motor yacht big bad john

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Christensen 140

• By Dudley Dawson
• Updated: October 4, 2007

For those who remember the 1960s, Jimmy Dean and the country ballad “Big Bad John” are inseparable. It would be another decade or two before packages of premium sausage bore Dean’s name, and even there, his roots remained prominent in the form of a cowboy boot in the logo.

Considering this history, it’s no surprise Dean christened each of his yachts Big Bad John . The latest to carry the name is a sleek motoryacht from Christensen Yachts’ busy Vancouver, Washington, yard. An experienced yachtsman, Dean had definite ideas for this yacht, and the result is more a symphony than a ballad. The consonance of design has yielded a vessel that is not simple, yet the disparate parts combine to deliver an exceptionally pleasing whole that’s as smooth as pure harmony.

At 140 feet, Big Bad John is one of the longest yachts in memory to utilize a raised pilothouse. Most yachts of this length would carry at least a full pilothouse, and perhaps even a full third deck. Dean, however, wanted something more evocative of motion and made a deliberate choice to go long rather than high to achieve the space he wanted.

It is a wise choice from both aesthetic and technical standpoints. Visually, Big Bad John looks like she’s moving even when she’s standing still, and that fluidity is only partly illusion. By keeping the profile low, the beam can be a foot or so narrower than that on a three-deck yacht without compromising stability. This increases the length/beam ratio, an important factor in reducing resistance and power requirements, and in increasing range. There is more hull bottom area for a given displacement, lowering the bottom loading and improving performance further. The lower profile of Big Bad John also means less windage and a lower vertical center of gravity. These characteristics result in less rolling at sea and at anchor, counteracting the reduced beam and providing increased comfort and safety.

Another unusual design choice is the asymmetrical arrangement: the saloon and dining room are full-beam to port, walkaround to starboard. The arrangement works-for the owner, because it offers more interior area; for the crew, because it provides space to work the yacht in port and at sea. Large yachts invariably tie up starboard side to, so there’s seldom any true purpose for a portside deck. If you think the arrangement might look strange, keep in mind that it is nearly impossible to see both sides of the boat at once. Even so, Setzer Design Group did a great job of keeping the two sides similar. Only a careful observer will notice the difference.

The asymmetry continues below-decks in the master stateroom, where the berth is shifted to starboard, leaving space to port for a comfortable sitting area. The berth is attractively finished in the same medium-tone satin mahogany used throughout the interior, and is capped by a dropped tray that creates the impression of a canopy bed while inconspicuously housing the air-conditioning ductwork. The master baths are also dissimilar. Hers is a bit larger, with a full tub and spacious vanity, and his is fitted with a shower. Two large walk-in lockers round out the master accommodations.

Two identical guest staterooms are forward of the master stateroom. Each has a queen berth and spacious hanging locker, and the en suite baths are equipped with tubs. A captain’s cabin rivaling the guest accommodations in size is forward, as are two crew cabins, a crew mess and a laundry room. An exercise room is to port, between the master and guest staterooms, in a space large enough to house a third guest cabin.

Between the guest and crew spaces is a short passageway with a door at each end and stowage lockers to either side. Not only does this clever connector allow the crew to carry out their housekeeping chores easily and efficiently, it provides an important second route of escape in the event of fire or other emergency in either space.

Forward of the pilothouse on the main deck are large stowage areas under the brow and an open galley and dinette that will be a favorite informal gathering area for crew and guests alike. A passageway to port of the pilothouse will serve multiple duties. During formal dinners, it is the service route between the dining room and the galley; in port, it will be handy for bringing supplies into the galley, the stowage areas under the pilothouse and the brow, and the crew area belowdecks. To starboard are an entry foyer and a day head, as well as stairways down to the accommodations and up to the pilothouse and boat deck.

The dining room is open to the saloon, but separated by a low divider cabinet and hefty columns. The table is centered to port, leaving room for a sizable bar to starboard. The saloon isn’t quite full-beam-remember the side deck to starboard only-but is wide enough for the several large settees and chairs clustered around a grand piano. The furniture, the carpet and the overhead are done in light, complementary hues that bring out the best in the satin mahogany paneling. They create a space I find especially attractive and inviting, even without an evening of music by the master.

On the flying bridge, four companion seats flank the captain’s chair. A huge table to starboard with an L-shape settee is just abaft the seats. A wet bar seating six is to port, and a row of individual sun lounges is beneath the radar arch. A pair of canister liferafts and a large RIB tender handled by a centerline davit stow aft.

Big Bad John is just about everything a yacht should be. She was designed to suit the particular tastes and specific requirements of an experienced owner who wasn’t afraid to break a few rules. She was solidly built by a well-respected yard, to the high standards of ABS class and MCA certification. Her interior is warm, comfortable and upscale without being pretentious. Rather than being stored in some remote marina, the yacht is moored behind the owner’s home, where she will receive constant attention. Perhaps best of all, she is owned by a yachtsman who will cruise extensively, providing a great deal of pleasure to himself, to his family and friends, and to all those who might be fortunate enough to spot John cruising by.

Big, yes. Bad, no way.

Contact: Christensen Yachts, (360) 695-3238; fax (360) 695-3252; [email protected] ; www.christensenyachts.com . Setzer Design Group, (919) 319-0559; fax (919) 319-0557.

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BIG BAD JOHN

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The a)BIG BAD JOHN with a length of 140'/42.7 meters was build for country singer Jimmy Dean by Christensen Yachts in 2000. She was named after one of his biggest hits "Big Bad John". Today she is known as the b)BRI, a)BIG BAD JOHN. Shown here in Norfolk, VA just prior to OP Sail 2000.

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FREEDOM Christensen

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33m luxury yacht FREEDOM for charter in ...

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A General Description of Motor Yacht FREEDOM

FREEDOM was previously called project/yacht name 023 Big Bad John; Walkabout. This 43 metre (141 foot) luxury yacht was crafted at Christensen Shipyards in 2000. Motor Yacht FREEDOM is a capacious superyacht. The firm of naval architecture whom authored her plans and general arangement on this ship was Christensen Shipyard and Setzer Design Group. The vessel had interior design work was the work of the talented KC Designs/Sarah Fahey. Luxury yacht FREEDOM is a well crafted yacht that is able to accommodate a total of 6 passengers on board and has around 7 qualified crew.

The New Build & Design relating to Luxury Yacht FREEDOM

Christensen Shipyard was the naval architecture company involved in the formal vessel plans for FREEDOM. Also the company Christensen Shipyard and Setzer Design Group expertly collaborated on this undertaking. Interior designer KC Designs/Sarah Fahey was charged with the creative interior ambience. In 2000 she was formally launched to triumph in Vancouver Wa and following sea trials and final completion was afterwards passed on to the owner. Christensen Shipyards completed their new build motor yacht in the United States. Her hull was built out of composite. The motor yacht superstructure component is made extensively using composite. With a beam of 8.53 metres / 28 feet FREEDOM has spacious interior. She has a shallow draught of 2.1m (7ft). She had refit improvement and changes carried out in 2001.

Engines & Speed On M/Y FREEDOM:

The 16V 2000 M90 engine installed in the motor yacht is built by MTU. For propulsion FREEDOM has twin screw propellers. The main engine of the yacht produces 1800 horse power (or 1325 kilowatts). She is equiped with 2 engines. The combined thrust for the yacht is accordingly 3600 HP or 2650 KW. As for stabalisers she was supplied with Naiad. The bow thrusters are Abt.

On board Superyacht FREEDOM She Caters For Guest Accommodation For Guest:

Bestowing cabins for a limit of 6 yacht guests spending the night, the FREEDOM accommodates everyone luxuriously. This ship has room for circa 7 expert crewmembers to manage.

A List of the Specifications of the FREEDOM:

Further Information On The Yacht

Around Sept 2009 FREEDOM traveled to Broadview Park, in United States. This motor yacht has traveled the cruising ground encompassing Broward County during Sept 2009. Cruisair is the company that installed the A/C in this yacht. FREEDOM features a teak deck.

FREEDOM Disclaimer:

The luxury yacht FREEDOM displayed on this page is merely informational and she is not necessarily available for yacht charter or for sale, nor is she represented or marketed in anyway by CharterWorld. This web page and the superyacht information contained herein is not contractual. All yacht specifications and informations are displayed in good faith but CharterWorld does not warrant or assume any legal liability or responsibility for the current accuracy, completeness, validity, or usefulness of any superyacht information and/or images displayed. All boat information is subject to change without prior notice and may not be current.

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Marine News from the Great Lakes

Jimmy dean-sausage king & boater.

Published: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 7:00 am By: Van W. Snyder, CAE

I was saddened to hear of Jimmy Dean's death on June 13, 2010. Most young people think Jimmy did only one thing- own a sausage company. He did; he founded the Jimmy Dean Sausage Company with his brother Don in 1969 and the company was sold to Consolidated Foods in 1984 which was renamed Sara Lee Corporation; yet the products still bear his name.

For those who are seasoned, we know Jimmy as a country and western singer, actor and television host. In 1961 he had a huge music hit with the song Big Bad John which earned him a 1962 Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording. Both Patsy Cline and Roy Clark started their music careers with Jimmy. He was also an actor. He had a supporting role in Diamonds Are Forever, a 1971 James Bond thriller, as the Las Vegas billionaire Willard Whyte. He appeared in several episodes of Daniel Boone in the later 60s and in two episodes of Fantasy Island in 1981-82. He had his own TV show in the mid-60s called The Jimmy Dean Show. He was, indeed, a man with diverse talents.

But I remember him as an avid boater. In the late 70s one of my positions was managing the marina at Bahia Mar Yachting Center in Fort Lauderdale, FL. This today, is the primary location of the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show held in October each year. Jimmy Dean was one of our slip renters. One of my joys was to welcome new boaters to the marina and one way of doing so was to personally deliver a bottle of the resorts best scotch. So, not to miss an opportunity, I headed to Mr. Dean's yacht Big Bad John (what else would he call it?), knocked on the hull, asked for permission to come aboard and got to set in the yacht's salon with Mr. Dean. I welcomed him to the marina, had a diverse conversation for about ten minutes and thanked him again, as I departed, for choosing Bahia Mar. Meeting someone of his fame, my memory of that experience was how down-to-earth he was. He didn't have to let this young whippersnapper on board, but he did and graciously welcomed me and spent time with me. I'm sure I never missed a chance to tell family and friends that I met Jimmy and "even had a conversation on board his yacht." Back then, Florida attracted celebrities as a result of the cruising opportunities and the proximity to the Bahamas. The island of Bimini is only 49 nautical miles from the coast. In addition to Jimmy Dean, other celebrities boating in the area, I recall, were Neil Sedaka, Roy Clark, Joe Namath, and Evel Knievel. I'm sure there were more.

Jimmy Dean's yacht then was a 53 Hatteras motor yacht. A 53 Hatteras was considered a good-size yacht back then. I suspect Jimmy got infected with two-foot, or 10-foot or 20-foot-itis. Yacht Magazine published an article written by Dudley Sawson published in October, 2007 reporting on Jimmy Dean's Christensen 140. Yes, it was named Big Bad John as had all of his boats before it. Mr. Dawson noted: "At 140 feet, Big Bad John is one of the longest yachts in memory to utilize a raised pilothouse. Dean ... wanted something more evocative of motion and made a deliberate choice to go long rather than high to achieve the space he wanted." He continued by saying, "Her interior is warm, comfortable and upscale without being pretentious. Rather than being stored in some remote marina, the yacht is moored behind the owner's home, where she will receive constant attention. Perhaps best of all, she is owned by a yachtsman who will cruise extensively, providing a great deal of pleasure to himself, to his family and friends and to all those who might be fortunate enough to spot John cruising by. Big, yes. Bad, no way."

Written By: Van W. Snider, Jr., President Michigan Boating Industries Association & Boaters' Association of Michigan

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‘BIG, BAD JOHN’ TAKES ITS TURN

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Jimmy Dean, country-and western superstar, hangs over the second-story railing, peering down at the black 107-foot hull that lies upside down. “I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,” he says.The newly constructed hull of his yacht is about to be turned, and traditionally, this is the key point in any yacht’s creation.The others crowding the […]

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The Haves and the Have-Yachts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LA SIRENA is a 42.98 m Motor Yacht, built in the United States of America by Christensen and delivered in 2000.

Her top speed is 19.0 kn, her cruising speed is 16.0 kn, and she boasts a maximum cruising range of 1705.0 nm at 14.5 kn, with power coming from two MTU diesel engines. She can accommodate up to 8 guests in 4 staterooms, with 6 crew members waiting on their every need. She has a gross tonnage of 360.0 GT and a 8.53 m beam.

She was designed by Setzer Yacht Architects , who has designed 32 other superyachts in the BOAT Pro database.

The naval architecture was developed by Christensen , who has architected 31 other superyachts in the BOAT Pro database, and the interior of the yacht was designed by K.C. Designs and Sarah Fahey - she is built with a Teak deck, a GRP hull, and GRP superstructure.

LA SIRENA is in the top 30% by LOA in the world. She is one of 618 motor yachts in the 40-45m size range.

LA SIRENA is currently sailing under the United States of America flag, the most popular flag state for superyachts with a total of 1655 yachts registered. She is currently located at the Thunderbolt Marine refit yard, in United States of America, where she has been located for 1 day. For more information regarding LA SIRENA's movements, find out more about BOATPro AIS .

Specifications

• Name: LA SIRENA
• Previous Names: FREEDOM,BIG BAD JOHN,WALKABOUT,BRI
• Yacht Type: Motor Yacht
• Builder: Christensen
• Naval Architect: Christensen
• Exterior Designer: Setzer Yacht Architects
• Interior Designer: Sarah Fahey , K.C. Designs
• Refits: 2001,2003,2013

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BIG EASY YACHT CHARTER

44.6m  /  146'4   hakvoort   2002 / 2022.

• Previous Yacht

Cabin Configuration

• 1 Convertible

Special Features:

• Full-beam master cabin for superior comfort
• Impressive 5,000nm range
• Recent refit in 2022
• Interior design from Winch Design
• Sleeps 12 guests

Superyacht Big Easy is a thrilling yacht charter vessel for those looking to cruise the open seas in large numbers in the utmost comfort

The 44.9m/147'4" 'Big Easy' motor yacht built by the Dutch shipyard Hakvoort is available for charter for up to 12 guests in 6 cabins. This yacht features interior styling by British designer Winch Design.

Motor yacht Big Easy boasts a wealth of convivial spaces, perfect for luxury yacht charters with families of friends, offering ample opportunities to kick back and relax, or enjoy the water on the yacht's array of water toys, the choice is yours.

Guest Accommodation

Built in 2002, Big Easy offers guest accommodation for up to 12 guests in 6 suites comprising a master suite located on the main deck, three double cabins and two twin cabins. There are 7 beds in total, including 2 king, 3 queen, 2 singles and 1 convertible. She is also capable of carrying up to 9 crew onboard to ensure a relaxed luxury yacht charter experience.

Onboard Comfort & Entertainment

On your charter, you'll find plenty to keep you busy and entertained, notably a deck jacuzzi, perfect to enjoy the scenery with your favourite drink in hand.

Big Easy benefits from some excellent features to improve your charter, notably Wi-Fi connectivity, allowing you to stay connected at all times, should you wish. Guests will experience complete comfort while chartering thanks to air conditioning.

Performance & Range

Big Easy is built with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure. Powered by twin Caterpillar engines, she comfortably cruises at 12 knots, reaches a maximum speed of 14 knots with a range of up to 5,000 nautical miles from her 57,000 litre fuel tanks at cruising speed. An advanced stabilisation system on board reduces the side-to-side roll of the yacht and promises guests exceptional comfort levels at anchor or when underway.

Big Easy has a good selection of water toys and accessories to entertain you and your guests whilst on charter. Principle among these are waterslides bringing a sense of fun that all the family can enjoy. Guests can feel the wind in their hair and jump the waves on one of the two SeaDoo GTI 170 WaveRunners. In addition there are two F5S SEABOBs, that allow you to skim along the surface or steer under the crystal water and see a variety of aquatic sea life. If that isn't enough Big Easy also features fishing equipment, inflatable water toys, paddleboards and snorkelling equipment. Big Easy features two tenders, but leading the pack is a 5.49m/18' Nautica Tender to transport you in style.

Big Easy and her crew are available for charter this summer for cruising within the Mediterranean. She is already accepting bookings this winter for cruising in the Caribbean.

Motor yacht Big Easy is an outstanding pedigree yacht that delivers on all fronts for superlative luxury yacht vacations.

TESTIMONIALS

There are currently no testimonials for Big Easy, please provide .

Big Easy Photos

Amenities & Entertainment

For your relaxation and entertainment Big Easy has the following facilities, for more details please speak to your yacht charter broker.

Big Easy is reported to be available to Charter with the following recreation facilities:

• 1 x 5.49m  /  18' Nautica Hard Bottom Tender Yamaha 115 HP engine
• 1 x 12.19m  /  40' Intrepid Tender

For a full list of all available amenities & entertainment facilities, or price to hire additional equipment please contact your broker.

• + shortlist

For a full list of all available amenities & entertainment facilities, or price to hire additional equipment please contact your broker.

'Big Easy' Charter Rates & Destinations

Summer Season

May - September

€160,000 p/week + expenses Approx $178,000

High Season

€180,000 p/week + expenses Approx $200,500

Cruising Regions

Mediterranean France, Italy, Monaco

HOT SPOTS:   Amalfi Coast, Corsica, French Riviera, Sardinia

Winter Season

October - April

$175,000 p/week + expenses

$190,000 p/week + expenses

Caribbean Antigua, Bahamas, Saint Martin, St Barts

HOT SPOTS:   Virgin Islands

Charter Big Easy

To charter this luxury yacht contact your charter broker , or we can help you.

To charter this luxury yacht contact your charter broker or

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Yacht Owner, Captain or Central Agents - Send us latest Photos, Charter Rates or Corrections Send Updates

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48m | Christensen

from $175,000 p/week

NOTE to U.S. Customs & Border Protection

Specification

SEASONAL CHARTER RATES

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Carver... Good? Bad?

• Thread starter Panda
• Start date Jul 28, 2020
• Jul 28, 2020

I'm doing some research on powerboats and the Carver Yachts brand keeps popping up. Does anyone know about build quality? I'm also looking at some Offshore Yacht boats... mostly the 54. I like the 1000 gallon of fuel -- so extended anchoring shouldn't be an issue (with 1000 gallons). Any thoughts about Carver?  

TF Site Team/Forum Founder

As a previous Carver owner, I would say the boat exceeded my expectations. It was a 2001 356 with Cummins 6BTAs. Not a damn thing wrong with that boat. As always, boats are a compromise. If I had to complain about something, it was engine access. The engine space just wasn't that big...and it never will be on a 35 foot twin engine boat. I do have to ask what Carver you are looking at? I lost interest in them around 2003ish when they went full bleach bottle and mostly all Volvo. Probably my favorite "big" Carver is the 445....it was the continued evolution of the 4207 followed by the 440 followed by the 445. They only made them for two years. It is a big GIANT value in my opinion and usually powered by Cummins 6CTAs...although a few were gas and I did find one with the smaller 6BTAs...which would not be favorable if you want to gettyup and go. If you are comparing them to Offshore Yachts....there is no comparison. The only place I think the Carver beats the Offshore is value. If you're in love with the Offshore and are willing to part with that kind of cash, then go for it. They are excellent boats and are pretty too. But DAYUM they are expensive. I'd be happy to answer any specific questions about Carver.  

caltexflanc

Like a lot of the big builders of popular priced boats, Carver has had various models at all points of the spectrum. So I wouldn't make a blanket assumption about the brand one way or the other. Of the ones I have occasion to take a good look at and talk with owners, I happen to think most of the Voyager series are pretty good boats. They started the Marquis brand as an up-sale from Carver and some of the early Marquis were very good boats. I agree that Offshore is a definite upgrade, and really like the 54 too. Quality wise I'd put them similar to the early Marquis; I've spent a fair amount of time crawling around both and have been at sea on a large Offshore.  

I owned a 1997 Carver 440 with 6CTAs for 17years. An excellent boat with a good sea hull and as i did all the maintenance myself I know every inch. Great at 9 Kts or 20. As above not all boats by any maker are equally good.  

Senior Member

The few Carvers I've had a chance to run, they got up on plane quickly and decent cruising speed. Bleach bottle was mentioned, it's the models that have a lot of cabin above the water. My pet name is Shamu, they look like a Killer Whale. Black and white and rotund. This is sail area that gives the wind carte balance to push the boat around, especially when docking and maneuvering in close quarters.  

Woodland Hills

Carver: good or bad? Maybe they are just ugly?  

caltexflanc said: Like a lot of the big builders of popular priced boats, Carver has had various models at all points of the spectrum. So I wouldn't make a blanket assumption about the brand one way or the other. Click to expand...

Woodland Hills said: Carver: good or bad? Maybe they are just ugly? Click to expand...

We had a Carver 3207 for a few years until we went bigger. I really liked that boat and still miss it. The systems were pretty simple but that boat still taught me a lot. Decent engine access, oddly even better than our bigger boat now in some ways. Not a high end ocean boat by any means but it was decent, and good value for the money. We did look at a newer, more current Carver last year (2019) at the Palm Beach show, a 37 Coupe. All shiny and new, excellent use of space but the build quality wasn't the best - panel seams off, cabinet doors, that kind of thing. But the new boat smell was very nice.  

Moderator Emeritus

We had a Carver in the past, it was a nice boat, but they do look like Clorox bottles now. And then there are the Volvo engines. I also had them in a boat in the past, never again. That is a personal choice but Volvo can be a PITA to get support and parts from, the price of parts aside... Oh, BTW, welcome aboard.  

• Jul 29, 2020

caltexflanc said: Some of them are indeed ugly, the Mariner 37 being maybe the ugliest production boat of all time. But, they have made many good looking boats.The aforementioned Voyagers just to name one. Heck, even our beloved Hatteras managed to come up with some doozies, like the 52CMYs post-Hargrave, or the later 63 and 64MYs of the late 90's and early 'oughts. You could say the same thing about virtually every car manufacturer or large house builder as well. Click to expand...

Attachments

People's opinions on any specific brand will always run the gamut from love to hate. I happen to fall into the category of "love 'em." I have toured the factory and had lengthy discussions with their customer service reps. The employees there seem to be genuinely happy and proud of their work. In fact, most teams sign the inside of the boat when they finish their work. You can't see it and likely couldn't find it if you were looking for it but the signatures are probably there. The company is also multigenerational, meaning there are fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, cousins etc that work there. One big factor is that the company is still in business. Let's say you bought a 53' Voyager and had a question about how best to access something or trace the wiring or plumbing on the boat. You can call Carver and they'll email you the owner's manual, sometimes they'll even send you the actual CAD-CAM drawings of the boat's design. They have all of the original purchase orders and can tell you exactly what was and was not on the boat when it was originally ordered, based on the HIN. One time, I even called to ask about about some details of the engine wiring on a 2001 506 owned by one of my clients. After discussing the specifics with the customer service rep, he put me on hold for a few minutes. The next voice on the line was one of the actual technicians that installed the engines on that particular boat back in 2001. He still worked for the company and was able to provide invaluable insight. That kind of service is really hard to beat. Out of the 255 slips in our marina, at least 12 of the boats are Carvers or Marquis. Carver builds a lot of attention to detail into their models and there are pretty much no unused spaces. If there was an empty space, they put a door on it so you can use it for storage. They do have some drawbacks and design quirks. The cabin space is roomy but they did that by building tall boats with high side decks so they could maximize interior space. The drawback is windage. On my client's 506, the sliding screen door could not be removed to clean the wheels without removing the entire bridge (customer service's words). But overall, great boats that you will likely enjoy for years. We would likely have a Carver right now if we hadn't lucked into a boat that was already kitted out exactly like we wanted and was owned by a friend of ours. Go for the Cummins engine models if you can find them. But don't be afraid of a well-maintained Volvo engine, either. We have Volvos in our boat and they're rock solid. Just stay on top of the maintenance... but that's the same with any engine. Let me know if you have any additional questions. John  

caltexflanc said: Here is the Mariner 37 I was referring to. Still disagree? Click to expand...

• 4 wide steps (on both sides) from the cockpit to the bridge
• 3 steps down to the saloon
• huge bridge area with wide walkways on both sides
• very large saloon all on one level
• v-drives mean easy engine access from the cockpit

Our first boats in the PacNW in 88 (28 sedan) and 89-94 (32 sedan) were Carvers. We enjoyed them a lot. Not the stiffest hull designs but good in a seaway. Agree with storage comment - great use of space. Agree with the bleach bottle analogy - Carver wasn’t the only builder to go down that rat hole. One thing that’s irritating in the newer designs (and. Are er is not alone in this) is the use of round galley sinks. Just dumb. As for the larger Carvers, on of the Ben’s on panbo.com lives aboard a 53 (?) with his family. I bet he’d gladly share his experience.  

JT and Estee

Veteran member.

We have a Carver 450 Voyager Pilothouse with Cummins engines. We love, love, love our boat. Handles rougher water well, can go faster when needed but also very comfortable at "trawler" speeds. Our Carver has a full cover over the flybridge, lots of windage! However, the engines are powerful enough to overcome most wind situations we find ourselves in. We do have bow and stern thrusters, however, they are generally only used to pin us or un-pin us to a dock when we are fixing dock lines. Recently we shattered a side window (operator error). Carver service promptly provided us with part number, drawings, installation instructions, and contact information for the window manufacturer. Other than this Carver we only have experience (from many years ago) of a SeaRay 30 Sundancer so we can't compare our Carver to other brands. But we are very happy with our boat.  

We’ve been bouncing back and forth between the Mainship 390/400 and the Carver 390/400/404 models. I’m in favor of the MS build quality, engine access, operating economy and ease of maintenance. My wife loves the Carver interior, deck layout and that awesome sliding glass door to the cockpit. I’m not sure that the dog can climb the stairs to the flybridge on the MS and unfortunately, that’s a factor working against me. Not many aft cabin, cockpit boats out there with access from the aft cabin to the cockpit. Fewer still with no stairs more than 4 steps.  

PPandE said: I’m in favor of the MS build quality, engine access, operating economy and ease of maintenance. My wife loves the Carver interior, deck layout and that awesome sliding glass door to the cockpit. I’m not sure that the dog can climb the stairs to the flybridge on the MS and unfortunately, that’s a factor working against me. Not many aft cabin, cockpit boats out there with access from the aft cabin to the cockpit. Fewer still with no stairs more than 4 steps. Click to expand...

We had a 1989 3807. Great boat, but had gas motors. Great use of space and a ton of amenities. Great value and actually pretty good quality.  

Gotta say that 355/356 is one of my favorite aft cabin (non-trawler) boats! Space is really well designed and priced around 75K. The only issue for me, is that since most have gas engines, it really wouldn't be a great boat for long distance cruising. Jim  

Miz Trom said: Wow, George, I usually agree with all of your comments. But I really like the Carver Mariners from the early 80's. My favorite feature was the built-in bow seat (because our dogs love that) and next was the decent-sized cockpit (for fishing). My only complaint was that their dual-engine running gear was too exposed for cruising in unfamiliar waters; I wished they had a deeper keel. Now this thread has me wondering how their older models from the 80's are holding up. Cheers and stay safe, Mrs. Trombley Click to expand...

JLD said: Gotta say that 355/356 is one of my favorite aft cabin (non-trawler) boats! Space is really well designed and priced around 75K. The only issue for me, is that since most have gas engines, it really wouldn't be a great boat for long distance cruising. Jim Click to expand...

Baker said: Yep. Damn good boat. See my signature. And those B series Cummins were a perfect match for that hull. I burned about 16gph doing 18 knots. Not bad for a “big” planing powerboat. Click to expand...

• Aug 3, 2020

Redhook98 said: We had a 1989 3807. Great boat, but had gas motors. Great use of space and a ton of amenities. Great value and actually pretty good quality. Click to expand...

They're just fugly...most of them look like my sneaker shoe except their Voyager line.  

Had a 2002 carver voyager 57 for about 5 years. Great boat and support from factory. Had twin Cummings QSM 11 engines that ran great. Have purchased two new boats since then and wish I had kept the Carver. Resale was great, listed it and sold it within 6 weeks. A lot of windage so be sure to get bow thruster at minimum and stern thruster would be super nice.  

Ruffryder said: They're just fugly...most of them look like my sneaker shoe except their Voyager line. Click to expand...

• Oct 15, 2020

Looking at a carver 370 aft cabin with cat diesel engines. 1993 model. Anything I should be looking for that is common to this model. Plan on using it at trawler speeds. 8-10 knots on the icw. What should I be looking for as fuel usage. Thanks for y'all input. Coming from a 38' sailboat.  

Just had a contract fall through on a Carver. Seems that the last four years or so saw little to no preventive maintenance which has morphed into ten of thousands in corrective maintenance. Not to mention little things like several of the major components were advertised as "replaced" and still wore the serial numbers installed when the boat was new. I'm learning that there are no truth in advertising laws in boating.  

Mountain sailor

So many dishonest people out there these days. It's really sad. Not the way I was raised.  

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Blue ocean trawler. With ABT stabilizers and hydraulic bow and stern thrusters. Has 2000 hour battery bank with Absolyte 20 year sealed 2 volt batteries and 3 inverter chargers. Two Northern Lights generators, a 10 kw with 1300 hours and a 20 kw with 900 hours. One of the final Ocean Alexanders built in Taiwan with outstanding joinery and teak and holly soles. Built to go to Alaska with Webasto diesel plumbing throughout. Easy for two people to handle with 5 steering stations. Price is reduced for quick sale. Insurance survey 2020 valued vessel at$850K.

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Yard : Horizon Type : Motor yacht Guests : 6 Crew : 4 Cabins : 3 Length : 28.65 m / 94′0″ Beam : 6.55 m / 21′6″ Draft : 1.98 m / 6′6″ Year of build : 2005 Refit : 2015 Displacement : Semi displacement Type of engine : Diesel Brand : Caterpillar Model : 3412E Maximum speed : 15 knots Cruising speed : 12 knots Gross tonage : 144 Hull : GRP Superstructure : GRP Interior designer : John H.V. Lindblom Generator : Northern Lights Similar yachts New listings Log in or Sign up You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser . timvail Senior Member We have just recently sold our sea ray and are looking to purchase between 35 to 40 foot MY. We have been looking at carvers as we like the layout. We have recently heard some discouraging news regarding the older ones. Any comments or suggestions would be most helpful.\tks tim wscott52 Senior Member I don't know specifics, someone here will, but the Carvers I've been on didn't seem very well built. I think Sea Ray is generally a better built boat. I did have a marine surveyor once, after ragging on Carvers, tell me Silvertons were surprisingly well built boats. CaptTom Senior Member My family and I had a 1987 34 Silverton Convertible for 17 years. Based in Long Island, NY, we cruised all over the south shore, around Manhattan, tons of offshore ocean fishing, even up the Hudson to Albany. Nice, solid hull, all glass at least below the waterline. Drilled a hole in the bottom for a transducer and the plug had no wood or coring. Had it in 6+ footers a few times. It's not always the build of the boat that makes an experience good or bad but the experience and knowledge behind the wheel. Anyway, sleeps 4 comfy, 6 is possible, you'll have more options with kids (i.e. took the dinette table down and had my infant son sleep on the dinette floor on blankets, worked well. 40-fotters around the late 1980's had same type of layout but much more room, which may suite you. RER Senior Member Not sure what you mean by 'older' ...some people think a 2002 model is old. With an older boat, and I'll assume you mean at least 10 years old, I don't get too hung up on model year or brand. If it's 10 years old or 15 years old what matters to me is the care the boat has received and the condition that it's in. When I buy an older boat I look at it like I'm paying the seller for care and upkeep during the period of time he's owned it. I value a knowledgeable owner/seller as much or more than a particular brand. mbgator New Member Older Carver's Last summer we purchased a '85 Carver Riviera. 28' with twin crusaders. Very well maintained. We are the 3rd owner, first had it for 17 years and loved the boat dearly. The 2nd owner just kept it at the marina and didn't use it. After a thorough survey, weeks of cleaning - we are very proud of her. Solid boat for a 28 footer. Attached Files: Pegasus.jpg. By older we mean something late '80s. Specifically we had been looking at 3607's or 3807's. And in the mid '90's, perhaps the 355. We'd always thought Carvers to be solid, well made boats....there are certainly a number of them around here, and are popular, but after doing a little research, have heard a number of sources tell us that they are not as solid as they appear. mbgator: contrats on your Riviera! Just a few years ago that was our "dream boat". But at the time, they were out of our range and now we'd like something a little different. Nice boat though! Fireman431 Senior Member I have a 2001 Carver 374 Voyager. I am the second owner and picked it up after realizing what a decent boat they really are. I have done a lot of research on the Carvers, Silvertons, Meridian (Bayliner), Maxums, etc. The older Carvers, generally older than the early 90's, weren't constructed as well. They had foam and coring below the waterline and lots of wood in their stringers. As the manufacturing process progressed, they had to come into compliance with stricter guidelines for the NMMA certifications. My vessel has no coring (fiberglass only) below the waterline. TONS of sealent between fittings and with all fasteners, very nice fit & finish to all fiberglass parts--no giant gaps to fill in with caulking. The interiors are some the best in their mid-range cruiser class. Just make sure that the boat has been preperly cared for and all maintenance completed as scheduled. Good luck on whatever purchase you make. geriksen Senior Member We work on a lot of them here. Quality is between Silverton and Sea Ray. The biggest problem we see is that they had layup issues that lead to massive blisters. Big, deep ones. I have seen some that almost go all the way though the hull on Carvers.. The Santego's are actually great boats but don't sell very well. The old 4207 was a great boat with 3208 cats. Some of the other models are just plain goofy. We call the Mariner "the orthopedic shoe" After 2001 they all sort of look like plastic bubbles like Meridian, Silverton, etc. CaptTom said: My family and I had a 1987 34 Silverton Convertible for 17 years. Based in Long Island, NY, we cruised all over the south shore, around Manhattan, tons of offshore ocean fishing, even up the Hudson to Albany. Nice, solid hull, all glass at least below the waterline. Drilled a hole in the bottom for a transducer and the plug had no wood or coring. Had it in 6+ footers a few times. It's not always the build of the boat that makes an experience good or bad but the experience and knowledge behind the wheel. Anyway, sleeps 4 comfy, 6 is possible, you'll have more options with kids (i.e. took the dinette table down and had my infant son sleep on the dinette floor on blankets, worked well. 40-fotters around the late 1980's had same type of layout but much more room, which may suite you. Click to expand... carver boats Thanks everyone for your help. I hope a good surveyer can locate the concerns that may arise in the boat we choose. Regarding your surveyor: 1) They hate it, but watch everything the surveyor does. I had the survey done on my boat and they provided everything including compression tests on the engine. They indicated each cylinder pressure, took oil samples for the engines and genset, pulled the boat and checked the hull, out drives, shafts, seals, etc. However, I discovered that they forged the cylinder pressures because there was a broken plug that they missed plus one that was seized in the cylinder head. That was because the big fat surveyor couldn't get his bug butt on the outboard side of the engines. 2) Get a reputable company. There are fly-by-night compaines that won't certify their results. Get someone that's beenin business for a while. 3) By sticking with the surveyor and asking questions, you're likely to learn somehing about the vessel and what to look for on your own. I learned a lot about what to look for on the hull and shafts when I pull the boat for zincs and visable inspection. geriksen said: We work on a lot of them here. Quality is between Silverton and Sea Ray. The biggest problem we see is that they had layup issues that lead to massive blisters. Big, deep ones. I have seen some that almost go all the way though the hull on Carvers. Click to expand... NYCAP123 Senior Member Fireman431 said: Regarding your surveyor: 1) They hate it, but watch everything the surveyor does. I had the survey done on my boat and they provided everything including compression tests on the engine. They indicated each cylinder pressure, took oil samples for the engines and genset, pulled the boat and checked the hull, out drives, shafts, seals, etc. However, I discovered that they forged the cylinder pressures because there was a broken plug that they missed plus one that was seized in the cylinder head. That was because the big fat surveyor couldn't get his bug butt on the outboard side of the engines. 2) Get a reputable company. There are fly-by-night compaines that won't certify their results. Get someone that's beenin business for a while. 3) By sticking with the surveyor and asking questions, you're likely to learn somehing about the vessel and what to look for on your own. I learned a lot about what to look for on the hull and shafts when I pull the boat for zincs and visable inspection. Click to expand... joe miglio New Member mbgator said: ↑ Older Carver's Last summer we purchased a '85 Carver Riviera. 28' with twin crusaders. Very well maintained. We are the 3rd owner, first had it for 17 years and loved the boat dearly. The 2nd owner just kept it at the marina and didn't use it. After a thorough survey, weeks of cleaning - we are very proud of her. Solid boat for a 28 footer. Click to expand... Capt J Senior Member wscott52 said: ↑ I don't know specifics, someone here will, but the Carvers I've been on didn't seem very well built. I think Sea Ray is generally a better built boat. I did have a marine surveyor once, after ragging on Carvers, tell me Silvertons were surprisingly well built boats. Click to expand... Joe Thanks for reaching-out. We loved our Riveria and occasionally discuss how much we enjoyed the boat. When first purchased, the survey returned a single page of recommended items, all cleared-up within a weekend. Very little was noted, and nothing structural. Very solid boat, easy to handle and a breeze to dock. While not as fast as a 30 Sundancer, she was easily as stable and had twice as much 'livable' room aboard. Fuel consumption is relative, but I ran her at 17 - 18 knots and averaged about 20 gph at that speed on Lake Michigan. I could keep her on plane at as little as 15 knots before she fell-off. One downside to note - she's not a 'dry boat', the bow doesn't have enough flare to keep all the spray off the windshield, but that wasn't a problem. Does the boat you are looking-at have A/C, is it gas or diesel, genset installed? Keep us posted. Cindy F New Member We are also looking at a 1986 Riviera and would appreciate any comments about the boat. It has been completely restored inside with all new cushions etc. It seems to have been very well maintained. I 've read a lot of negative reviews about Carver boats, especially the older ones. We don't plan on any long trips, just want to explore the SW Florida coastline. I'm wondering if it may be a good little boat for us, as its very roomy below. The price is $30,000, so for the money, we can't expect too much. The engine has been refurbished and has 700 hours. Any thoughts on this boat? No, create an account now. Yes, my password is: Forgot your password? News of St. John An Online Blog About the Daily Happenings of St. John, USVI The Best St. John Villas… Without the fees. Click to book St. John Villas direct. Big Time Boats – Motor Yacht KAOS Good Morning!  I hope that all of you had an absolutely spectacular weekend and that your Monday is off to a great start!  We took a much deserved day off yesterday and actually went on a non-working boat day.  Ryan Matthews with On the Sea Charters took us out for a beautiful day of snorkeling, beach hopping and whale hunting.  Well, we didn’t find any whales, but we did happen upon billions of dollars of boats on the docks at Yacht Haven Grande on St. Thomas. A few of these are pretty familiar at this point.  Sailing Yacht EOS and Motor Yacht Rising Sun have been in the USVI for most of the past year. But Motor Yacht KAOS was a new one for me and I was intrigued to look into this incredibly stunning vessel! KAOS, formerly called Jubilee, is a 110 meter luxury vessel that houses all of the amenities and a crew of 46 people in the 31 crew cabins!  The boat was originally built in the Netherlands in 2017 and was refitted in 2020.  The fifteen lavish staterooms on board sleep up to 30 lucky cruisers with one owner suite, four VIP suites and ten doubles. Unfortunately, this beautiful vessel is not for sale or for charter so this is about as close as we will get…Not that we could afford it if it were 🙂 KAOS offers generous outdoor teak deck areas with a wide range of amenities including an outdoor cinema, swimming pool, jacuzzi, BBQ areas, a lavish swim platform and an outdoor bar. Also adorning the upper deck of the vessel is a touch and go helipad! The interior of KAOS continues the luxuries with lavish decor, a steam room, sauna, gym, beach club, club lounge and elevator. KAOS was originally built as Jubilee for the late Emir of Qatar.  Following the passing of the Arab leader, the boat was listed for sale at the ticket price of $310 million.  It was purchased, and is currently owned, by heiress to the Walmart fortune, Nancy Walton. Leave a Comment Cancel reply Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Experts puzzle over why Bayesian yacht sank. Was it a 'black swan event'? The Bayesian set off on a leisurely cruise around Italy's southern coast on a sunny day in late July. The luxurious super yacht − which boasted one of the largest masts in the world and carried a crew of business moguls, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his family and a chair of Morgan Stanley − set sail from the Amalfi Coast, bound for Sicily. Less than a month later, the ship had sunk 160 feet under the water , leaving its cook dead and six of its passengers, including at least two Americans, missing and prompting a massive search that has drawn international attention. Now, experts are trying to piece together why in the early hours Monday the Bayesian was quickly pulled under the waves amid a storm that saw at least one tornado spin up over the water. Breaking news to start your day smart. Sign up for USA TODAY's Daily Briefing newsletter. A perfect storm led to Bayesian sinking, experts say The combination of unlikely factors that could have contributed to the ship's fate constituted a "black swan event," Matthew Schanck, chairman of the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, told USA TODAY. The Bayesian was well-built: A 2008 product of Italian ship maker Perini, it was constructed in accordance with international maritime standards and commercially certified by the U.K.'s Maritime and Coastguard Agency, according to Schanck. The bout of bad weather that swept the area when the ship went down was also out of the ordinary in the northern Mediterranean, "which isn't renowned for prolonged, significant stormy weather," he said. "The fact that those two elements have then resulted in the foundering of a super yacht is pretty extraordinary," Schanck said. "These things don't happen every day." After the ship sank just before 5 a.m. local time, 15 people, including a 1-year-old, were pulled from the water. Some were rescued from a life raft by the crew of a ship docked nearby. Ricardo Thomas, the ship's cook and a native of Antigua, was found dead, according to authorities. As of Tuesday, six people were missing, including Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter. Several missing passengers were involved in Lynch's trial on fraud charges, including Jonathan Bloomer, a Morgan Stanley chair who served as his character witness, and one of Lynch's attorneys. Lynch, accused of fraud after he sold his company to electronics giant Hewlett-Packard, was acquitted of all charges weeks ago. Who is Mike Lynch? UK entrepreneur among those missing after superyacht sinks off Sicily Tornado formed over unusually hot water Storms in the area that night may have whipped up a water spout, a tornado over the water , according to local meteorologists. It was likely triggered by the water's unusual warmth, said Rick Shema, a certified consulting meteorologist who served in the Navy. "The water spout was an uncommon occurrence," he said. "But again, these things happen, especially in warmer water." At 83.7 degrees, water in the area was more than 3 degrees hotter than average on the day the Bayesian sank, likely the result of climate change, Shema said. "Hurricanes can form at 80 degrees. This was almost four degrees higher than that," he said. The water spout may have spun up when cooler air dropped from mountainous places nearby onto the hot water, he said. "A water spout is a vortex, basically like a tornado, spinning real fast, sucking up water and moisture as the column rises," he said. Although water spouts only reach around 120 mph, as compared with tornadoes on land, which can reach up to 300 mph, "you don't need 200 mph to sink a ship," he said. "Even an average tornado, 120 miles an hour, that's a lot of wind," he said, "which would heel the boat over for sure." Water spouts spring up suddenly, Shema said. Before they strike, winds can be slow, but "once the water spout comes over, bam, it's on," he said. Before sunrise, the ship's crew may not have seen the water spout coming. "The visibility was probably a big factor," he said. With the windows of the yacht opened, as they likely were in the hot weather, the water spout could have triggered water that flooded through the portholes, Shema said, causing the ship to sink. Tragedy strikes: Scramble to find survivors after Bayesian yacht sinks off Sicily coast Search continues, but shift to recovery phase approaches Italian authorities said the Bayesian was probably at anchor when the storm struck, meaning it couldn't maneuver and ride the waves, according to Mitchell Stoller, a captain and maritime expert witness. Other ships in the area that turned on their engines rode out the storm, he said. "When you're at anchor and you see weather, you start your engine and you put the wind on the bow. You don't let it get on the side," he said. Schanck said another key question concerns the position of the keel, a heavy weight underneath the boat that acts as a counterbalance to keep it upright, when the ship sank. When lifted, "that's going to affect the stability of the vessel, because, obviously, you've now raised the center of gravity of that vessel," he said. The Bayesian was floating over 160 feet of water at the time, deep enough that the keel would likely be deployed. But the fact that "the vessel heeled over so heavily makes me question that," Schanck said. The cause of the disaster may not be known until the ship can be examined in more detail, experts say. Prosecutors in a nearby town have already opened an investigation. Schanck said investigators will have plenty to work with once the operation moves into a recovery phase. "The vessel is intact and in good condition on the seabed," he said. "There's a lot of eyewitness accounts from other vessels in the area and the shore." As the search entered its second day on Tuesday, the rescue effort may shift in that direction soon. "I suspect, later on, today or tomorrow, we'll probably see some mention of a recovery operation being stated," Schanck said. The decision to would depend on whether rescuers find signs of life in the ship and air pockets or survivable spaces, Schanck said. At this point, survivors on the water's surface looks unlikely. "My professional opinion is that the casualties will be located within the vessel," he said. "There is a risk versus benefit in all maritime search and rescue incidents," he said. "Where we start transitioning to a recovery phase, that line shifts." Contributing: Reuters Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. Reach her on email at [email protected]. Follow her on X @CybeleMO. 117 IMAGES Overall view of 110 ft., custom-designed yacht, Big Bad John, owned BIG BAD JOHN Overall view of 110 ft., custom-designed yacht, Big Bad John, owned Big Bad John Movie Motor yacht Bad Company richmenslife VIDEO Big Bad John #trucking 85m Motor Yacht Motor Yacht LEONA (video #1) AUTO TUNED? Big Bad John Big Bad John Big Bad John (Refurbished) COMMENTS LA SIRENA Yacht The 43m/141'1" motor yacht 'La Sirena' (ex. Big Bad John) was built by Christensen in the United States at their Vancouver, WA shipyard. Her interior is styled by design house Setzer Design Group and she was delivered to her owner in March 2000. This luxury vessel's exterior design is the work of Christensen and she was last refitted in 2013. Christensen 140 At 140 feet, Big Bad John is one of the longest yachts in memory to utilize a raised pilothouse. Most yachts of this length would carry at least a full pilothouse, and perhaps even a full third deck. Dean, however, wanted something more evocative of motion and made a deliberate choice to go long rather than high to achieve the space he wanted. BIG BAD JOHN Motor Yachts From 65 Feet Or 20 M Loa. Added: Nov 1, 2012. Views: 10,027. Image Resolution: 1,780 x 1,168. Description: The a)BIG BAD JOHN with a length of 140'/42.7 meters was build for country singer Jimmy Dean by Christensen Yachts in 2000. She was named after one of his biggest hits "Big Bad John". Today she is known as the b)BRI, a)BIG BAD ... Overall view of 110 ft., custom-designed yacht, Big Bad John, owned DETAILS. Contact your local office for all commercial or promotional uses.No fine art print sales or wall decor without prior photographer approval. Not released. More information. Overall view of 110 ft., custom-designed yacht, Big Bad John, owned by C/W singer, businessman Jimmy Dean. Get premium, high resolution news photos at Getty Images. HEARTSAVER Yacht Cruising speed of 29 knots. Sleeps 6 overnight. The 33.22m/109' motor yacht 'Heartsaver' (ex. Big Bad John) was built by Denison at their Dania, FL shipyard. Her interior is styled by design house Susan Peluo and she was completed in 1990. This luxury vessel's exterior design is the work of Joe Langlois. Yacht FREEDOM, Christensen FREEDOM was previously called project/yacht name 023 Big Bad John; Walkabout. This 43 metre (141 foot) luxury yacht was crafted at Christensen Shipyards in 2000. Motor Yacht FREEDOM is a capacious superyacht. The firm of naval architecture whom authored her plans and general arangement on this ship was Christensen Shipyard and Setzer Design Group. Jimmy Dean-Sausage King & Boater Jimmy Dean's yacht then was a 53 Hatteras motor yacht. A 53 Hatteras was considered a good-size yacht back then. I suspect Jimmy got infected with two-foot, or 10-foot or 20-foot-itis. ... Yes, it was named Big Bad John as had all of his boats before it. Mr. Dawson noted: "At 140 feet, Big Bad John is one of the longest yachts in memory to ... 'BIG, BAD JOHN' TAKES ITS TURN He and his wife of 39 years, Sue, spend half the year on their present yacht, Big Bad John, including two summer months in Kennebunkport buddying around with George and Barbara Bush. They'll do ... BIG BAD JOHN ~ Jimmy Dean (1961) BIG BAD JOHN ~ Jimmy Dean (1961) Columbia # CL 1735 Jimmy Dean - (August 10, 1928 - June 13, 2010)Birth name: Jimmy Ray Dean Birth place: Plainview, TexasPl... Motor Yachts: A Definitive Guide Living Aboard Motor Yachts. For a solo nomad, the ideal size sailboat to live on would be 35 feet for most people. However, if you are planning to live aboard a boat with a family, you will need a boat between 45-50 feet. Any boat below 35 feet would be too cramped for living, and you would quickly get cabin fever. He followed his dream to the high seas and now designs multimillion The same magazine named Magic, a 130-foot design by Setzer for Northern Marine, to its fleet of the finest large yachts in the world and gushed that the firm's 77-foot motor yacht Magpie is one of ... BAD-LAD Yacht for Sale in Fort Lauderdale 2008. Cabins. 3. Asking Price. $ 1,999,000. Contact A Broker. Outer Reef 730 Motor Yacht, BAD-LAD, exemplifies the exceptional lineage of Outer Reef Yachts. The 730 Model solidified the brand as a top choice for discerning owners seeking superior quality, safety at sea, and reliable performance. BAD-LAD boasts an impressive volume with her 21 ... Bayesian (yacht) Bayesian was a 56-metre (184 ft) sailing superyacht, built as Salute by Perini Navi at Viareggio, Italy, and delivered in 2008. [9] It had a 72-metre (237 ft) mast, one of the tallest in the world. The yacht was last refitted in 2020. [10] It was in the legal ownership of Angela Bacares, wife of the technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch. [11] [12] It was at anchor off the northern coast of Sicily ... The Age of the Superyacht 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 ... BAD DADDY Yacht for Sale Click here to discover BAD DADDY yacht for sale. This 94' (28.65m) Motor Yacht boat by HORIZON is for sale with Northrop & Johnson. LA SIRENA yacht (Christensen, 42.98m, 2000) 2000. BEAM. 8.53 m. GUESTS. 8. LA SIRENA is a 42.98 m Motor Yacht, built in the United States of America by Christensen and delivered in 2000. Her top speed is 19.0 kn, her cruising speed is 16.0 kn, and she boasts a maximum cruising range of 1705.0 nm at 14.5 kn, with power coming from two MTU diesel engines. She can accommodate up to 8 guests ... BIG EASY Yacht Charter Price The 44.9m/147'4" 'Big Easy' motor yacht built by the Dutch shipyard Hakvoort is available for charter for up to 12 guests in 6 cabins. This yacht features interior styling by British designer Winch Design. Motor yacht Big Easy boasts a wealth of convivial spaces, perfect for luxury yacht charters with families of friends, offering ample opportunities to kick back and relax, or enjoy the water ... Carver... Good? Bad? Mainship 37 Motor Yacht. We had a Carver 3207 for a few years until we went bigger. ... John . Jul 29, 2020 #14 J. JLD Guru. Joined Mar 22, 2017 Messages 681 ... And those B series Cummins were a perfect match for that hull. I burned about 16gph doing 18 knots. Not bad for a "big" planing powerboat. Jul 29, 2020 #23 R. rslifkin Guru. Joined ... 2005 Horizon 94 Motoryacht Bad Daddy Yacht For Sale A buyer should instruct his agents, or his surveyors, to investigate such details as the buyer desires validated. This vessel is offered subject to prior sale, price change, or withdrawal without notice. Explore this 2005 Horizon 94 Motoryacht for sale. Bad Daddy is located in Palm Beach, view photos, yacht description, priced at $2,499,000. Heartsaver Yacht Heartsaver is a motor yacht with an overall length of m. The yacht's builder is Denison from United States, who launched Heartsaver in 1990. The superyacht has a beam of m, a draught of m and a volume of . GT.. Up to 6 guests can be accommodated on board the superyacht, Heartsaver, and she also has accommodation for 4 crew members, including the ship's captain. BIG WOOF Yacht for Sale in Moorehaven CRUMDALE. 85' 26.14m. Ocean Alexander. 2018. 6 Staterooms. $5,499,000. View More. Click here to discover BIG WOOF yacht for sale in Moorehaven. This 65' (19.81m) trawlers boat by Ocean Alexander is for sale with Northrop & Johnson. Motor yacht Bad Daddy About Bad Daddy. Bad Daddy is a 28.65 m / 94′0″ luxury motor yacht. She was built by Horizon in 2005. With a beam of 6.55 m and a draft of 1.98 m, she has a GRP hull and GRP superstructure. This adds up to a gross tonnage of 144 tons. She is powered by Caterpillar engines giving her a maximum speed of 15 knots and a cruising speed of 12 knots. pros and cons of older carvers Older Carver's. Last summer we purchased a '85 Carver Riviera. 28' with twin crusaders. Very well maintained. We are the 3rd owner, first had it for 17 years and loved the boat dearly. The 2nd owner just kept it at the marina and didn't use it. After a thorough survey, weeks of cleaning - we are very proud of her. Big Time Boats KAOS, formerly called Jubilee, is a 110 meter luxury vessel that houses all of the amenities and a crew of 46 people in the 31 crew cabins! The boat was originally built in the Netherlands in 2017 and was refitted in 2020. The fifteen lavish staterooms on board sleep up to 30 lucky cruisers with one owner suite, four VIP suites and ten doubles. Why Bayesian super yacht sank, leaving 1 dead, 6 missing The luxurious super yacht − which boasted one of the largest masts in the world and carried a crew of business moguls, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his family and a chair of ... catamaran gulet motorboat powerboat riverboat sailboat trimaran yacht