superyacht lifestyle

Superyacht chefs in the spotlight

Jess Douglas

Bianca Dunham

The Superyacht Life Foundation champions the positive people, places and projects surrounding the superyachting good life.

Latest stories.

A passion for superyachting

Far-flung destinations, exquisite craftsmanship and family adventures to remember forever – is it any wonder these owners have fallen in love with the superyacht life?

A helping hand for a more eco-aware crew

The release of new groundbreaking guidelines aim to assist superyacht crew in making the best decisions on board.

Superyachting’s global fusion

When two Italian interior designers met by chance in Australia, they joined forces to fuse the best of Europe with the best of Australia while drawing on sustainable materials.

A yacht for every taste

The most fundamental of choices in the world of superyachts – to motor or to sail

#humansofyachting

She started out drawing fishing boats in Lyme Regis and has ended up painting superyachts all over the world. The Yacht Artist shares her extraordinary journey.

The superyacht nurse explains how her love for the environment led her to working on board eco-yacht Black Pearl and with conservation society Sea Shepherd.

Matthijs, one of the superyachting world’s most recognised faces, shares his passion for inspiring others through social media, shedding light on the motivation behind his dedicated career.

This Italian superyacht captain grew up on boats – so it’s little wonder that he ended up following in his father’s footsteps and embracing a life and career at sea.

Behind every superyacht lies a story. The Superyacht Life Foundation is on a mission to share these stories, offering a fresh take on the positive people, places and projects that surround the superyachting good life. This is superyachting that shares your values.

Do you work in the superyacht industry? Yes No I would like to receive updates from Superyacht Life

Don’t miss out

Sign up to our newsletter and get our latest stories delivered monthly to your inbox.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

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.”

Link copied

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. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

The day the dinosaurs died .

What if you started itching— and couldn’t stop ?

How a notorious gangster was exposed by his own sister .

Woodstock was overrated .

Diana Nyad’s hundred-and-eleven-mile swim .

Photo Booth: Deana Lawson’s hyper-staged portraits of Black love .

Fiction by Roald Dahl: “The Landlady”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Susan B. Glasser

By Michael Schulman

By Luke Mogelson

• Bottom Painting & Prop Speed
• Fiberglass & Paint Work
• Running Gear & Valves
• Full-Service Team
• Monthly Maintenance Programs
• Dockside Service Team
• Full-Service Boatyard
• Management Services
• Accounting & Reporting
• Relevant Management Experience
• News and Media

Maximizing the Superyacht Lifestyle

The team at Yacht Management South Florida, Inc. understands the importance of maintaining the quality of life out on the water and presents their insights in this guide. If you want to begin experiencing the superyacht lifestyle aboard your yacht and you want your experience to be amazing, continue reading below to see how Yacht Management can help.

The Full Yachting Experience While Onboard Embracing the superyacht lifestyle is a privilege cherished by discerning superyacht owners, offering an unparalleled experience that transcends conventional luxury. To fully immerse yourself in the yacht lifestyle, two pivotal elements come to the forefront: assembling the right crew and ensuring impeccable preparedness for every voyage.

The Right Crew Your superyacht experience hinges on the expertise and professionalism of your hired crew. Meticulously select and nurture a team comprising a seasoned captain, skilled chef, attentive stewardesses, and capable deckhands. Their collective prowess in navigation, hospitality, and vessel maintenance is indispensable. The harmonious synergy among the crew fosters a seamless adventure onboard.

Thorough Preparation  The heart of the lifestyle is marked by meticulous preparation. Before embarking on any journey, ensure that your vessel is impeccably maintained and primed for the open waters. Regular maintenance routines and comprehensive inspections are non-negotiable, guarding against unforeseen setbacks during your yacht experience. Provisioning is key, catering to both guest preferences and culinary indulgences, while the itinerary should be thoughtfully tailored to provide the utmost in yacht lifestyle enjoyment.

Safety as a Priority Prioritizing safety is paramount within yachting. Outfit your vessel with cutting-edge safety equipment, conduct routine safety drills, and ensure that your crew is well-versed in emergency protocols. A yacht lifestyle characterized by peace of mind allows all on board to bask in the experience without having any worries.

Personalized Itineraries To truly embody the superyacht lifestyle, custom-tailored itineraries are a must. Collaborate closely with your captain to craft bespoke journeys that encompass your favored destinations, pursuits, and experiences. Whether it's discovering secluded coves, relishing gourmet fare, or engaging in thrilling water sports, each excursion should reflect your unique yacht lifestyle preferences.

Guest-Centric Comfort Anticipating the desires of your guests is a hallmark of the yacht lifestyle. Ensure that your superyacht offers a wealth of amenities, from sumptuous cabins and gourmet kitchens to sophisticated entertainment systems. The pinnacle of superyacht ownership is curating an exceptional experience that caters to all onboard, elevating the art of hospitality.

The lifestyle is not merely about ownership. It's an embodiment of extraordinary experiences and cherished memories. By assembling the right crew , meticulously preparing for each voyage, prioritizing safety, and crafting personalized itineraries, you can fully embrace the yacht lifestyle and relish every moment aboard your superyacht. It's the pinnacle of luxury, where the experience of yachting is synonymous with exceptional living.

How Complete Yacht Upkeep Can Elevate the Superyacht Experiences Professional superyacht management services and maintenance care are the bedrock of an elevated superyacht lifestyle. They offer owners a respite from the demanding intricacies of maintenance, granting them the freedom to wholly indulge in the joys of yacht ownership. The benefits are manifold: peace of mind prevails as experts oversee meticulous yacht maintenance and repairs, ensuring a worry-free experience.

Expertise and efficiency come to the forefront, with seasoned professionals adeptly managing all aspects of the vessel, from engine room intricacies to the yacht's exterior. Customization is the hallmark of these services, catering to individual owner preferences, from yacht crewing to accounting and reporting services to overseeing specialized management of the vessel.

Cost-effectiveness is realized through proactive maintenance that staves off costly breakdowns. Additionally, yacht enhancement opportunities abound, enabling owners of superyachts to relish in the fun adventures and spend less time worrying about the tedious maintenance schedules they may have. This bolsters both enjoyment and appreciation of the vessel. The networks and industry connections of yacht management companies prove invaluable, while streamlined logistics ensure every excursion is executed seamlessly.

The services offered by our team of Fort Lauderdale yacht management experts are the cornerstone of an enhanced yachting experience. They transform yacht ownership into a luxurious, carefree, and indulgent yacht lifestyle, offering unparalleled excellence and peace of mind.

Team Up With a Leader Among Fort Lauderdale Yacht Management Companies Collaborating with our dedicated Fort Lauderdale yacht management team opens doors to a comprehensive array of yacht management services that set us apart within the industry, allowing you to get the most out of the superyacht lifestyle. Our esteemed South Florida yacht management professionals take the lead, offering a treasure trove of enlightening yacht blog articles . These articles constitute a valuable repository of knowledge for budding yacht enthusiasts, delving deep into the multifaceted realm of yacht management.

Should your curiosity lead you to explore our diverse service offerings or seek tailored care for your unique requirements, we warmly invite you to engage with our seasoned professionals. Initiating contact is effortless, whether you prefer our user-friendly online contact form or a straightforward phone call . Be assured we are poised to become an invaluable addition to your maritime team, eagerly anticipating the privilege of preparing your vessel for its next unforgettable journey. Your yacht deserves nothing less than the utmost care, and that is precisely what we provide.

Related Readings Maximizing the Lifespan of Your Yacht Reasons to Consider Professional Superyacht Management

For all inquiries, fill out the form below and a member of our team will respond as soon as possible

• Nautic Shows
• America’s Cup
• Classic Yachts
• Motor Yachts
• Sailing Yachts
• Superyachts
• Yachts News
• Destinations
• Yacht Clubs
• Boat Racing
• Meta Yachts

If cruising around in a private superyacht wasn’t outrageous enough, the “shadow yacht” concept added even more oomph to the billionaire lifestyle. More and more ultra-rich superyacht owners are choosing to add a second, equally stunning yacht, to accompany the mothership on all journeys, like a floating garage. And it all started with the Pursuit.

One of the benefits of traveling onboard a superyacht is that there’s room for several tenders and multiple water toys. After all, a big part of vacationing in beautiful exotic locations is the ability to have some fun on the water, in privacy. However, even these large vessels became too small for all the toys that would satisfy adventure-seeking guests, including helicopters, submarines, and large chase boats.

It’s not just about storing these toys. The bigger ones require a reliable launch system, plus additional equipment. All of this would not only take a lot of space onboard a superyacht, but would also make it look more like a commercial vessel than a floating mansion. This is how a new breed of luxury yachts was born.

They were called support yachts, or shadow vessels, and were built to take over the logistics of superyachts, as much as possible. Picture them as massive, floating garages, trailing the main yacht during cruises. Their main function is to carry all the water toys, and any other additional vehicles, which is why they always feature a heavy-duty crane onboard.

But they also double as storage spaces for everything from extra fuel and supplies to laundry, kitchen equipment, wastewater, and garbage. At first, they looked a lot like the offshore vessels in the oil and gas industry, which inspired them.

Over time, these support vessels started looking better, and integrating more comfortable accommodation. Today, shadow yachts are almost as luxurious as the motherships, even though their main role is still logistics-related.

The Dutch Damen Shipyards Group was instrumental in bringing support yachts on the market. Back in 2010, it was making waves with the first Sea Axe 5009. Currently known as Pursuit, this pioneering ship was named Oberon at the time, and claimed to be the first official support yacht.

At 50 meters (164 feet) Oberon was as large as a superyacht, but with a very different layout. Its massive, 30-meter (98 feet) open deck revealed a working area unfolding over 230 square meters (2,475 square feet). A rugged, 10-meter (32.8 feet) crane dominated the area, flexing a 15-ton lifting capacity.

At the time, Oberon broke the ice on the Fast Yacht Support market. It was the first of its kind to incorporate the Axe Bow, an innovative concept that was initially developed for military and offshore applications.

The Axe Bow was developed by Damen in collaboration with the Delft University of Technology’s Ship Hydromechanics Department. The design with a “knife-like” bow was meant to ensure top speed and fuel efficiency even in challenging weather conditions. Normally, this would result in more discomfort for passengers, especially when facing rough waters.

The Axe Bow also takes care of this inconvenience, which results in a more comfortable vessel. Before Oberon’s launch, Amels (Damen’s yacht building division) had sold several of the Sea Axe vessels, based on the Axe Bow concept. But they were all operating in the oil or military field.

When the Sea Axe was adapted for yacht design, Damen practically created a new category of yachts, which would be known as Fast Yacht Support vessels. And Oberon (renamed Pursuit) was the first one.

At the time of its launch, it was rumored to become the shadow vessel of another Amels debut, a mammoth 300-foot (91 meters) superyacht. Thirteen years later, it’s back on the market, asking for $18.3 million, and ready to become the companion of another grandiose superyacht.

Pursuit is still in top shape. During a 2015 refit, it got a fresh paint job and a touch-and-go helipad. A few years later, in 2021, it was also fitted with new Volvo generators and an upgraded navigation system. Powered by four MTU engines, Pursuit can carry up to 175,000 liters of fuel onboard. Thanks to this, it can easily cross the Atlantic at 18 knots (20.7 mph/33 kph).

As for accommodation, Pursuit only comes with three standard cabins, three guest rooms, and a lounge, doubling as a dining room. Even though this is modest, compared to the impressive amenities of today’s support yachts, Pursuit was still luxurious at the time of its debut. According to Damen, it was designed to be as stylish as the main yacht, “ rather than looking like the poor relation .” This meant a good-looking exterior, plus top- quality materials and furnishings.

Damen  has delivered more than 20 Yacht Support Vessels, between 45 and 75 meters (148 and 246 feet) since 2009. Its current YS (Yacht Support) range includes the YS 53, the YS 65, and the YS 75. The YS 75 combines the classic qualities of Damens’ shadow yachts with impressive accommodation for up to 40 crew members, plus the luxurious style of a superyacht.

Today, the line between superyachts and their shadow vessels is blurred. The latest support vessels are more like floating hotels, than garages, and are perfectly fit for accommodating extra guests in equally luxurious conditions. Underneath its tough exterior, the forefather of these extravagant vessels is still  a living legend.

• Shadow Yachts
• superyachts

RELATED ARTICLES

Isa launches project unica 40m – the epitome of contemporary trends, azimut gets even more grande with the unveiling of the project of grande 44m, the new fleet flagship, zeelander yachts reveals stylish interior to keenly awaited new flagship yacht zeelander 8, damen yachting launches second yacht support 53, conrad shipyard launches extra time.

Subscribe to our newsletter

To be updated with all the latest news, offers and special announcements.

LATEST ARTICLES

Cannes yachting festival 2024: showcasing innovation and joy on the french riviera, sailgp season 4 heats up: bermuda grand prix marks a pivotal turn, exploring ineos britannia’s ac75 launch: a leap in america’s cup competition, emirates team new zealand preparations for america’s cup and kiwi cup raffle, editor picks, canadian beau lake introduces the tahoe ’14 and lugano ’14 electric runabouts, underwater adventure and exploration with deepflight’s super falcon 3s, driving performance on land and on water: 41′ amg carbon edition, popular posts, young designer of the year 2022: ioana valentina corcodel reveals 65m ophelia concept, mirabaud sailing video of the century: celebrating 2 decades of passion, superyacht the flying fox seized in the dominican republic, popular category.

• Regatta 823
• America's Cup 422
• Motor Yachts 264
• Boating 216
• Superyachts 186
• Sailing 179
• Yachts News 174
• Sailing Yachts 165

The global authority in superyachting

• NEWSLETTERS
• Yachts Home
• The Superyacht Directory
• Yacht Reports
• Brokerage News
• The largest yachts in the world
• The Register
• Yacht Advice
• Yacht Design
• 12m to 24m yachts
• Monaco Yacht Show
• Builder Directory
• Designer Directory
• Interior Design Directory
• Naval Architect Directory
• Yachts for sale home
• Motor yachts
• Sailing yachts
• Explorer yachts
• Classic yachts
• Sale Broker Directory
• Charter Home
• Yachts for Charter
• Charter Destinations
• Charter Broker Directory
• Destinations Home
• Mediterranean
• South Pacific
• Rest of the World
• Boat Life Home
• Owners' Experiences
• Interiors Suppliers
• Owners' Club
• Captains' Club
• BOAT Showcase
• Boat Presents
• Events Home
• World Superyacht Awards
• Superyacht Design Festival
• Design and Innovation Awards
• Young Designer of the Year Award
• Artistry and Craft Awards
• Explorer Yachts Summit
• Ocean Talks
• The Ocean Awards
• BOAT Connect
• Between the bays
• Golf Invitational
• Boat Pro Home
• Global Order Book
• Superyacht Insight
• Premium Content
• Product Features
• Testimonials
• Pricing Plan
• Tenders & Equipment

What's trending in superyacht technology?

Despite the omnipresence of today’s smartphones and gadgets, yachts have struggled to keep up with tech developments onshore. But that’s changing – and fast, as Risa Merl discovers the latest technology trends in the world of superyacht design.

When it comes to technology, we’ve never had it so good. From an ever-increasing range of gadgets and gizmos to the latest advances in connectivity, there’s more choice, and more exciting developments on the horizon than ever before – and that goes for the superyacht world, too. Owners want the same services – if not better – that they can access on land, and a handful of specialist firms are doing their best to meet consumer-driven demand on board. Yet, whether owners appreciate it or not, yachts have their own challenges when it comes to keeping up with tech’s constant progress. The middle of the ocean is one of the hardest – and most expensive – places to ensure fast and reliable broadband. And the three-year build time of a custom yacht is a challenge for suppliers and designers who need to think ahead and include the latest tech by the time the yacht is launched. Nonetheless, tech companies are rising to the challenge with an abundance of products to enhance onboard entertainment and security.

“Yacht guests want the same experience they have at home, so rock-solid and secure Wi-Fi is the first priority,” explains Videoworks CTO Maurizio Minossi, “and bigger internet pipes will be available within the next two years in order to allow 5G and new-generation VSAT [very small aperture terminal – a compact, two-way satellite antenna].” Super-fast connectivity is leading the charge, then, but there are plenty more developments in the pipeline too...

Streaming on superyachts

On-demand services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have all heightened our expectations of how quickly we should get whatever we desire. We want it now, and that includes being able to watch the latest movies and television shows, wherever we are. Streaming services that work on land, however, haven’t always worked as efficiently on yachts, both in terms of reliable connectivity and price point, as Anil Thadani, owner of the world- roaming 45-metre Latitude reports. “The service I used before was horrible,” he says. “Connectivity was spotty, the speed was awful and it cost a lot more because they only gave us a limited amount – 30GB per month – for about $7,000 [£5,400], and if you exceeded that, the rates would be exorbitant.”

Thadani found a new service for Latitude that is working wonders. Switching over to Marine VSAT required a new satellite dome, which incurred upfront costs, but he says that the service has been so good that the initial pain was worth it. Now for a fixed cost of $5,000 per month he can stream Netflix in remote parts of Indonesia and watch CNN live on his iPad. He says the streaming isn’t always flawless, but overall it’s “good enough” and he hasn’t experienced any outages. For an extra $5,000 per month, Marine VSAT can guarantee flawless streaming and unlimited data. Meanwhile, London-based satellite communications company Inmarsat is set to launch seven new satellites into orbit by 2023, which will include extended 'always-on' coverage across the Arctic for those plotting a polar adventure.

For those who don’t want to rely on a data connection, Kaleidescape is also offering its new Marine Movie Service. Launched at the Monaco Yacht Show, it offers movie and music collections that arrive on a hard drive in a matter of days. One drive can hold up to 100 Blu-ray or 50 4K-quality movies, and customers (either a hands-on owner or a crew member) can have whichever titles they want pre-loaded on to it. The service also offers curated selections of new cinema releases, classic movies and kids’ favourites too.

It’s not the breadth of choice, however, but the quality of what’s on offer that companies are focusing on. “Ten years ago, yacht owners and captains were more concerned with how to get enough content,” says Cheena Srinivasan, founder and CEO of Kaleidescape. “Now there’s an overabundance of content, and we are trying to solve that problem through curation. Think of this as a white-glove concierge service. We’re bringing convenience via an end-to-end system through working with our marine integrators, so the yacht owners don’t have to worry about anything.”

Kaleidescape demonstrated its offerings during the boat show, dimming the lights on board the Tankoa yacht Solo and showing how vividly coloured and rich in sound a movie from its system is. Solo is beta-testing this brand new service, supported by 88 marine integrators worldwide who will install the hard drives to ensure quality control.

IT support at sea

Priva is another superyacht tech company that’s putting a focus on concierge services to reduce owner headaches – what good is expensive kit if it doesn’t work when you want to use it? Priva’s Technical Concierge is a 24/7 service that connects crew directly to expert audiovisual and technical support. Rather than getting passed around at a call centre, users will find that the first person to answer this hotline is a highly skilled technical expert, who will work with the captain or electronic technical officer to get the yacht’s tech back online and working right away.

“We want yacht owners to get the most out of every minute they spend on board,” says Cynthia Gillis, senior vice president at Global Eagle, the company behind Priva. “PRIVA and our 24/7 Technical Concierge service are tailored to our clients who want to be fully connected and access customized content from anywhere in the world. We have 50, high-touch, trained technicians and specialists dedicated to yacht customers who are available to address our clients’ specific technical needs without disrupting their onboard experience.”

Connectivity on demand

Of course, superyacht owners aren’t on board all the time, and charter yachts aren’t booked every week of the year, so onboard tech has to be scalable to suit their needs. “Flexibility is key when it comes to yacht connectivity,” says Peter Broadhurst, senior vice president at Inmarsat. Its latest generation of Global Xpress satellites were launched two years ago and allow for greater bandwidth. Inmarsat then tailored the service to the yachting industry with Fleet Xpress, which has since performed more than 10,000 installations.

The service allows owners and managers to scale bandwidth up and down, depending on usage and the number of people on board at any one time, and even allows clients to suspend their service in the off-season (or in case a worldwide pandemic leaves you on one side of the world and your yacht on the other). "We've introduced a lot more flexibility into our plans," Broadhurst explains, "the ability to upgrade and downgrade as and when you want, suspend the service, change the data rates and plans." Inmarsat data plans start from just three months.

Adaptability is also key when it comes to a yacht’s build. “One of the biggest challenges during any yacht project is that technology keeps evolving, and you don’t want a new yacht with old tech,” says Casper Kleiman of Dutch company VBH, which creates audio, video and IT products for new-build yachts as well as refits. VBH confirms that in the past systems needed to be connected physically, which added to the challenge of designing a yacht that needed to be up to date at launch three years down the line. But this is now changing thanks to software-based connections. “By using a flexible software-based backbone, it’s easier to connect new hardware later in the build,” Kleiman says. “We’ve used this on a recent 87-metre yacht.”

Once installed, technology also has to work within multipurpose spaces, which are becoming increasingly popular on board. A helideck might host yoga in the morning, a round of TopGolf in the afternoon and a live music performance, nightclub or movie under the stars come nightfall – and it still needs to be able to allow a helicopter to land if required. “Providing multifunctional areas and spaces that evolve throughout the day, including the main saloon and beach club, requires technology that can adapt from one experience or functionality to another,” says Alistair Levine, director of sales and marketing at California Audio Technology.

“This type of flexibility harnesses everything from video walls and audio systems to lighting control and motorised shades, so that you can manipulate the visual and auditory experience to suit your needs – but this level of functionality needs to be discussed at the design stage.”

Smartphone apps

In recent years we’ve become attached – some might argue addicted – to our smartphones, so it’s no surprise that we now want and expect them to control our onboard tech. As yacht automation streamlines into a “smart yacht” experience, clients and crew want to be able to control all the onboard systems from one easy-to-use location. Videoworks currently offers just this, integrating all of the yacht’s domotics and onboard systems into a single device. Instead of the popular Crestron remote control, owners might opt for a dedicated multi-service app that allows them to manage all of their systems from a smartphone. ItwModeX is an iOS app (a web version can be installed on Android) designed by Itworks exclusively for Videoworks, which can be customised with content and graphics to suit each yacht. “Multi-service apps can seamlessly integrate with the usual tools guests are familiar with, such as Kaleidescape,” says Minossi. “We use them in most of our projects.”

Yacht brokerage houses are also thinking more about mobile devices, as proven by the new Burgess app which allows users access to its services whether on or offline. “We want to allow our clients and potential customers access to Burgess yachts and content via whichever channel they prefer,” says Tim Davis, chief marketing officer at Burgess. “Our research shows that our target audience favours mobile devices [over laptops or desktop computers] to access our digital services. We have seen a good proportion of new prospects registering with Burgess via the app, as well as existing customers. Take-up has been encouraging – and we are planning an Android version.”

Cybersecurity

Superyachts can have all the latest kit, then. Yet while advances in audiovisual technology are impressive, having sufficient cybersecurity to keep onboard internet connections safe hasn’t become standard practice. “Research showed us that 64 per cent of superyachts rely on simple firewalls or crew-based solutions to protect against cyber risks – and 76 per cent don’t have anyone on board to look after cybersecurity,” says Rob Myers, senior director at Inmarsat. The company now offers its Fleet Secure End Point service to address this problem. It is designed to prevent cyberattacks, detect vulnerabilities and respond to threats – and the bandwidth used doesn’t come out of the yacht owner’s monthly allowance. "It's a pragmatic approach to security," says Broadhurst.

At the Marine Equipment Trade Show in Amsterdam, Videoworks introduced Cisco ASA 55066, a new dedicated onboard cybersecurity device. “Cisco ASA is a state-of-the-art cybersecurity product,” claims Minossi. The network security device incorporates threat- defence software, which allows for real-time identification and prevention of viruses and threats from the web. Several levels of security are permitted via a single platform, and it can also look at all network activity to see vulnerabilities in any apps or files, with an automated system assessing potential threats.

Emotional rooms

“The modern consumer is all about the experience that their technology delivers to them, not the underlying technology,” Levine says. “Millennials are starting to drive these conversations. Whether they are the children or grandchildren of the owners, they are far more willing to pay for exceptional experiences than things.” Meeting this demand is the rise of dynamic, interactive and so-called “emotional” tech on board, which is designed to enhance a guest’s experience.

Sacramento-based California Audio Technology creates “dynamic entertainment experiences”, and is looking to do more with less – including less equipment. The company is working on an audio specification that will allow onboard DJs or bands to be accompanied simply by their laptops or instruments without the need to bring on a bulky PA system, and the time and logistics that are required for set-up. Working with production company Blue International Talent, it is developing a marine system spec that will consider a yacht’s individual sound and lighting needs – however high-spec these might be. 

“Most audio systems in the marine space are designed to deliver low-level background audio, yet most stadiums don’t have the aesthetic integration possible that a yacht requires,” says Levine. “This specification will allow for a whole new range of experiences for both charter guests and owners, by giving them the opportunity to have everything from a stand-up comedian to a jazz trio to someone like Coldplay, David Guetta or Elton John playing a private concert on the back of their yacht in a remote part of the world.”

Meanwhile, VBH is focusing on setting the mood, and helping to create ever more extravagant examples of interactive bars, walls and hallways that can transform a superyacht space using content displayed on screens. “Instead of such screens only being used for showing movies or television shows, we can use them as integrative backgrounds,” says Kleiman. “They can add extra depth and meaning to a boat’s space.”

Perhaps as a much-needed salve to all this overload in technology, Videoworks has developed what it calls the Emotional Room, a system that utilises an algorithm on a neural network to assess the mood of the people in a space and adapt the lighting and music accordingly. Cameras in the room will scan guests’ faces to determine their emotions by mapping “points of interest” on their faces, such as the eyes, lips and cheekbones. The neural network will then learn how different settings – from lighting set-up and positions to music selection – in the room affect human emotions. This self-learning system evolves the more it’s used, and is designed to replicate conditions that it logs as the most pleasing.

Emotional Rooms will start appearing on yachts from late spring this year, including in a project with one of the top Italian builders. Not only is superyacht technology getting better at giving us what we want, it will soon be doing it without us even asking.

Safety first

With such enormous pieces of machinery sitting far from land, there's a certain risk factor that comes with the territory of yachting. And while the owner is busy soaking up the sunshine or entertaining guests of an evening, it's the role of the crew and captain to ensure safety at all times. "Don't run on the decks" springs to mind, but in reality, onboard safety goes far beyond the do's and don't of yachting etiquette. Inmarsat is currently trialling an IMO approved safety solution 'Fleet Safety', set for release later this year. "We've effectively brought safety communications into the 21st century," says Broadhurst. "If the vessel is in any danger then the crew have immediate access to secure communications. It's easier to use than what's currently out there, with greater functionality that will allow the crewmembers to feel confident in onboard safety equipment and communications. Inmarsat was set up to provide safety to seafarers and this is effectively the next generation of safety." 

This feature is taken from the March 2019 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.

More stories

Most recent, from our partners, sponsored listings.

Superyacht Cup Palma gets off to a great start among rookies and prominent veterans

Superyacht Cup Palma is looking forward to summer 2024 with great enthusiasm. In fact, the 28th edition of Europe’s longest-running superyacht regatta

La Belle Classe Superyachts Business Symposium, yachting at the heart of Monaco’s challenges

An insightful debate among the world’s top players in the yachting industry to discuss the importance and economic impact of yachting worldwide

Monaco Energy Boat Challenge returns in July for its 11th edition

The 11th edition of the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge is scheduled to occur from July 1st to 6th, 2024, organized by the

International Smart & Sustainable Marina Awards, the final stages of the sustainable yachting awards

The final stage of the selection of nominees for the International Smart & Sustainable Marina Awards,the competition among the best technological and

Monaco Classic Week, over 100 boats expected at Yacht Club de Monaco

Monaco Classic Week: over 100 classic boats on display Organized by Yacht Club de Monaco and hosted by the Principality of the

Qu presents: “Infinitude. A circular lighting experience”

Qu’s Milan-based showroom opens its doors to us. Interview with Chiara Marzucco The circle shape has always been a symbol of harmony,

On-board safety: Alberto Palazzo talks about firefighting systems and Aerosol AerPro

During the latest conference organized by ItalianYachtMasters and the Associazione Marittimi Argentario, we met with Alberto Palazzo, Sole Director of Polytechno Engineering,

ItalianYachtMasters: the captains of the future are Made in Italy

Great attendance at the second edition of the Argentario meets Yachting conference which, organized by ItalianYachtMasters and Associazione Marittimi Argentario, focused on

The 6th Monaco Yacht Ocean comes to an end: sustainability took centre stage

The prestigious Yacht Club de Monaco held the 6th Monaco Yacht Week, an initiative supported by the Prince Albert II Foundation. The

How to take care of the wetted surface of the hull? We asked STOPPANI

Keeping a boat in excellent condition is one of the main concerns for most boat owners, and perhaps, the most difficult to

Subscribe For Latest Updates

Sign up to receive the best of superyachts news, world premieres and shipyards new models.

The only ADVERTISING FREE newsletter

• Motorcycles
• Car of the Month
• Destinations
• Men’s Fashion
• Watch Collector
• Art & Collectibles
• Vacation Homes
• Celebrity Homes
• New Construction
• Home Design
• Electronics
• Fine Dining
• Aston Martin
• L’Atelier
• Les Marquables de Martell
• Mira Villas
• Panther National
• Reynolds Lake Oconee
• 672 Wine Club
• Sports & Leisure
• Health & Wellness
• Best of the Best
• The Ultimate Gift Guide

The 10 Best Superyacht Concepts of 2023

Blue-sky superyacht concepts range from pure fantasy to easily buildable. here are our 10 favorites in the last year., howard walker, howard walker's most recent stories.

• This 112-Foot Superyacht Has an Interior That’ll Make Your Manhattan Condo Jealous
• This 1967 Shelby GT500 Has Been Reimagined to Perfection. Now It’s up for Grabs.
• One of Ferrari’s Earliest Formula 1 Cars Is Now Up for Grabs
• Share This Article

To stand out from the crowd, more and more superyacht buyers—many new to the market—are challenging designers to break molds, go extreme, and think way outside of the traditional box. And they’re doing it with head-spinning bow designs, huge windows, and much larger interior and exterior spaces.

They’re also trading traditional monohulls for big-volume catamarans and trimarans, taking inspiration from oddball places—an aircraft carrier or 1930s Hollywood-style automobile—and, at the same time, future-proofing them with new propulsion systems, including hydrogen fuel cells, solar power, and advanced battery power.

These 10 concepts, from a range of designers and studios, show that the future of superyacht design has never been more exciting—if at times a little bizarre.

Sinot, ‘Aware’

Not all superyachts need to look like multi-tiered wedding cakes. That’s according to Dutch studio Sinot Yacht, which has just penned conceptual renderings for a sleek, almost-minimalist cruiser called Aware . Yes, the 262-footer does have the look of some super-stylish European river boat from the likes of Viking or Uniworld. But the aim here is to optimize the spaces experienced owners tend to use the most. Like the owner’s suite on the main deck, which in Aware spans the full beam and totals over 860 square feet. Then there’s the super-size beach club with its twin fold-out terraces, gym, bar, cinema, 36-foot-long pool, and glass-sided dining area. As for power, Sinot envisions a hybrid diesel-electric propulsion system good for a 21 mph max, and a 4,000 nautical mile range at 14 mph.

Icon Yachts, ‘Mission’

Ice-breaking, globe-trotting expedition yachts are nothing new for Holland’s Icon Yachts. Its rugged, 224-foot, converted ice-breaker Ragnar literally wrote the rule-book on building high-latitude-friendly luxury superyachts. But Icon’s concept for a brand-new, ultimate explorer it’s calling Mission adds Indiana Jones–levels of off-the-grid exploration. Designed by Dutch explorer-yacht specialist Bernd Weel, Mission is all towering, ice-crushing bow, trademark geometric hull sides, and endless space for all that adventure-seeking gear. Here we’re talking six tenders of all sizes, a three-person submersible, an Airbus H130 helicopter, and space midships for a multitude of shipping containers for when you want to become the next Jacques Cousteau. As for range, Icon would target over 6,000 nautical miles.

Andy Waugh Yacht Design, ‘Decadence’

Flick through the pages of any automotive history book and you’ll notice that 1930s design is dominated by the outrageous, teardrop-fendered creations of the French duo of Figoni et Falaschi. Their designs look to be the inspiration behind London-based designer Andy Waugh’s jaw-dropping concept for a 264-foot catamaran he quite aptly calls Decadence . Featuring a central hull flanked by four teardrop-like pods, the concept evolves the idea of so-called SWATH catamaran hull design used in a number of oil-platform support, research vessels, and even some superyachts. Providing immense stability through reduced roll and pitch, the design makes perfect sense for a superyacht. One drawback: the yacht’s massive, marina-unfriendly 98-foot beam. Though that becomes a positive when you consider Decadence ‘s vast owner’s suite measures 66 feet wide and almost 100 feet long.

Oceanco, ‘Aeolus’

When the Dutch superyacht maestros at Oceanco release a blue-sky design, the concept is likely just a few steps away from reality. Fresh from delivering the 410-foot Koru , the world’s largest sailing yacht, to new owner Jeff Bezos, and the 357-foot Seven Seas to Steven Spielberg, Oceanco has unveiled Aeolus , a concept for a highly sustainable 430-foot gigayacht. Drawn by former Rolls-Royce head of design Giles Taylor, this curvaceous, quad-deck world cruiser looks to the future by incorporating Oceanco’s Energy Transition Platform (ETP) philosophy. The propulsion could start with diesel-electric power, with battery banks charged by twin MTU V16 diesel generators. Then, as technologies advance, it could more to more advanced fuel types such as methanol or other, even wilder technologies like nuclear power.

Anthony Glasson, ‘Star Trek’

Designed to boldly go across oceans, this concept for a massive 275-foot trimaran i s said to have been inspired by Hong Kong–based designer Anthony Glasson’s love of the TV show “Star Trek”—especially the Starship Enterprise . Viewed bow-on, you can see why: The slender, wave-piercing bow, the twin side hulls, and rounded glass upper observation deck have USS Enterprise written all over it. But the trimaran form definitely adds to its function, with the wide beam creating an expansive “courtyard” that’s part enclosed and part open, housing a hot tub—one of three aboard—a gym, a bar, sunpads galore and even a helipad-turned-dancefloor. Glasson envisions the trimaran to be built of lightweight aluminum, with a 5,000-nautical-mile range. Captain Kirk would be impressed.

Jozeph Forakis, ‘Pegasus’

Until now, arguably the ultimate stealth boat was the one in the 1997 James Bond romp Tomorrow Never Dies , owned by tyrannical media mogul Elliot Carver. That would change if the 289-foot concept Pegasus , from the computer screen of N.Y.C.-born and now Milan-based designer Jozeph Forakis, gets a production go-ahead. It features a superstructure comprising three over-lapping “wings” with metallic surfaces designed to reflect the sky and the clouds, rendering the superyacht near-invisible. The “wings” also do double duty as solar panels generating energy that would be used to convert sea water to hydrogen. Fuel cells would then turn the hydrogen into electricity that would be then stored in banks of lithium-ion batteries, making Pegasus essentially emissions-free with a virtually infinite cruising range.

Lazzarini, ‘Plectrum’

Why fly through the water when you can fly on top? That’s the thinking behind Rome-based Lazzarini Design’s radical 243-foot hydrofoiling superyacht concept named Plectrum . Massive foils deploy from the sides of the yacht’s rounded carbon-fiber hull, while a trio of 5,000 hp engines would elevate the yacht out of the water and punch it to a top speed of over 80 mph. It’s a similar concept used in the latest America’s Cup AC75 foiling monohull sailboats, along with a crop of electric powerboats and surfboards. Applying the technology to a 243-foot superyacht is what’s new and possibly technically impossible, at least for now. Other stand-out features of this bright-orange flyer include a helicopter garage beneath the mile-long foredeck and a garage for your supercar at the stern.

Phantom and Golden Yachts, ‘Vesper’

When it comes to next-generation superyacht design, it seems glass is fast becoming the new steel. Take the collaboration between the design team at Holland’s Phantom Studios and Athens-based superyacht builder Golden Yachts. The 213-foot concept they’re calling Vesper features five levels of floor-to-ceiling structural glass, a glass floor in the yacht’s upper deck lounge, and a glass-sided swimming pool. Connecting the beach club to the pool is a huge, high-lifting hatch that’s, what else, all glass. Now head to the owner’s “suite”—it’s more like a two-level penthouse in a Miami skyscraper—and it features floor-to-very-high-ceiling glass that floods the space with light. To catch some real rays, the full-deck suite features not one, but two outdoor terraces.

DeBasto Design, MED

Think of this as a 301-foot dayboat with the emphasis on outdoor, alfresco, lounge-in-the-sun, Mediterranean living. From the drawing board of Miami-based designer Luiz de Basto, Project MED features uninterrupted, bow-to-stern open teak decks topped with a huge upper superstructure supported by just four columns. And to ensure the superstructure doesn’t dominate the superyacht’s sleek lines, de Basto covered it in reflective glass so that it almost disappears from view by mirroring its surroundings. The designer says his inspiration came from the idea of “Agora,” named after the squares in Ancient Greek villages where everyone congregated. Aboard Project MED, that could be on the main deck, around the oversized pool at the stern, or on the vast open foredeck.

Enzo Manca, ‘UAE One’

There are superyachts designed to look like military warships. Some even are shaped to look like navy submarines. But here’s a first; a superyacht inspired by the lines of an aircraft carrier. The 459-foot UAE One is from the fertile mind of Milan-based designer Enzo Manca who created the concept for an unnamed United Arab Emirates sheikh looking to create an official UAE flagship. Without a doubt, the design highlight is the yacht’s runway-like main deck. It features not one, but three helipads, a conning tower-like, four-level structure on the starboard side, a geometric-shaped pool and a huge circular “conversation pit” right on the bow, complete with cozy sofas and a firepit. Accommodations over nine decks include five “super suites”, eight master cabins, 14 mini apartments, and 35 cabins for the crew of 65. 

Read More On:

• Superyacht Design
• Superyachts

More Marine

INEOS Britannia’s America’s Cup Race Boat Just Crossed a Lightning-Fast 40 Knots at Sea Trials

This New 248-Foot Superyacht Has Its Own Sports Court on the Deck

Brabus’s New Flagship Is a Loud, Speedy 45-Foot Dayboat. We Hopped Onboard.

Forget a Crow’s Nest. This 207-Foot Explorer Yacht Concept Has Its Own Pop-Up Observatory.

Culinary Masters 2024

MAY 17 - 19 Join us for extraordinary meals from the nation’s brightest culinary minds.

Give the Gift of Luxury

Latest Galleries in Marine

Meet ‘Sherakhan,’ the 228-Foot Ice-Class Explorer Yacht With a Lavish Balinese Spa

The 12 Best Water Safaris Around the World, From Antarctic Cruises to Botswana River Journeys

More from our brands, img shifts focus from central hub for nyfw: the shows to designer partnerships, billionaire repole seeks first kentucky derby win with fierceness, ‘john mulaney presents: everybody’s in la’ is a winningly shambolic pop-up talk show: tv review, ancient egyptian pyramids, sphinx close to public for tech billionaire’s lavish wedding, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors.

Billionaires are getting ready for summer with wildly spectacular superyachts

• Superyachts, the most expensive asset  a billionaire can own, are pushing the boundaries of luxury.
• The boats, which cost eight or nine figures, are getting larger and include more features than ever.
• From massage rooms to basketball courts, here's what the world's richest want on board.

For many wealthy boat owners, a private spa is a must-have on board. A sauna is a nice touch. A Jet Ski or two makes days at sea way more fun. And if you don't have someone on board who can whip up a Michelin-star-worthy meal , you might as well stay on land.

In the world of massive yachts , there's no such thing as too much. After all, if someone spends eight or nine figures to design the vessel of their dreams — or at least $500,000 a week to charter one — more is more.

"Yachting. It's not rational; it's emotional," Ralph Dazert, the head of intelligence at SuperYacht Times, told Business Insider at the Palm Beach International Boat Show, where dozens of superyachts — often defined as vessels over 30 meters in length — were on display.

And while there are certain classic features, such as jacuzzis and bars, what superyacht owners want is evolving, insiders at the show said. That might mean more crew members, more space for helicopters, or more water toys, but might also include manicure salons and putting greens.

"The bar of what is the baseline expectation has increased exponentially just over the last four or five years," Anders Kurtén, the CEO of brokerage Fraser Yachts, said. Clients are "spending more time on the boat and really wanting to extend the lifestyle they lead on the shore."

A lot of this can be chalked up to the pandemic. Superyacht purchases and charters spiked as life and luxury travel on land screeched to a halt. While the market has moderated slightly, the number of superyachts on order — 1,166 as of September, according to Boat International's Global Order Book — is still above pre-pandemic norms.

"What the pandemic really showed is that the appetite for being out there at sea, sort of living the marine lifestyle, is still as valid as ever," Kurtén said.

That means there's a lot of money on the water. The total value of the 203 superyachts over 30 meters delivered last year was $6.4 billion, according to data from SuperYacht Times. New custom builds from the world's most prestigious shipyards — Lurssen, Feadship, Oceanco , Benetti — can run into the hundreds of millions. Even used superyachts at the Palm Beach show cost as much as $75 million.

And it's not just traditional buyers like retired wealthy couples looking for a place to relax or celebrities looking for a place to party away from the paparazzi. New clients are often younger and have families, so want areas to work and watch movies . They also want pricey water toys, access to fitness equipment, or even pizza ovens for picky eaters.

"This would've never happened in the nineties," said Giovanna Vitelli, the vice president of the Azimut Benetti Group, the world's biggest producer of superyachts. "You would go with your beautiful woman, Champagne — the idea of yachting was much more showing off with your jacuzzi and things like that."

Pure opulence has made room for function.

When Benetti's Nabila set sail in 1980, its 50-person crew, gold-and-diamond-encrusted interiors, and lavish parties captured headlines and even inspired the Queen song "Kashoggi's Ship."(Seven years later, Donald Trump bought Nabila for $30 million , renaming her the Trump Princess.)

"Life on board was considered very formal — big formal dining rooms, boats were high on the water, you would be segregated from the rest of the world," Vitelli said, remembering another client who insisted on a replica of the Sistine Chapel above the dining table.

But the ostentatious, palatial-like interiors that used to be highlighted in yacht brochures have made way for lists of more functional features .

Related stories

Rather than esoteric novelties like an extra-large safe for rifles that one builder had to construct per a Russian yacht owner's request , the superyachts on display at the Palm Beach show featured basketball courts, saunas, and ice baths.

Owners want elevators and luxury gyms. Pampering options, be it a massage room, manicure station, or a professional-grade facial machine, are a dime a dozen. Some bathrooms have fancy Toto toilets, which can cost around $20,000.

Sterns (that's the back of the boat) used to be built high to guard guests' privacy. Now, they're built as "beach clubs" — an open swim platform.

And what good is a massage room if no one on board can give one? Many superyachts can hold twice as many crew members as guests, if not more. One broker, representing a boat that didn't have a masseuse, said it could be quite a "tricky" issue because if a charter wants one, they have to find someone who can massage guests and "pull their weight with the crew."

"It's not uncommon to look for a deckhand who can also mix a martini, play an instrument, maybe entertain the guests with singing, and ideally even give a massage," Kurtén said.

Of course, a crew comes at a cost . Most are considered full-time employees, requiring salaries and benefits like health insurance. Captains, first mates, and chief engineers often make six figures a year. That's without tips; a charter guest will typically spend six figures on gratuities for the crew who worked during a weeklong vacation.

For the superrich, there must be room for toys.

It's not just the onboard amenities that count. What's known as "toys" in the industry — water slides, eFoils, Jet Skis, and underwater scuba diving jets — are popular, and costs range from merely hundreds of dollars (banana boats) to millions ( submersibles , which are still popular despite the recent tragedy).

" Tenders and toys, the sky seems to be the limit," Kurtén said. "More is more."

If you can't fit all those toys in the yacht's storage space, you can just use another boat. Jeff Bezos' support yacht is a superyacht in itself, measuring 75 meters and costing tens of millions of dollars. (His main yacht, Koru , cost a reported $500 million.)

Support yachts are also faster, meaning the crew can get to a destination first and set up the Jet Skis, seapools, and the like, Dazert said. "By the time the owner arrives on the main yacht, everything's set up, and he can go and have fun."

Even tenders, the smaller vessel that brings guests from the ship to the shore, are getting glow-ups. The Nero, a 90-meter beauty available to charter for about $500,000 a week and modeled after J.P. Morgan's 1930s ship, has custom-built tenders to match the design. The most expensive ones often cost seven figures. Nero has three.

"It used to be a tender was a tender," Jeffrey Beneville, who handles yacht insurance at NFP, told BI. "Now they're called limousine tenders. Think of an incredibly luxurious gondola that's got a hard top so nobody's hair gets mussed when they're being dropped off at the Monaco Yacht Club ."

One thing that clearly hasn't changed in superyachting: showing off. If the boat next door at the marina has an indoor-outdoor cinema, it's natural to want one too. Ditto a wine cellar or helipad.

"It's a bit of a celebration of your success in life, of wealth," Vitelli, whose company is behind the Lana yacht Bill Gates chartered for a birthday party three years ago, said. "You push it a little more."

And that's a boon for yacht makers and brokers catering to the superrich.

"Our job is to make clients' dreams come true," Kurtén said.

Watch: Inside the world's biggest cruise ship that just set sail

• Main content

Exploring the Luxury Lifestyle: Owning a Superyacht in Singapore

F rom the sparkling coastline to the breathtaking vista of its iconic skyline, Singapore presents an alluring retreat for those who prefer a luxurious lifestyle. Its affluent populace, along with affluent visitors from around the world, has led to a burgeoning demand for superyachts in this island nation. A superyacht isn’t merely a status symbol; it’s a lifestyle choice that echoes an individual’s passion for luxury, adventure, and the penchant for the unexplored. Using knowledge from Simpson Superyachts’ guide to owning luxury vessels in Singapore , this article seeks to offer a thorough guide for embracing and prospering in this distinctive, opulent nautical lifestyle. 

The Allure of Superyacht Ownership

Having a superyacht gives its owners an unrivaled degree of seclusion, luxury, and independence; it’s like having your own moving island. A superyacht offers an unmatched way to enjoy Singapore’s beauty and opulence, whether one wants to cruise the pristine waterways of Southeast Asia or throw lavish, unforgettable parties against the mesmerizing backdrop of the Singapore cityscape. In Singapore’s ever-changing maritime scene, a superyacht personifies luxury living and adventure through its unique combination of exclusivity and mobility.

Understanding the Basics

Understanding a few key aspects of yacht ownership is essential before deciding to buy a superyacht. Superyachts range in length from 24 to over 100 meters, with a crew to oversee operations. Their sizes also vary greatly. These magnificent vessels meet the greatest standards of comfort and amusement with a plethora of opulent amenities, such as large state suites, fully equipped bars, helipads, swimming pools, and even onboard theatres. Nevertheless, the cost of owning a superyacht goes much beyond the original purchase price and includes recurring charges for things like maintenance, crew pay, insurance, and marina fees. Potential owners must do extensive financial planning to make sure they can afford the long-term expenditures of yacht ownership and maintenance, given the substantial financial commitment needed.

Selecting the Perfect Superyacht

Selecting the perfect superyacht requires careful consideration of your needs, wants, and intended use. Finding the ideal fit takes careful thought because there is such a wide range of alternatives to choose from, including sleek, sporty yachts made for weekend outings and explorer yachts intended for longer trips. To make sure that every element, from layout and facilities to aesthetic aspects, matches their specific tastes and needs, many customers choose to have their yachts custom-built. Reputable yacht brokers, like Simpson Superyachts, are essential to this process since they provide potential owners with crucial knowledge and direction. 

Here’s a list of different types of yachts:

• Motor Yachts: Powered by engines, motor yachts offer speed, comfort, and luxury, ranging from sleek, sporty designs to spacious, long-range cruisers.
• Sailing Yachts: Driven primarily by wind power, sailing yachts evoke a sense of tradition and elegance, offering serene and eco-friendly cruising experiences.
• Explorer Yachts: Designed for long-distance voyages and exploration, explorer yachts feature robust construction, extended fuel range, and amenities tailored for adventurous expeditions.
• Catamarans: Catamarans boast two hulls, providing stability, spaciousness, and efficiency, making them ideal for cruising in shallow waters and island hopping.

Understanding Laws and Regulations

Singaporean law requires that all yachts be registered with the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA). Additionally, superyachts docking in Singapore must adhere to local marine regulations. Some of these concern maritime safety, crew training, insurance, and pollution control. It’s vital to familiarise oneself with these regulations or work with a knowledgeable broker who can navigate through the legal and regulatory complexities.

Tax and Customs

Another critical aspect of superyacht ownership in Singapore is understanding the applicable taxes. Currently, Singapore does not impose tax on foreign-registered yachts. However, GST is levied on locally registered yachts. Also, certain customs rules must be adhered to when bringing your superyacht into Singapore.

Maintenance Matters

Superyachts require regular, high-quality maintenance to ensure safety and longevity. Whether it’s routine engine service, hull cleaning, or interior refurbishment, your yacht must be meticulously maintained. These responsibilities can be managed individually or delegated to a yacht management company.

Crew Hiring

The crew of a superyacht is essential to the seamless running and enjoyment of the yacht. Every member of the crew plays a vital role in ensuring that passengers have an unforgettable day, from the knowledgeable captain in charge of navigation and safety to the kind deckhands and catering personnel. Superyacht owners should work with respectable companies that specialize in crew recruiting to guarantee a high caliber of service and professionalism. 

Moreover, undergirding these aspects and ensuring a seamless adventure is the Simpson Superyachts guide to owning luxury vessels in Singapore. Regarded as a comprehensive, tailored resource, this guide assists prospective owners through every step of the superyacht ownership journey, from initial inquiry to sailing off into the sunset. It provides an invaluable wealth of knowledge and expertise to navigate the world of luxury yachts in Singapore, setting you free to embark on your high-sea adventure truly.

The post Exploring the Luxury Lifestyle: Owning a Superyacht in Singapore appeared first on The Design Tourist .

• Charter & Brokerage
• Yacht Design & New Builds
• Tenders & Toys
• Superyacht Events Calendar
• Career & Training
• Departments
• Superyacht Crew Finances
• Sustainability
• Shipyards and Marinas
• Health & Wellbeing
• Polar Region
• Our Services
• Meet the Team

World’s Largest Sportfish Superyacht ‘Special One’ To Be Delivered In 2024

If you’re wondering, here’s how to take advantage of currency fluctuations, the crew network: introducing their antibes office, is it possible for men to work as a superyacht stew, tender of the week: saxdor 320 gto.

• Superyacht News

Boundless Benefits Of Content Marketing In The Superyacht Industry

First waterless cleaning products head to uk marine market. let’s hear from sea clean, sustainability champions, the crew mess, the crew network – top jobs this week, crew is a pre-nup worth the bother, crew travel, adriatic allure: how adriatic destinations are enticing superyachts, essential connectivity preparation for your trip to turkey this season, superyacht lifestyle, the 879 companies in the balearic nautical sector generate €1.106 billion in revenue & create 5,145 jobs, reaching out to fellow crew: ‘me too’ makes all the difference, stay connected, syc on instagram, superyachtcontent.

Popular posts

• New BWA Yachting Cyprus Office In Limassol Marina Now Open
• Burgess Yachts x GF Entertainment Collaboration Revolutionises the Onboard Movie Experience
• Environmental Officers
• Experience the America’s Cup: from the Superyacht owner’s perspective
• Yachts Attending The 2023 MYBA Charter Show Announced

Join our Newsletter

• Your Name First Last
• Your Email *

Superyacht Content

Social media influencer and digital brand expert.

Superyacht Content brings you the latest in social news for the superyacht industry.

Keep up to date with us across our social channels, and don’t forget to hit that share button!

• Superyacht Jobs
• Superyacht Marketing

Copyright © 2023 Superyacht Content | Website Design by Zonkey

Privacy | Credits | Get in Touch