maintenance of natural wood products used in the design.

"As long as we can bring that aesthetic and keep the maintenance down, number two would be my choice," Steinke said.

Councilmember Robert Welsh said he could go either way, but he liked the look of two.

Design three:

This would be more contemporary and modern.

"Even with a more contemporary language, you can still have warmth, incorporating some wood elements and stone elements," Bryant said.

None of the council members expressed any favorability for the third design.

Inside the new community center

The Community Center will have an additional 10,000 square feet for a total of 47,000 square feet, a history room to remember the first ballroom building on the first floor, and more rooms for civic and community use on the first floor.

Additionally, the new ballroom has shifted slightly as the balcony area on the second floor has been expanded to wrap around the top of the building.

Moscow Mayor Reports Shooting Down of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In a recent announcement on his Telegram channel, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin revealed that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying towards Moscow was shot down by air defense forces in the city district of Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast. According to preliminary information, there were no casualties or damage caused by the falling debris of the UAV.

Mayor Sobyanin further stated that emergency service specialists are currently working at the scene of the incident. This development comes after reports on the night of November 19th that air defense systems had destroyed a Ukrainian UAV over the Moscow region. The air defense forces successfully intercepted and shot down the unmanned aircraft in the Bogorodsky city district. Prior to this, Mayor Sobyanin had also reported the successful defense against an attack by a UAV heading towards Moscow.

It is worth noting that Russia has recently developed a new system for counteracting drones. This system aims to suppress the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles in order to ensure the safety and security of Russian airspace.

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Danneskjold owner: 'Crew ran for their lives in shipyard fire'

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The owner of the 32m sailing yacht Danneskjold has spoken exclusively to BOAT International after his yacht was destroyed in a fire at a shipyard in Newport, Rhode Island.

Owner Bill Duker said his crew were forced to “run for their lives” when a fire engulfed Danneskjold  and 30m Ocean Alexander 100 superyacht  Drinkability at the Hinckley Yachts yard in Portsmouth.

“They are very shaken – it all happened very fast,” he said, adding that at least one person was injured in the incident.

Both boats have been declared a total loss.

It is understood that the fire, which began on the morning of Friday, December 10, originated on Drinkability , which was in a travel lift while shipyard staff worked on the bottom of the boat. Danneskjold , which was at the yard undergoing maintenance work, was positioned alongside Drinkability .

While there has not yet been an official announcement about the cause of the fire, fingers have been pointed at the proximity of propane heaters to some hay bales, which were nearby Drinkability .

Duker said he was informed about the fire by a member of crew. “I got a call saying, ‘the boat’s gone. It’s consumed by fire – it’s a total loss.’”

He added that his first concern was for his crew. “For us, it’s a financial issue but for them, it’s their home and their jobs and all the plans they had made,” he said. “We’ve assured them that we’ll make sure they’re ok.”

Duker, who only bought Danneskjold at the end of October , added that he hadn’t even had the chance to step on board. “I never spent a night on the boat.”

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Majesty Yachts • 33.05 m • 10 guests • $6,450,000. Owner Bill Duker said his crew were forced to "run for their lives" when a fire engulfed Danneskjold and 30m Ocean Alexander 100 superyacht Drinkability at the Hinckley Yachts yard in Portsmouth.

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Constructing a new custom house is a huge and multifaceted undertaking, so it's important to find custom house builders in Elektrostal', Moscow Oblast, Russia you can trust to bring your vision to life, as well as keep the process under control from start to finish. Although a construction job is never without surprises and challenges ...

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