golden life yacht owner

Who Owns Which Superyacht? (A Complete Guide)

Have you ever wondered who owns the most luxurious, extravagant, and expensive superyachts? Or how much these lavish vessels are worth? In this complete guide, we’ll explore who owns these magnificent vessels, what amenities they hold, and the cost of these incredible yachts.

We’ll also take a look at some of the most expensive superyachts in the world and the notable people behind them.

Get ready to explore the world of superyachts and the people who own them!

Table of Contents

Short Answer

The ownership of superyachts is generally private, so the exact answer to who owns which superyacht is not always publicly available.

However, there are some notable superyacht owners that are known.

For example, Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, owns the Rising Sun, which is the 11th largest superyacht in the world.

Other notable owners include Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Overview of Superyachts

The term superyacht refers to a large, expensive recreational boat that is typically owned by the worlds wealthy elite.

These vessels are designed for luxury cruising and typically range in size from 24 meters to over 150 meters, with some even larger.

Superyachts usually feature extensive amenities and creature comforts, such as swimming pools, outdoor bars, movie theaters, helipads, and spas.

Superyachts can range in price from $30 million to an astonishingly high $400 million.

Like most luxury items, the ownership of a superyacht is a status symbol for those who can afford it.

The list of superyacht owners reads like a whos who of billionaires, with names like Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The most expensive superyacht in the world is owned by the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

While some superyacht owners prefer to keep their vessels out of the public eye, others have made headlines with their extravagant amenities.

Some of the most famous superyachts feature swimming pools, private beaches, helicopter pads, on-board cinemas, and luxurious spas.

In conclusion, owning a superyacht is an exclusive status symbol for the world’s wealthy elite.

These vessels come with hefty price tags that can range from $30 million to over $400 million, and feature some of the most luxurious amenities imaginable.

Notable owners include the Emir of Qatar, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Who are the Owners of Superyachts?

From Hollywood celebrities to tech billionaires, superyacht owners come from all walks of life.

Many of the most well-known owners are billionaires, including Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Other notable owners include Hollywood stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp.

However, not all superyacht owners are wealthy.

Many are everyday people who have worked hard and saved up to purchase their dream vessel.

Other notable billionaire owners include Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and former US President Donald Trump.

These luxurious vessels come with hefty price tags that can range from $30 million to over $400 million.

For many superyacht owners, their vessels serve as a status symbol of wealth and luxury.

Some owners prefer to keep their yachts out of the public eye, while others have made headlines with their extensive amenities – from swimming pools and helicopter pads to on-board cinemas and spas.

Many of these yachts are designed to the owner’s exact specifications, ensuring that each one is totally unique and reflects the owner’s individual tastes and personality.

Owning a superyacht is an exclusive club, reserved for those with the means and the desire to experience the ultimate in luxury.

Whether they are billionaires or everyday people, superyacht owners are all united in their love of the sea and their appreciation for the finer things in life.

The Most Expensive Superyacht in the World

When it comes to superyachts, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, certainly knows how to make a statement.

His luxury vessel, the 463-foot Al Mirqab, holds the title of the world’s most expensive superyacht.

Built in 2008 by German shipbuilder Peters Werft, this impressive yacht is complete with 10 luxurious cabins, a conference room, cinema, and all the amenities one would expect from a vessel of this magnitude.

In addition, the Al Mirqab features a helipad, swimming pool, and even an outdoor Jacuzzi.

With a price tag of over $400 million, the Al Mirqab is one of the most expensive yachts in the world.

In addition to the Emir of Qatar, there are several other notable owners of superyachts.

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos all own luxurious vessels.

Bezos yacht, the aptly named The Flying Fox, is one of the longest superyachts in the world at a staggering 414 feet in length.

The Flying Fox also comes with a host of amenities, such as a helipad, swimming pool, spa, and multiple outdoor entertaining areas.

Bezos also reportedly spent over $400 million on the vessel.

Other notable owners of superyachts include Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns the $200 million Kingdom 5KR, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who owns the $200 million Rising Sun.

There are also many lesser-known owners, such as hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin, who owns the $150 million Aviva, and investor Sir Philip Green, who owns the $100 million Lionheart.

No matter who owns them, superyachts are sure to turn heads.

With their impressive size, luxurious amenities, and hefty price tags, these vessels have become a symbol of wealth and prestige.

Whether its the Emir of Qatar or a lesser-known owner, the worlds superyacht owners are sure to make a statement.

Notable Superyacht Owners

When it comes to the wealthiest and most luxurious owners of superyachts, the list reads like a whos who of the worlds billionaires.

At the top of the list is the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who holds the distinction of owning the most expensive superyacht in the world.

Aside from the Emir, other notable owners include Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

All of these owners have made headlines with their extravagant vessels, which are typically priced between $30 million and $400 million.

The amenities that come with these vessels vary greatly from owner to owner, but they almost always include luxurious swimming pools, helicopter pads, on-board cinemas, and spas.

Some owners opt for more extravagant features, such as submarines, personal submarines, and even their own personal submarines! Other owners prefer to keep their vessels out of the public eye, but for those who prefer a more showy approach, they can certainly make a statement with a superyacht.

No matter who owns the vessel, it’s no surprise that these superyachts are a status symbol among the world’s wealthiest.

Whether you’re trying to impress your peers or just looking to enjoy a luxurious outing, owning a superyacht is the ultimate way to show off your wealth.

What Amenities are Included on Superyachts?

Owning a superyacht is a sign of wealth and prestige, and many of the worlds most prominent billionaires have their own vessels.

The most expensive superyacht in the world is owned by the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, while other notable owners include Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The cost of a superyacht can range from $30 million to over $400 million, but the price tag doesnt quite capture the sheer extravagance and amenities of these vessels.

Superyachts come with all the comforts of home, and then some.

Many owners will equip their vessels with swimming pools, helicopter pads, on-board cinemas, spas, and other luxury amenities.

The interior of a superyacht can be custom-designed to the owners specifications.

Some owners opt for modern, sleek designs, while others prefer a more traditional look.

Many of the most luxurious yachts feature marble floors, walk-in closets, and custom-made furniture.

Some vessels even come with a full-service gym, complete with exercise equipment and trained professionals.

Other amenities may include a library, casino, media room, and private bar.

When it comes to outdoor amenities, superyachts have some of the most impressive features in the world.

Many yachts come with outdoor entertainment areas, complete with full kitchens, dining rooms, and lounge areas.

Some owners even opt for hot tubs or jacuzzis for relaxing afternoons in the sun.

And, of course, there are the jet skis, water slides, and other exciting water activities that come with many of these vessels.

No matter what amenities a superyacht has, it is sure to be an experience like no other.

From the sleek interiors to the luxurious outdoor features, these vessels provide a unique, luxurious experience that is unrivaled on land.

Whether you’re looking for a relaxing escape or an exciting adventure, a superyacht is sure to provide.

How Much Do Superyachts Cost?

When it comes to superyachts, the sky is the limit when it comes to cost.

These luxury vessels come with hefty price tags that can range from anywhere between $30 million to over $400 million.

So, if youre in the market for a superyacht, youre looking at an investment that could easily break the bank.

The cost of a superyacht is driven by a variety of factors, including size, amenities, and customization.

Generally, the larger the yacht, the more expensive it will be.

Superyachts typically range in size from 100 feet to over 200 feet, and they can be as wide as 40 feet.

The bigger the yacht, the more luxurious features and amenities it will have.

Amenities also play a significant role in the cost of a superyacht.

While some owners prefer to keep their yachts out of the public eye, others have made headlines with their extensive amenities.

From swimming pools and helicopter pads to on-board cinemas and spas, the sky is the limit when it comes to customizing a superyacht.

The more amenities a superyacht has, the more expensive it will be.

Finally, customization is another major factor that will drive up the cost of a superyacht.

Many luxury vessels have custom-designed interiors that are tailored to the owners tastes.

From custom furniture and artwork to lighting and audio systems, the cost of a superyacht can quickly escalate depending on the level of customization.

In short, the cost of a superyacht can vary widely depending on its size, amenities, and customization.

While some may be able to get away with spending a few million dollars, others may end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on their dream yacht.

No matter what your budget is, its important to do your research and find out exactly what youre getting for your money before signing on the dotted line.

Keeping Superyachts Out of the Public Eye

When it comes to owning a superyacht, some owners prefer to keep their vessels out of the public eye.

Understandably, these individuals are concerned with privacy and discretion, and therefore tend to take measures to ensure their yachts are not visible to outsiders.

For instance, some superyacht owners opt to keep their vessels in private marinas, away from the public areas of larger ports.

Additionally, some yacht owners may choose to hire security guards to patrol and protect their vessels while they are moored or sailing.

In addition to physical security, some superyacht owners also use technology to keep their vessels out of the public eye.

For example, a yacht owner may choose to install a satellite-based communications system that allows them to keep their vessel completely off-radar.

This system works by bouncing signals off satellites rather than transmitting them, making it virtually impossible for anyone to track the yachts movements.

Finally, some superyacht owners also choose to limit the number of people who have access to their vessels.

For instance, the owner may only allow family members and close friends to board the yacht.

Additionally, the owner may choose to employ a limited number of staff to help maintain the vessel and keep it running smoothly.

These individuals may be required to sign non-disclosure agreements to ensure they do not disclose any information about the yacht or its owner.

Overall, while some superyacht owners may choose to keep their vessels out of the public eye, there are still plenty of other ways to show off the opulence associated with owning a superyacht.

From swimming pools and helicopter pads to on-board cinemas and spas, there are many luxurious amenities that can make a superyacht the envy of any jet setter.

Final Thoughts

Superyachts are a symbol of luxury and status, and the list of yacht owners reads like a who’s who of billionaires.

From the Emir of Qatar’s world-record breaking $400 million yacht to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s vessel with a helicopter pad and on-board spa, the amenities of these luxury vessels are truly stunning.

With prices ranging from $30 million to over $400 million, owning a superyacht is an expensive endeavor.

Whether you’re looking to purchase one or just curious to learn more about the owners and their amenities, this guide will provide you with all the information you need to stay up to date with the superyacht scene.

James Frami

At the age of 15, he and four other friends from his neighborhood constructed their first boat. He has been sailing for almost 30 years and has a wealth of knowledge that he wants to share with others.

Recent Posts

When Was Banana Boat Song Released? (HISTORICAL INSIGHTS)

The "Banana Boat Song" was released in 1956 by Harry Belafonte. This calypso-style song, also known as "Day-O," became a huge hit and remains popular to this day for its catchy tune and upbeat...

How to Make Banana Boat Smoothie King? (DELICIOUS RECIPE REVEALED)

To make a Banana Boat Smoothie King smoothie at home, start by gathering the ingredients: a ripe banana, peanut butter, chocolate protein powder, almond milk, and ice. Blend the banana, a scoop of...

The story behind this superyacht sailing along Oahu’s south shore

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Mystery solved. You may have seen this superyacht off the coast of Waikiki.

Anne Abaya snapped a photo and asked Hawaii News Now to find out more.

We confirmed the nearly 400-foot-long vessel is called the LIVA° .

Since last week, it’s been berthed at Pier 9, then Pier 2, and right now, it’s parked in front of Aloha Tower.

Reports say it’s owned by German-born, U.S. citizen billionaire Stephen Orenstein, who lives in Dubai.

He bought it for about $250 million and spends about $25 million a year to operate it.

No word on why the ship is here, or where it’s headed next.

Copyright 2024 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.

Family attacked in mass shooting seeks therapy for trauma and guilt

State files legal action against homeowner whose house partially collapsed into ocean

MFD receives ATF report on ‘cause and origin’ of Maui wildfires

Punaluu couple battles erosion, potential state fines and abandoned cesspool

Viral Hawaii comedy skit becomes feature film

Police locate suspect wanted in animal cruelty case caught on camera

Lawmaker calls for upgraded criminal charges for owner accused of abusing dog for years

Latest news.

Free legal clinic in Waianae offers chance to clear minor criminal records

Lahaina’s King Kamehameha III Elementary cannot be rebuilt in original location, state says

First Alert Weather: Trade winds dominate along with a building north swell

City brings mobile homeless triage shelter to Kapolei

Maui mayor voices need for county water distribution after wildfires

Longtime Hawaii MLB veteran hoping for another shot at a world title

New Hawaii coffee law hurting Kona businesses

Animal cruelty cases spike as a result of law enforcement reporting app

The human side of yacht ownership

How would you characterise the typical yacht owner? Whatever you may have been led to believe, the truth is simple: for most, it’s about using their yachts for precious family time, and for many it’s also about using their yachts for good.

There’s a theme that is repeated on countless yachts large and small the world over – superyachting, for most, is not about being seen but rather the opposite. It’s about yacht families and their friends enjoying precious, private moments away from the pressures of demanding business lives and the long hours running those businesses can entail.

“I have an extended family, and when our schedules allow we all like to gather on the yacht and spend some quality time as a family,” Douglas Barrowman , owner of the yacht Turquoise , told Superyacht Life back in 2017. “There is no place like a yacht for family togetherness.”

Douglas Barrowman with family

A love of the sea, adventure and technology

Superyachts and yacht ownership are also a way to explore the world around us, and to interact with and grow to understand extraordinarily diverse communities from remote Pacific islands to the Scandinavian Arctic. It’s something that inspired tech entrepreneur Jasper Smith to combine his love of adventure and his love of the sea with an opportunity for owners to give back while indulging their passion.

“I have always had a deep passion for the ocean,” Smith says. “I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau movies and being enthralled at the idea of being challenged by an endeavour.” When he set out to find his own perfect explorer yacht, however, he realised it didn’t yet exist. His answer was to create Arksen. “My aim with Arksen was to create the perfect machines to enable adventure,” he enthuses. “I also wanted to build sustainable boats which considered full life cycles, from material sourcing to recycling.”

That’s not all – Arksen also asks owners of its yachts to sign up to a pledge it calls 10% for the Ocean, where they will donate 10% of their vessel’s time to philanthropic activities. “A lot of people who have the money feel a responsibility to try and make sure that the oceans are well looked after,” Smith explains. “The people that are attracted to Arksen are passionate about the ocean and want to go off on slightly more advanced expeditions and trips. With that audience, there is a tremendous buy-in to the boat being for more than just their own purposes.”

Superyachts as a force for good

It speaks to the heart of the matter, which is that the superyacht industry and yacht owners in particular have a heart – they care about preserving the environment they enjoy, and they care about the communities they interact with who make them feel so welcome when they visit. It’s reflected in the smallest of gestures, such as donating materials and books to local schools, to the largest – helping with last-mile delivery of critical disaster relief. It’s about superyachts giving back.

It’s a positive-impact attitude toward humanity that is quietly typified by hundreds of superyacht owners, who often prefer to do their thing under the radar rather than take false glory for their philanthropic or humanitarian endeavours. For some it’s as straightforward as getting involved in projects with organisations like YachtAid Global . For others, their endeavours become a key reason for yachting.

American superyacht owner Carl Allen is a prime example of these philanthropic yacht owners. After selling his company, and having enjoyed chartering and owning yachts as a family for years, Allen set up Allen Explorations to deliver a full programme of projects, ranging from historical shipwreck searches and environmental research to disaster relief. Indeed, Allen’s support yacht Axis played a vital role in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian – one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the Bahamas.

“We had to drop everything and help after the hurricane,” says Allen. “ Axis delivered over £700,000 of supplies and made multiple trips to Little Grand island in the Bahamas. We’ve turned it into the epitome of how to organise hurricane relief.” The team helped get the local school back up and running, and organised for a group from Florida Power and Light to help restore power. “The island also lost their water tower,” he adds, “so we delivered four tanks on  Axis .”

Jasper Smith

Celebrating the good in the superyachting good life

From family time to time spent embracing the global family, superyacht owners have a far greater positive impact than many assume from preconceived ideas about what a superyacht is and the sort of person who owns or charters one. It’s one of the reasons The Superyacht Life Foundation, in association with the Monaco Yacht Show , has unveiled The Honours, which is a way to celebrate the people of our industry rather than the yachts which so often get sole focus. It’s about recognising the extraordinary contributions that people make, the change they inspire, the opportunities they create, and the lives they change.

On 26 September, the eve of the 2023 Monaco Yacht Show, three honourees – nominated by people from across the superyacht industry, and selected from a shortlist by an expert panel of industry judges – will be feted for their work and contribution to superyachting. These are industry professionals and yacht owners who epitomise what superyachting can do. These are people who highlight the good in the superyachting good life.

Yacht owners, impactful journeys

All around the globe, yacht owners are enjoying precious time on their yachts with family and friends, and many are also realising that their yachts can be a force for good and for change, tying in with their philanthropic works and humanitarian endeavours.

“Our yacht is a platform for much of our life,” offers Joe Anderson , co-owner of the Benovia Winery in California with his wife, Mary Dewane. “For instance, we used it at a fundraiser for cystic fibrosis in Baltimore at the 200th anniversary of the Star-Spangled Banner event. The Blue Angels were flying overhead and used Bella Una [the couple’s yacht] as a GPS coordinate and performed flybys, tipping their wings at us. It was quite a thrill. Having a yacht is a way to keep the family intact, enjoy time with friends and have fun.”

You may also like...

John Courtney

The managing director of superyacht toy maker FunAir on his love of the ocean and the destinations still on his family bucket list.

Seeking healthier waters in Menorca and beyond

Sunseeker and Blue Marine join forces for Project Menorca, aimed at protecting the seas around this popular Balearic island.

Fatih Aslanoba

Fatih Aslanoba explains why his yacht is so special to him and his daughter, Lila.

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

Don’t miss out

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

• Compare Yacht

• Azimut World

Find a dealer

Charter club, news & events.

M/Y Golden Life

Drawing on Azimut carbon fiber technology and the expertise of Stefano Righini, who defined the concept and designed the exteriors, Grande 35 Metri offers unprecedented solutions for a boat this size, representing a masterpiece of style and space. A wide-body megayacht with the possibility of adding a third level for an additional sundeck, side garage for tender and jet ski and an owner’s suite on the maindeck with a spectacular fold out terrace.

Data summary

• Length overall (incl. pulpit) 35
• Beam max 7,50
• Draft (incl. props at full load) 1,91
• Displacement (at full load) 154 t
• Building material GRP and Carbon Fiber
• Exterior designer Stefano Righini
• Interior designer Achille Salvagni Architetti
• Hull designer Pierluigi Ausonio Naval Architecture & Azimut Yachts
• Builder Azimut Yachts
• Certifications _
• Head compartments 6
• Engines 2 x 2.400 mHP MTU
• Maximum speed (test load) up to 26 knots
• Cruising speed (performance test mass) 21 knots
• Fuel capacity 18.000 l
• Water capacity 3.000 l

Follow us on WECHAT

Please keep me updated on everything about this yacht.

Non venderemo mai i tuoi dati, manterremo i tuoi dati al sicuro e non condivideremo mai i tuoi dati con terze parti per scopi di marketing. You can update your contact details at any time by emailing [email protected] or change your mind by clicking “unsubscribe” in any email you receive from us.

I have read Azimut Benetti s.p.a. privacy notice and:

I agree to receive the newsletter about Azimut’s world from Azimut Benetti s.p.a.

I agree to receive, via email, informational material regarding Azimut products from Azimut Benetti s.p.a..

We have successfully received your request and will contact you shortly.

Our newsletter will provide you with the latest news, on boat launches, previews and shows.

You will soon receive your first newsletter with the latest Azimut news.

Complete the form below to be contacted by a dedicated dealer who will gladly respond to your questions and requirements.

I agree with the disclosure of my personal data to other companies belonging to Azimut Benetti s.p.a. group and /or to third-party companies affiliated with Azimut Benetti s.p.a. for the sale of its products.

We have successfully received your request. One of our select dealers will contact you shortly.

Specify your request

Fill in the required fields and submit the form.

I have read Azimut Benetti s.p.a. privacy notice.

Thank you for your interest

All you need to know about This yacht.

We will gladly respond to your questions and requirements. Please complete the form below to be contacted.

• Live Life Bella Vita, LLC v. Cruising Yachts, Inc.: Ninth Circuit finds that third-party indemnity claimants are still claimants for Limitation Act purposes

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Live Life Bella Vita, LLC v. Cruising Yachts, Inc ., -- F.4th --, 2024 WL 4163709 (9th Cir. 2024) found that claimants seeking indemnification or contribution are additional claimants to a limitation fund that render the “single claimant” exception under the Limitation of Liability Act inapplicable.

On or about October 6, 2022, the sailing yacht Allora was docked in Marina Del Rey, California. The vessel owners hired Eduardo Loaiza to dive under water to inspect and service the bow thruster. While Loaiza was servicing the bow thruster, it suddenly activated. The propeller blades cut through Loaiza’s hands causing severe injuries.

On December 20, 2022, the vessel owners filed suit in federal district court under the Limitation of Liability Act and provided security in the amount of $788,000, the stipulated value of the vessel at the time of the loss. The district court provided notice of the limitation proceeding in a published order and issued an injunction of any other proceedings arising from Loaiza’s injury.

On February 28, 2023, Loaiza filed a complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court and in March he filed counterclaims against the vessel owners in the limitation proceeding as well as third-party claims against several third-party defendants including his employer and his coworker from the incident. The vessel owners filed their own third-party complaint against the same third-party defendants for indemnity and contribution.  

Loaiza sought leave from the district court from the stay imposed by the Limitation of Liability Act, alleging that he was a “single claimant,” which is an exception to the mandate that all claims arising out of a maritime casualty should be tried in the Limitation action. 

The district court eventually agreed to stay the limitation proceedings and allow Loaiza to proceed in state court as the sole claimant to the limitation fund. The vessel owners appealed this decision arguing that there was sufficient reason to expect the imminent filing of additional claims in the Limitation.

The Ninth Circuit had previously declined to take a position on this issue in Williams Sports Rentals , 90 F.4th 1032, 1038 (9th Cir. 2024). The Court here, though, held that parties seeking indemnity or contribution constitute separate claimants for the purposes of applying the “single claimant” exception of the Limitation of Liability Act. Allowing Loaiza’s case to proceed in state court with the indemnity and contribution claims would defeat the purpose of the Limitation of Liability Act.

The Court reasoned that, if Loaiza was awarded a judgement of $1 million in his state court action against the vessel owners and the third-party defendants, the third-party defendants could attempt to recover the additional $212,000 from the vessel owners. This would theoretically make the vessel owners liable for an amount greater than that which they had stipulated to in limiting their liability and would make such a limitation action pointless.

This holding brings the Ninth Circuit into the majority camp of circuits having considered this issue and highlights the persisting circuit split considering the role of indemnity and contribution claimants as claimants in a limitation action. This decision is helpful for the marine sector because it further limits the extent of the “single claimant” exception, and cabins the number of cases in which vessel owners may be subject to state court verdicts. Further, this ruling protects the purpose of the Limitation of Liability Act by eliminating scenarios where a vessel owner could be liable for more than the owners’ stipulation of value.

Latest Posts

• California Court of Appeal clarifies Howell and proceeds to publish Audish v. Macias
• Treasury “significantly expands” CFIUS jurisdiction over covered real estate transactions
• News alert: Update to ITAR export control regulations
• The FTC’s effort for a non-compete ban has been judicially struck down, however, its fate still hangs in the balance

See more »

DISCLAIMER: Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations. Attorney Advertising.

Refine your interests »

Written by:

PUBLISH YOUR CONTENT ON JD SUPRA NOW

• Increased visibility
• Actionable analytics
• Ongoing guidance

Published In:

Kennedys on:.

"My best business intelligence, in one easy email…"

Find anything you save across the site in your account

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.”

Link copied

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Yorker Favorites

An excerpt from Sally Rooney’s new novel.

Why you can’t get a restaurant reservation .

After a London teen-ager plummeted into the Thames, his parents discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son .

Is it O.K. to eat any type of meat ?

Don’t put off reading this article on procrastination .

What it was like being married to the Marquis de Sade .

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

Please use a modern browser to view this website. Some elements might not work as expected when using Internet Explorer.

• Landing Page
• Luxury Yacht Vacation Types
• Corporate Yacht Charter
• Tailor Made Vacations
• Luxury Exploration Vacations
• View All 3713
• Motor Yachts
• Sailing Yachts
• Classic Yachts
• Catamaran Yachts
• Filter By Destination
• More Filters
• Latest Reviews
• Charter Special Offers
• Destination Guides
• Inspiration & Features
• Mediterranean Charter Yachts
• France Charter Yachts
• Italy Charter Yachts
• Croatia Charter Yachts
• Greece Charter Yachts
• Turkey Charter Yachts
• Bahamas Charter Yachts
• Caribbean Charter Yachts
• Australia Charter Yachts
• Thailand Charter Yachts
• Dubai Charter Yachts
• Destination News
• New To Fleet
• Charter Fleet Updates
• Special Offers
• Industry News
• Yacht Shows
• Corporate Charter
• Finding a Yacht Broker
• Charter Preferences
• Questions & Answers
• Add my yacht

View More Photos

• Luxury Charter Yachts
• Motor Yachts for Charter
• Amenities & Toys
• Rates & Regions
• + Shortlist

PROJECT X YACHT CHARTER

88.01m  /  288'9   golden yachts   2022.

• Previous Yacht

Cabin Configuration

Special Features:

• Brand new for 2022
• Outstanding triple-height glass atrium and elevator
• Chic interiors courtesy of Massari Design Studio
• 7.5m by 3m glass-sided swimming pool, leading to an expansive swim platform
• Vast wellness suite with spa, Hammam and Finnish Sauna, plus juice bar and lounging area
• 7 impressive staterooms, plus VIP and on-deck owner suite with private pool
• Huge array of toys and tenders, including two limo tenders
• 360-degree sundeck gymnasium
• Top speed of 18 knots and cruising range of 4,000 nm

With plenty of onboard entertainment, motor yacht Project X is an exceptional yacht charter choice

The 87.6m/287'5" motor yacht 'Project X' is an excellent new superyacht for the luxury charter market. Delivered by the Greek shipyard Golden Yachts and featuring interior styling by Massari Design this multi-award winning yacht can comfortably accommodate up to 12 guests in 9 cabins.

Built in 2022, Project X is custom-built for world-class luxury yacht chartering, offering a wealth of spacious living areas and fabulous amenities, you'll be in for a treat from the moment you step on board. She is equipped with a beauty salon, elevator, underwater lights, beach club and gym.

Exterior Design

Nominated for a slew of awards, luxury charter yacht PROJECT X boasts a head-turning exterior profile courtesy of Ken Freivokh Design. Showcasing iconic cascading aft decks and triple-X paneling amidships, the yacht is guaranteed to turn heads wherever she ventures. Designed to create a harmonious connection with the outside world, she captures the essence of innovative superyacht design through subtle interplay with her surroundings evidenced by her floor-to-ceiling windows, fold-down balconies and large open-plan beach club.

Interior Design

Her contemporary light-filled interiors are the works of Italian studio Massari Design and have been designed to a specific brief by her experienced owner. Each interior space has been meticulously crafted to create a unique feel, yet one that still maintains complete harmony with the rest of her beautiful interiors. Showcasing a warm and welcoming palette in a variety of rich materials and textures; from rare woods to exquisite marbles, worked metals to myriad types of leather, every detail has been carefully thought out.

Guest Accommodation

Project X offers guest accommodation for up to 12 guests in 9 suites comprising a master suite, one VIP cabin, five double cabins and two twin cabins. A crew of twenty-eight, who specialize in creating exceptional charters, are on hand to provide guests with a yacht charter vacation to remember.

Onboard Comfort & Entertainment

You and your guests can enjoy a variety of experiences on Project X such as a beauty salon featuring all of the facilities required for a number of different beauty treatments. Visit the sauna and disconnect in peace and quiet or elsewhere, take a plunge in the pool under the sun. Make your day truly exceptional at the beach club and maintain your fitness routine and work out in the well-equipped gym. Soak up the bubbles in style in the deck jacuzzi.

Whatever your activities on your charter, you'll find some impressive features are seamlessly integrated to help you such as an elevator, making any part of the yacht quickly and easily accessible. For those needing to take care of work at sea, conference facilities are available to make business on board that much easier or elsewhere, stay connected to the outside world on long voyages with satellite communications. Soak up the atmosphere after dark with dramatic underwater lights and whether you want to work, use social media or stream movies on board this yacht, you can with Wi-Fi connectivity. Guests will experience complete comfort while chartering thanks to air conditioning.

Performance & Range

Built with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure, she offers greater on-board space and is more stable when at anchor thanks to her full-displacement hull. Powered by twin Caterpillar engines, she comfortably cruises at 12 knots, reaches a maximum speed of 18 knots with a range of up to 5,500 nautical miles from her 296,300 litre fuel tanks at 16 knots. Project X features at-anchor stabilizers providing exceptional comfort levels.

Project X knows a thing or two about fun on the water, with an extensive selection of action packed water toys and accessories for you and your guests to enjoy whilst on charter. Principle among these is a Flyboard for soaring over the water or swimming like a dolphin. Also there are waterslides letting guests speed from the sun deck to the water in seconds. Guests can feel the wind in their hair and jump the waves on one of the four SeaDoo WaveRunners. If that isn't enough Project X also features waterskis, a seabob, wakeboards, kayaks, bikes and much more. Project X features three tenders, but leading the pack is a 10m/32'10" Onda Limo Tender to transport you in style.

Book your next the Mediterranean luxury yacht charter aboard Project X this summer. She is already accepting bookings this winter for cruising in the Indian Ocean.

This ocean-going luxury charter motor yacht carries up to 28 professional crew who will cater to your every need.

TESTIMONIALS

There are currently no testimonials for Project X, please provide .

Project X Photos

Amenities & Entertainment

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

Project X is reported to be available to Charter with the following recreation facilities:

• 1 x 10m  /  32'10 Onda Limo Tender with 2 x Volvo Penta 220 HP engines
• 1 x 9m  /  29'6 Pedrazzini Vivalle Classic Tender
• 2 x 6.25m  /  20'6 Whitmarsh RIB

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

Project X Awards & Nominations

• Boat International Design & Innovation Awards 2023 Outstanding Exterior Motor Yacht Design - 60m and above Finalist
• Boat International Design & Innovation Awards 2023 Best Interior Design Motor Yachts 500GT and Above Finalist
• Boat International Design & Innovation Awards 2023 Outstanding Lifestyle Feature Winner
• Boat International Design & Innovation Awards 2023 Innovation of the Year Finalist
• The World Superyacht Awards 2023 Displacement Motor Yachts 1500GT and above Nomination
• The International Yacht & Aviation Awards 2023 Motor Yacht over 80m Winner
• + shortlist

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

APPROVED RYA WATER SPORTS CENTRE

Your family and friends could learn to use the water toys on your charter vacation onboard this luxury charter yacht. Motor Yacht Project X is a certified RYA Training Centre yacht.

'Project X' Charter Rates & Destinations

Summer Season

May - September

€1,200,000 p/week + expenses Approx $1,333,500

High Season

Cruising Regions

Mediterranean Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Monaco, Montenegro, Turkey

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

Winter Season

October - April

€1,100,000 p/week + expenses Approx $1,222,500

Indian Ocean Maldives, Seychelles

HOT SPOTS:   Abu Dhabi, Dubai

Charter Project X

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

To charter this luxury yacht contact your charter broker or

On Board Review

Blending chic interiors with superb craftsmanship, the editorial team at YachtCharterFleet were lucky enough to step on board Golden Yacht’s 88m (288ft) flagship PROJECT X as she made her star debut at the 2022 Monaco Yacht Show.

Award-winning yacht that is a masterclass in design, engineering and luxury

Read Review

Update your yacht

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

NOTE to U.S. Customs & Border Protection

Specification

SEASONAL CHARTER RATES

• Share on Facebook
• Share Yacht

SIMILAR LUXURY CHARTER YACHTS

Here are a selection of yachts which are similar to the current charter yacht. To view all similar luxury charter yachts click on the button below.

from $965,000 p/week ♦︎

70m | Benetti

from $762,000 p/week ♦︎

75m | Feadship

from $900,000 p/week *

89m | Oceanco

from $1,100,000 p/week

95m | Lurssen

from $1,769,000 p/week ♦︎

90m | Oceanco

from $1,334,000 p/week ♦︎

80m | Yachtley

from $891,000 p/week ♦︎

80m | Abeking & Rasmussen

from $1,150,000 p/week

97m | Feadship

from $1,903,000 p/week ♦︎

85m | Lurssen

from $0 p/week ♦︎

75m | Admiral Yachts

from $998,000 p/week ♦︎

93m | Feadship

from $1,554,000 p/week ♦︎

As Featured In

The YachtCharterFleet Difference

YachtCharterFleet makes it easy to find the yacht charter vacation that is right for you. We combine thousands of yacht listings with local destination information, sample itineraries and experiences to deliver the world's most comprehensive yacht charter website.

San Francisco

• Like us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter
• Follow us on Instagram
• Find us on LinkedIn
• Add My Yacht
• Affiliates & Partners

Popular Destinations & Events

• St Tropez Yacht Charter
• Monaco Yacht Charter
• St Barts Yacht Charter
• Greece Yacht Charter
• Mykonos Yacht Charter
• Caribbean Yacht Charter

Featured Charter Yachts

• Maltese Falcon Yacht Charter
• Wheels Yacht Charter
• Victorious Yacht Charter
• Andrea Yacht Charter
• Titania Yacht Charter
• Ahpo Yacht Charter

Receive our latest offers, trends and stories direct to your inbox.

Please enter a valid e-mail.

Thanks for subscribing.

Search for Yachts, Destinations, Events, News... everything related to Luxury Yachts for Charter.

Yachts in your shortlist

• Yachting World
• Digital Edition

Golden Vanity: The rebirth of an artists’ boat

• January 27, 2021

A true working yacht, the 112-year-old Golden Vanity has a new role for 2021, as Nic Compton discovers

The lockdown of spring 2020 prompted all kinds of unusual purchases. People bought puppies, bikes, hot-tubs… Not many opted to buy a 23-ton, 112-year-old wooden cutter, yet that is exactly what Southampton-based charter operator Charlie Tulloch did when he purchased Golden Vanity .

“Everyone’s got a lockdown story,” he says. “Mine was trying to keep the business running and home-schooling the kids. It was incredibly stressful. I realised that, although we have three boats of our own, we were reliant on other people’s boats to supplement the fleet.

We needed another boat to take more control. When I heard Golden Vanity was for sale, I thought about it – not for very long – and bought her.

“Lockdown madness? I don’t know. We’ll see!”

There is some logic to it. Golden Vanity offers First Class Sailing’s existing customers a very different kind of experience, while her heavy construction provides a steady platform for beginners.

Golden Vanity has a new lease of life working for a Solent charter company in 2021. Photo Nic Compton

But the real reason Charlie bought the boat was emotional rather than rational. “I did some relief skippering on Provident, Keewaydin and Golden Vanity a few years ago, and I liked the ethos of getting young people involved. I loved the boats, the history, the wood, the teamwork, the skills, the look, smell and sound of them. My livelihood is in GRP yachts, but my heart is in these old boats.”

Golden Vanity’s  beginnings

Charlie isn’t the first to have fallen for Golden Vanity ’s charms. The yacht was commissioned by Arthur Briscoe in 1908 when he was just starting to make a name for himself as an artist. He had previously owned an 8-ton gaff cutter which he, his wife May, their son William and their terrier Jock lived on for eight months of the year, cruising extensively on the East Coast, the English Channel and in Holland and Belgium.

On the way, Briscoe sketched continuously, gathering material for his paintings which depict mainly working boats and their crews, in what turned out to be the last days of working sail. He held his first solo exhibition of mostly nautical paintings on Bond Street in 1906, to rave reviews.

Two years later, when he was 35, he commissioned a new boat, funded by his mother. This was an era when cruising yachts tended to be closely based on working boat types, and Briscoe was in no doubt what boat he wanted: a ‘Mumble Bee’, the little sister of the famous Brixham trawlers he loved so much.

Briscoe designed the boat’s rig himself but left the design and construction of the hull to WA Gibbs and J Sanders & Co in Galmpton, on the River Dart – one of the most prolific builders of Brixham and Lowestoft trawlers in the country.

Photo Nic Compton

Briscoe named his new boat Golden Vanity after the eponymous shanty set in the ‘lowland sea’ – an appropriate name for a yacht that was destined to spend a great deal of time in the lowlands of Holland.

For the next 20 years, Briscoe and May lived on board for most of the year, famously going out in any weather, accompanied by their Dandie Dinmont terrier, while their son William was looked after by his grandmother.

Erskine Childers was a regular guest and is thought to have borrowed the boat and sailed to the ‘lowlands’ (although this was long after he had written his celebrated book The Riddle of the Sands ).

Lost to a new love

After the war, Briscoe conceded to some home comforts and fitted a small Kelvin engine and a heads. He also discovered a new artistic medium in which he would excel and make himself a very comfortable living: etchings. He was soon producing striking images of English and Dutch working boats and square-riggers – often etching the plates on board Golden Vanity .

By his early 50s, however, Briscoe had divorced his first wife, May – who by all accounts was a jolly, outdoorsy person – and in May 1927 remarried an Alice Baker, who was more of a city dweller.

Article continues below…

OSTAR reunion

The Half Crown Club for skippers of all previous OSTARs is being reactivated before this year's race and a reunion…

Lulworth races again

After a remarkable restoration, which brought her back to near-original, the great gaff cutter Lulworth

The couple moved to London, and Golden Vanity was chartered out. Briscoe did take his new wife, together with his publisher, on a cruise to Holland. But despite the new engine and heads, Alice didn’t enjoy the boating life.

Golden Vanity was put on the market the following year, and the artist had to content himself with a small lugger based at St Mawes instead.

Changing hands

Over the next few decades Golden Vanity attracted an illustrious list of owners. The two after Briscoe were both former Olympic rowers: including Arthur Frederick Reginald Wiggins, who won silver at the 1912 Games.

In the 1940s, she was owned by Captain Clifford St George Glasson, an influential figure at Trinity House, who kept her on a mud berth on the East Coast for the duration of World War II.

In the 1960s, she caught the eye of another marine artist, David Cobb. Cobb served on motor torpedo boats during the war, and afterwards moved to Newlyn to become ‘a painter of our sea affairs’.

He and his wife Jean Main, also an artist, lived on the 36ft gaff cutter White Heather , followed by the Alfred Mylne 8-Metre Alpen Rose , before buying Briscoe’s more commodious ‘floating studio’, aboard which the couple lived for six years.

Although Cobb was fond of painting ships in their full glory, usually heeling over in a breeze, for his own yacht he chose to paint her alongside a quay with the tide out, having her bottom scrubbed.

Cobb’s painting ‘Scrubbing the yacht Golden Vanity’. Photo: National Maritime Museum

The resulting painting, entitled ‘Scrubbing the yacht Golden Vanity’, was exhibited at the Royal Society of Marine Artists in 1966 and immediately snapped up by the National Maritime Museum – the only Cobb painting in its collections.

Golden Vanity was next bought by an army captain who planned to sail around the world, but got only as far as Inverness before giving up. It was here, in the Inverness coal dock in the spring of 1970, that Peter Crowther discovered her.

He wanted to cruise around Japan and the US west coast. But he was also fascinated by the OSTAR, which had by then been run three times, and was eventually persuaded to enter the 1972 edition of the race with Golden Vanity .

“It would have been a stupid idea to take Golden Vanity across the North Atlantic, so I went south,” he recalled. “I thought I could do it in 60 days, and I made it halfway across in 30 days.

“But I went too far south and there was no wind. The sails needed constant repairing and she wouldn’t go to windward. I didn’t have self-steering, so I rigged up a line from the jib down the side to the wheel with a bungee cord.

“She was a lovely boat and very well balanced when she was close-hauled, but off the wind she would go anywhere.”

A few days before the start of the race, Peter’s cat Gypsy gave birth to a litter of five kittens. Rather than leave them behind, he made a bed for them out of an old suitcase and took them with him. He named the kittens after Lord of the Rings character; the most adventurous being Bilbo Baggins, who delighted in clambering onto the boom.

Peter Crowther with Gypsy the cat. Photo c/o Peter Crowther

One day, Peter came on deck to find the cats looking anxiously over the side and saw that Bilbo Baggins had fallen overboard. He immediately jumped over the stern onto the top of the rudder and managed to scoop the kitten up as the boat drifted past.

Exactly 89 tacks, five reefs, 71 sail changes, and two blown-out sails later, Golden Vanity arrived in Newport to take last place with a time of 88 days – the slowest crossing in the history of the race – a record unbroken to this day.

The story of the transatlantic kittens was immediately taken up by the American press and within days of arriving Peter had sold them all.

After the race, Peter and Golden Vanity carried on their way, sailing down the Intracoastal Waterway to Florida and then across to the Caribbean.

Golden Vanity’s 88-day crossing in the 1972 OSTAR remains the race’s slowest. Photo: c/o Peter Crowther

The yacht was nearly wrecked when she went aground on a reef off the island of St Croix, but Peter managed to refloat her and get her patched up in Antigua. It was all too much for Gypsy, however, who jumped ship at this point, and left Peter to sail the boat back to the UK on his own.

Golden Vanity in disrepair

The boat was sold on twice more, and in 1981 was listed in the Old Gaffers Association newsletter with the inauspicious description: “Extensive work on hull by Uphams of Brixham. Some internal fitting required.”

In fact, Golden Vanity was going downhill fast and languished on her mooring looking very sorry for herself indeed, until three men met in a pub and decided to do something about it.

Local businessmen Howard Young, Jack Spencer and Tony Ripley formed the Golden Vanity Trust in 1983 and bought the boat to restore, and use for sail training for the young people of Torbay.

New lease of life

The trio paid just £200 for the yacht, compared to the £4,000 Peter bought and sold it for, and spent the next five years completely rebuilding the boat with a team of up to 18 people, many of them on the Government’s Youth Training Scheme, led by local fisherman Colin Beer.

One of Arthur Briscoe’s trawler prints enjoys pride of place in the saloon. Photo: Nic Compton

Their 1983/8 rebuild was comprehensive: the topside planking, stem, beam shelf, deck beams and decks were all replaced, as were all her spars. The steering wheel was removed and her tiller steering restored, and her engine was completely rebuilt.

It was in many ways a new boat that was launched into the Dart in June 1988, and it’s thanks to all that hard work that she is still sailing today.

For 11 years The Golden Vanity Trust ran sailing training charters out of Brixham, as well as taking part in several Tall Ships Races. Despite being the smallest boat at these gatherings, in 1995 she managed to not only win her class but won the whole event on handicap, sailing 1,195 miles from Edinburgh to Bremerhaven, Frederikshaven and Amsterdam.

She joined forces with the Brixham trawlers Provident and Leader to form the Trinity Sailing Foundation in 1999 and for two decades the three boats held pride of place on the Heritage Pontoon in the middle of Brixham Harbour.

Coiling a halyard aboard Golden Vanity. Photo Nic Compton

“ Golden Vanity was great for teaching small groups of young kids,” says Ben Wheatley who skippered the boat when he joined Trinity Sailing in 2013. “She was so well balanced you could tack and gybe without touching the tiller – just by adjusting the sails and moving people’s weight around.”

Government cuts, however, meant there was less money for the social care work which Trinity relied on for its cash flow, and in 2019 the trust was wound down and all three boats sold off. Which is when Charlie stepped in.

Sailing on board Golden Vanity just before she headed to the Elephant Boatyard for her winter refit, it wasn’t hard to see why Charlie, along with a dozen owners before him, have been seduced by the boat.

She has the patina of age, a sense of being solid and well-built, and of having survived countless Atlantic and North Sea gales. You can see how much love and attention has been poured into her over many years, in a way that a newer boat can never hope to match.

Lockdown madness or not, there is something life-affirming about sailing on a boat that has weathered so much and still managed to keep her integrity. It’s as if the boat itself is saying: life goes on.

First Class Sailing is currently crowdfunding to enable the restoration of Golden Vanity with a variety of rewards available for pledges from £10 upwards. 

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams. Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

By SuperyachtNews 21 Oct 2022

123m Golden Odyssey sold at auction following arrest

Deutsche bank luxembourg arrested the yacht in malta due to outstanding debt in excess of €116 million….

The 123m Lürssen superyacht ‘Golden Odyssey'   has been sold at auction for an estimated €150 million in Malta. Deutsche Bank Luxembourg arrested the superyacht while it was moored in the Med as a way to enforce the mortgage against it for outstanding debt in excess of €116 million.

According to Times of Malta , the owner, Kal Marine Limited (A Bermuda-based company), originally secured a loan from the bank in 2013, and used the superyacht as collateral. After failing to make repayments and choosing to ignore calls, the bank decided to seize the yacht.

The article also highlights that Mr Justice Spiteri Bailey approved the private sale of the superyacht for the sum of €150 million - which was deemed to be the current market value. The yacht has apparently been bought by East Thrive Peace Limited, a company which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and will be represented in Malta by lawyer Nicholas Valenzia.

It is believed that this could be one of the highest prices ever fetched for a superyacht sold in a judicial sale ever. The Golden Odyssey is ranked as the world’s 36th-largest superyacht and was launched by German shipbuilders Lürssen in 2015.

In 2016, SuperyachtNews reported that the 123m Golden Odyssey is part of The Golden Fleet which also comprises of its support vessel, 67m M/Y Golden Shadow and 30m M/Y Golden Osprey. This fleet was used as a platform for the Living Oceans Foundation, which was founded by Prince Khaled bin Sultan. In 2012, the Prince was awarded the Perseus Award for his commitment to ocean conservation and scientific research.

In 2018, Captain Mike Hitch, the marine director for the Golden Fleet and Captain of M/Y Golden Odyssey, spoke to SuperyachtNews about the organisation and the role of crew in environmental initiatives.

Profile links

Join the discussion

123m golden odyssey to be sold at auction following arrest.

To post comments please Sign in or Register

When commenting please follow our house rules

Click here to become part of The Superyacht Group community, and join us in our mission to make this industry accessible to all, and prosperous for the long-term. We are offering access to the superyacht industry’s most comprehensive and longstanding archive of business-critical information, as well as a comprehensive, real-time superyacht fleet database, for just £10 per month, because we are One Industry with One Mission. Sign up here .

Related news

72m Axioma will sell via judicial auction following arrest

The Supreme Court in Gibraltar have ordered that the Admiralty Marshall should proceed with the judicial auction

The curious case of Amadea

With the 106m Amadea now sailing away from Fiji under a US Flag, the complex story of this seizure charts a consequential course for the industry

Sanctioned superyachts in Europe: the story so far

We take a look at what has happened so far regarding the freezing of superyachts in Europe

Freezing not seizing

Why the distinction between freezing and seizing is important to understand the application of sanctions in Europe

What does it mean for a yacht to be seized?

Duncan Bateson, Partner at Ince, gives insight into the latest developments related to Russia, sanctions and the superyacht industry

2 years ago

3 years ago

Sign up to the SuperyachtNews Bulletin

Receive unrivalled market intelligence, weekly headlines and the most relevant and insightful journalism directly to your inbox.

Sign up to the SuperyachtNews Bulletin

The superyachtnews app.

Follow us on

Media Pack Request

Please select exactly what you would like to receive from us by ticking the boxes below:

SuperyachtNews.com

Register to comment

• Bahasa Indonesia
• Slovenščina
• Science & Tech
• Russian Kitchen

How amber is mined at the LARGEST deposit in the world

Anna Dugina, an expert gemologist of the combine.

Many people in the world highly value amber. In Russia, almost every woman has jewelry with amber. Russians love amber not just for its unbelievable beauty and availability (it’s much cheaper than diamonds and emeralds); it’s believed that it also possesses healing qualities.

Jewelry from Kaliningrad Amber Combine.

According to different data, from 80% to 95% of the world’s supply of this gem is concentrated in Russia. There are deposits in Sakhalin and Taymyr, but the largest one is situated in the small village of Yantarny in Kaliningrad Region. Scientists have conducted some calculations: Each cubic meter of amber-bearing rock – ‘the blue earth’ – contains 1.9 kilograms of amber.

The only enterprise in the world that engages in the industrial production of amber is the ‘Kaliningrad Amber Combine’ (part of the ‘Rostec Corporation’).

Currently, they’re developing the Primorsky quarry, which we managed to visit.

Why is amber mined blind?

You can’t simply see amber, it’s contained in ‘blue earth’ (it really does have a blue hue), at a depth of 50-60 meters.

This is what the amber mining site looks like.

The process of extraction itself looks quite unusual: A worker stands at the bottom of the quarry with a water system and strikes the amber-bearing rock with a jet of sea water.

“You can’t wash it out with regular water, the rock is very dense,” Alexey Korkin, leading geologist of the quarry, explains to us. “So we use water from the Baltic Sea. To wash out one cubic meter of this clay, we need eight cubic meters of such water.”

There's tons of amber here, but you can't see it.

This way, we now have pulp – a mix of ‘blue earth’ and sea water – which flows down along the channel into a special ditch, from where it’s transported through a pipe to an enrichment plant. 

Due to the fact that water is needed in the process, amber can only be extracted in positive temperatures, when the water is not yet frozen. Usually, extraction lasts until the middle of November; in winter, meanwhile, the quarry undergoes maintenance.

The largest amber stones are manually examined at the processing plant.

In one workday, the quarry produces 3 to 5 tons of amber. Among them, nuggets weighing more than 1 kilogram are sometimes found. They are usually picked out at the plant, since initially they’re covered with a layer of clay. It’s hard to believe that tons of amber are rolling past us right now! “Over this season, we have already extracted 12 nuggets,” Alexey says. “The heaviest of them was found back at the beginning of spring, it weighed 1.876 kilograms!”

Nuggets at the combine museum.

Until recently, large specimens were being caught with nets, but now, machinery tackles this task just as well.

What will happen to the quarry when the supply of amber is exhausted?

The quarry has been in operation since 1976 and estimates say the supply will last for at least another hundred years. The annual yield is 500-600 tons, with the deposit reserves currently at 53,000 tons. 

This dragline is helping to reclaim quarry land.

All excess rock is removed with the help of a dragline – a walking excavator. There are three at the quarry. And while in one part of the quarry amber is washed out, the other hosts the process of recultivation. With a dragline excavator, depleted rock is brought and evened out; plants are then planted and it is all handed back to the region.

Nearby, there’s the depleted Sinyavinsky quarry, closed down in the 1970s, which now has turned into one of the most beautiful lakes in the region. “This quarry will also be handed over, but that’s a prospect for many years ahead,” Alexey says.

“Our speed is 50 meters per year; in total, the quarry stretches 1.5 kilometers wide and long. We have a 20-year plan: we know that, in 10-15 years, we’ll turn in one part of the quarry and continue the development for several more decades.”

Tourists at the quarry's observation deck.

You can watch the process of amber extraction at the observation deck of the quarry. There are cameras attached to draglines, which show specialists at work in real time on a large screen.

Interactive model of the quarry in the museum.

At the deck, you can also try yourself in the role of the “amber catcher” in an improvised quarry and take a look at the Kaliningrad Amber Combine’s company store.

How to unmistakably tell amber from simple stones

At the factory, it's already becoming clear that there really is amber in the formation.

The stones themselves become visible only at the plant. The process of separating amber from other rocks contained in the strata is quite simple and can be useful to check the authenticity of the gem in regular life, too.

Alexey Korkin and Anna Dugina show a large amber extracted that day in the quarry.

“Any rock is heavier than amber,” Alexey says. “There’s the simplest method to tell that it’s amber in front of you and not something else. You need to take a glass of water, pour a fair amount of salt in it, mix, and put in stones. Everything that sinks is not amber.” The thing is, amber’s density is almost equal to the density of water from the Baltic Sea; if you salt regular water, its density will rise and amber will float.

Everywhere in the factory there are grates that can "catch" even the smallest amber.

The initial sorting at the plant is conducted precisely so; all pulp comes to a separator and bathes in tubs with a salt solution.

Amber baths.

Then, all stones are sorted by size: small ones are immediately packaged in sacks, while large ones are sorted by hand, since there are sometimes unique specimens among them!

Which type of amber is the most precious?

Anna Dugina, an expert gemologist of the combine, can spot special stones among thousands of others. “Royal white amber is the most expensive and rare. It only accounts for 1% of amber in nature! Landscape amber is also very highly prized, white with yellow streaks.” 

There’s also “black lacquer” that, in the past, was considered the lowest kind; however, today, there’s a process for “making it pretty” and it’s now also highly sought after.

Anna Dugina shows interesting inclusions in large amber.

Apart from interesting colors, there are sometimes inclusions in amber (in 6-8% of it), such as flora and fauna preserved in resin. “For example, we have a pretty dragonfly in amber, you can see it in the museum at the combine,” Anna says. Usually, nothing is done to stones like that, they’re simply impeccably polished. Transparent honey-colored amber is a ‘Baltic classic’, as the gemologist calls it. This is the stone we see most often at stores.

“After sorting, our specialists determine what’s to be sold at auctions (the combine has no direct contracts) and what will go to jewelry production,” Anna explains.

The amber is first spread out by size.

Both Russian and foreign producers are among the combine’s clients. The Baltic stone is especially prized in China and in Arabic countries.

This amber is now ready to be delivered to the warehouse.

The combine sells not just raw extracted amber, but also jewelry made from it. It’s also produced right in the village of Yantarny.

There’s no waste from amber production

One of the walls of the workshop is decorated with a giant spider, “weaving” an amber net over the map of the world. “Back in 1954, Soviet jewelers came up with a spider design for a brooch that is still a symbol of the amber combine,” Vadim Parkhomenko told us, the head of the experimental production department. In total, they produce thousands of items of all kinds, coming up with new ones several times a week.

Artists think over the design, often suggestions come both from craftsmen and from clients. Some craftsmen prepare the stones of proper colors and sizes, others assemble the jewelry and others still check the prepared jewelry, holding it to the light – to check that there’s no cracks or scratches.

They try not to dispose of anything: “scraps” of amber are used for art pieces, go under a press or are used for small details.

Many people learn right on the job. “You can acquire all the necessary skills during the work process, but then it depends on each person,” Vadim says. “Of course, it’s great to have a gemologist education, but you also need to be a bit of an artist.”

How to reason with the stone?

Stone carver Margarita Bulygina makes animal and human amber figurines. There are no two identical amber stones in nature, so each of her souvenirs is unique.

Margarita Bulygina.

“Sometimes, we decide how to use the material based on the material itself, we study its color, its shape. Sometimes, we work with picking material for particular goals,’ Margarita explains. ‘You need to possess great spatial thinking, imagine in advance what you want to embody in the physical material, you need to have a 3D-computer inside of your head. My tool is the continuation of my hand.”

Margarita is a versatile artist by education, which means she has the skills of working with graphics, with drawing and with wood; she started here from ground zero and immediately understood the properties of amber. “If the stone is pliable, you can make a little figurine in just a day,” she says. “You only need to reason with the stone.”

Dear readers,

Our website and social media accounts are under threat of being restricted or banned, due to the current circumstances. So, to keep up with our latest content, simply do the following:

• Subscribe to our  Telegram  channel
• Subscribe to our  weekly email newsletter
• Enable push notifications on our  website
• Install a VPN service on your computer and/or phone to have access to our website, even if it is blocked in your country

If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material.

to our newsletter!

Get the week's best stories straight to your inbox

• Where to find the Amber Room, a cultural treasure stolen by the Nazis
• From most to least beautiful: 10 amber souvenirs to bring home from Russia’s Kaliningrad (Photos)
• What precious stones are found in Russia? (PHOTOS)

This website uses cookies. Click here to find out more.

YANTARNY, AMBER VILLAGE

Yantarny amber village and the resort town of svetlogorsk tour.

Duration: around 7hours

Yantarny amber village and a unic Baltic sea resort Svetlogorsk are located on Sambian peninsula, the heart of Baltic amber.It’s an interesting journey to a historical place. The history of Baltic amber, the ancient amber trade ways, the times of Kenigsberg amber manufacture, the mysterious amber room and more...You'll become an amber expert after the trip! :))

We shall start in the morning. I will take you from Kaliningrad or any other hotel in kaliningrad region. We will go to Yantarny village for a walking tour, then to Svetlogorsk for a walking tour and back to your hotel. We will drop into nice amber shops and a cafe for a snack.

• Czech Republic
• Booking.com
• GetYourGuide

Taxi/Transfer

• Discover Cars
• GetRentacar
• Trains in Europe

• Kaliningrad region

Yantarny, Kaliningrad region (Palmnicken)

Yantarny (until 1947 Palmniken) is an urban-type settlement located in the west of the Kaliningrad region, on the Baltic Sea coast, 48 kilometers from the regional center - the city of Kaliningrad .

Yantarny is considered the "capital" of the Amber region and the best resort in the Kaliningrad region.

The largest amber reserves in the world (about 90%) are concentrated in Yantarny and there is a unique place of its kind where amber is extracted on an industrial scale by an open method. The village is also famous for its wide sandy beach strip and some interesting sights.

A brief history of Yantarny

Yantarny was part of East Prussia until 1946.

The settlement of Palveniken (Palweniken) was first mentioned in documents in 1389. The name comes from the Prussian word "palwe", which means "wasteland, treeless swamp". By 1491, the name was transformed into Palmeniken (Palmenicken), and later the German form "Palmniken" was fixed.

The official date of Palmniken's formation is considered to be 1654. The main activities and means of earning the population of Palmniken were the extraction and processing of amber and fishing.

After the end of the Great Patriotic War, Palmniken, together with the entire region, departed from the USSR and was renamed Yantarny.

For a long time, Amber remained in relative neglect. But, starting in 2016, when the first Blue Flag beach appeared in the village, Yantarny began to develop and refine more intensively, turning into a resort, and thereby attracting an increasing number of tourists.

Beaches in Yantarny

Yantarny is famous for the longest and widest sandy beach strip in the region on the Baltic Sea coast, which runs along the entire village and goes beyond it.

The sand on the beaches is light and fine. Small pebbles are found near the edge of the seawater. The approach to the sea is gentle, the bottom is mostly sandy.

Two parts of the territory of the beach strip are marked with the international certificate of quality of beaches "Blue Flag" and have all the necessary beach infrastructure - this is the "Central Beach" and the beach "Mine Anna" ("Amber beach"). More about beaches in Amber...

The promenade in Yantarny

The promenade in Yantarny was opened in 2014 as an object of tourist infrastructure and since then has been one of the attractions and a popular place for walking and relaxing in Yantarny.

The promenade is completely pedestrian, made of Siberian larch, has wooden railings.

The length of the promenade is just under 2 kilometers. Decorative lanterns are installed on the promenade, there are places to rest and urns.

The amber promenade stretches parallel to the sea line in the south-north direction and connects the Central Beach (from the central descent to the sea from Becker Park) with the Anna Mine beach. Learn more about the promenade in Amber...

Amber Lake (Sinyavinskoe)

Lake Sinyavinskoye or Amber Lake is a freshwater reservoir that was formed on the site of the former Walter quarry for the extraction of amber.

When the amber-bearing rocks in the quarry were worked out, the quarry was deemed unprofitable and closed, the quarry was filled with spring and groundwater, resulting in the formation of a pond (lake).

Lake Sinyavinskoe is located between the villages of Yantarny and Sinyavino.

The approach to the pond is mainly limited by sufficient steepness and thickets. From the side of the village of Yantarny near the shore of the lake there is a small sandy beach - "Sinyavinsky Lake beach" or "Yantarny Lake beach".

The water in the pond is clear.

Near the lake beach there are : a volleyball court, a recreation center "Pearl" and two diving centers.

Coordinates of Lake Sinyavinsky : 54°53'15.0"N 19°56'54.0"E. More about the beach and lake...

Becker Park

Moritz Becker Park is a city park that is a historical monument and the pearl of Amber.

The park is located in the center of Amber, on an elevated terrace near the Baltic Sea and the Central Beach.

In Becker Park , notable :

- alleys running through the park;

- rare plants and trees;

- a memorial sign to the founder of the park - Moritz Becker;

- literary and amber trail (Coastal Alley), along the eastern side of which stands with profiles of famous poets and poetesses and excerpts from their works are installed;

- the Museum of the Baltic Sea Countries, which is an open-air museum, whose sculptures, located near the alleys of Becker Park (central, coastal and middle), with the help of mythical creatures or heroes of national fairy tales, tell about the environmental problems of the Baltic Sea;

- view swings installed on the site above the cliff of the park in such a way that when swinging on them, views of the Yantarny Beach and the Baltic Sea open up. The swing is located on a wooden platform, on which, in addition to the swing itself, there are places for rest, urns. Panoramic views also open from the playground and benches;

- the former hunting castle, which dates back to the 17th century, and now is a 5-star hotel Schloss ;

- wooden figures, amber fairs and cafes. More about Becker Park...

Squares in Yantarny

There are no large areas in Yantarny.

There are two small but cozy squares in the village, located on both sides of Becker Park.

Masters Square is the central and most attractive square in Amber.

The square got its name in 2007 in honor of the masters of jewelry, who in different periods of time devoted their talents and creative forces to amber.

On the square there are : a vintage-style trade and exhibition complex; cafes and eateries; places for recreation; retail outlets, which, among other things, sell amber products and amber cosmetics.

Address of Masters Square : 72 Sovetskaya Street. Learn more about Masters Square...

Park Square is a well-groomed square, marked by the so-called "Amber Way", which is located between the northern part of Becker Park and Sovetskaya Street.

The main street of Yantarny

The central street of Yantarny is Sovetskaya Street, which stretches along the entire village in the south-north direction, parallel to the beach strip and the sea.

At the address : Sovetskaya Street, 79a there is a supermarket "Victoria Quarter" and a small shopping center. Learn more about Sovetskaya Street...

Attractions in Yantarny

Church of the kazan icon of the mother of god (palmniken church).

The Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God is an Orthodox church, which is the main shrine of the village of Yantarny.

The current and restored church was originally the Palmniken Lutheran Church, founded on September 8, 1887. The church was built of boulders and shaped bricks and was a smaller copy of the Chapel of St. George of the royal castle of Montbijou on the outskirts of Berlin.

In 1990, the church building was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church. On January 13, 1991, the shrine was consecrated as a temple of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God.

The address of the temple : Sovetskaya Street, 67A. More about the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God...

Entrance sign "Virgin of the Baltic"

The entrance sign "Virgin of the Baltic", also known as the "Mermaid composition", is an entrance sign in the form of a mermaid composition in sea waters, installed at the southern entrance to Yantarny (from the city of Kaliningrad) - Sovetskaya Street.

The sign is one of the symbols of the village, and its part is depicted on souvenirs and postcards.

The sign was built in 1998 by the art cooperative "Victoria". Subsequently, restoration work was carried out.

A local legend is associated with this sign, which tells about the love of a fisherman and a mermaid - the daughter of the ruler of the sea waters of Triton. Having learned about the love of his beloved daughter for an ordinary fisherman, the lord of the water elements became enraged and killed the fisherman. The mermaid wept bitterly until her tears became amber pebbles, exactly those that were carried ashore by the waves and found by the villagers and vacationers on the coast.

Coordinates : 54°51'20"N (54.855788), 19°56'59"E (19.949791).

Observation deck of the Amber Combine (Primorsky quarry)

The observation deck of the existing Primorsky open-pit amber quarry is a unique tourist attraction, since visitors to the site, located at an altitude of more than 50 meters, can observe in real time the work in the amber quarry - the only place in the world where amber is extracted on an industrial scale by open-pit mining.

Lookout career is part of the complex under the open sky, which includes, in addition to the observation, the following tourist facilities : landscaped area; the pavilion dining, shopping hall and WC; observation tower; "the Amber pyramid" ; "amber tree"; attraction "the amber"; the layout of the entrance to "Mine Anne"; layout of "Hangman" and some of the equipment for mining.

The complex of the observation deck of the Primorsky quarry is located just south-east of the village of Yantarny. Coordinates : 54°51'43"N (54.861992), 19°58'19"E (19.972205).

Entrance to the observation complex is paid. Website : ambercombine . Learn more about the complex of the observation deck of the Primorsky quarry...

Amber Factory Museum

The Museum of the Amber Combine is an interactive exhibition hall called the Amber Chamber.

The exposition of the museum, located on the ground floor of the building of the restored former Tool shop of the Kaliningrad Amber Combine, tells about the history and industrial activity of the combine, and also shows the amber collection of the enterprise.

In addition, the hall is equipped with a photo zone where you can sit on the "Amber Throne", try on an amber tiara and amber beads, while taking photos for memory.

In addition to the exhibition, the museum also functions as a retail space where guests can buy amber souvenirs, gifts and jewelry with amber and amber.

Museum address : 1 Balebina Street (entrance from Zheleznodorozhnaya Street). Website : ambercombine . More about the Amber Factory Museum...

Museum and Exhibition complex "Amber Castle"

The Amber Castle Museum and Exhibition Complex has ancient roots.

According to reports, the complex is located on the site of a former building that was once part of the Palmniken fortress.

The museum's expositions are based on a narrative about the history of Palmniken-Amber and amber crafts - from the origin of amber deposits to its extraction and processing.

In addition to the expositions, the museum has an interactive hall where visitors can observe the processing of amber in existing workshops and try to make something for themselves.

There is also a shop in the museum; temporary author's exhibitions of artists are held; creative evenings; concerts; amber auctions are arranged.

The museum's address is 61a Sovetskaya Street. Coordinates : 54°52'8"N (54.868943), 19°56'22"E (19.939517). Website : amber-castle-amber . More about the Amber Castle Museum...

The layout of the "Palmniken of the late XIX century"

The ceramic model "Palmniken of the late XIX century" depicts Palmniken at the end of the 19th century.

The highlight of the layout is the amber trees.

The layout is located in the courtyard of the Amber Lagoon store, located at 63 Sovetskaya Street. Coordinates : 54°52'7"N (54.868627), 19°56'20"E (19.939078).

Palmniken Water Tower

The water tower was built in 1920 in Palmniken. For this reason, the tower is called the "Palmniken water tower".

The tower has a height of 35 meters and a diameter of 11 meters.

During the overhaul of the roof and facade of the tower in 2006 - 2007, a weather vane in the shape of a unicorn was installed on the tower.

Currently, the water tower operates for its intended purpose.

The address of the tower : 3 Zheleznodorozhnaya Street. Coordinates : 54°52'14"N (54.870771), 19°56'29"E (19.941602). Learn more about the water tower...

Mass grave of Soviet soldiers

The mass grave of Soviet soldiers who died in April 1945 was formed during the fighting. More than 50 people are buried in it.

The monument was erected in 1950.

In 2006, a symbolic reburial of unknown pilots who died in the vicinity of Palmniken was moved to a mass grave - a two-seater aircraft, presumably of American production, was found in the quarry area, the remains of the pilots were not found.

The address of the mass grave : Sovetskaya Street, 60 (intersection of Sovetskaya and Zheleznodorozhnaya streets). Coordinates : 54°52'10"N (54.869450), 19°56'19"E (19.938868).

Monument to the victims of the Holocaust

The Monument to the victims of the Holocaust is a memorial to the victims of the "Death March", which is designed to remind and never forget about the tragedy that became the last act of the Holocaust in East Prussia and occurred in January 1945, when several thousand people were shot on the Baltic Sea coast, who were brought to Palmniken from the ghettos and concentration camps of East Prussia.

The monument is set on a two-tiered base, carved from granite, seven-meter-high three arms raised to the sky, on which are the numbers of concentration camp prisoners.

"They are pulling their hands up out of the water in search of salvation, help, which did not come at that moment," explains the idea of one of the authors of the project - Frank Meisler.

A little to the north of the monument there is a memorial sign - a small pyramid created from field stones, on which a memorial plaque with the inscription is fixed: "In memory of the 7000 victims of the Holocaust killed by the Nazis on January 31, 1945 ..." and a plaque: "The memorial was installed at the expense of the Jewish Community of Kaliningrad ...".

The monument to the victims of the Holocaust and the memorial sign are located near the northern outskirts of the village of Yantarny, near the beaches and the sea, between Sovetskaya Street and the coastal strip. Coordinates : 54°53'4"N (54.884650), 19°56'8"E (19.935566). Learn more about the monument to the victims of the Holocaust and the memorial sign...

Observation deck "Anna Mine"

The Anna mine is the former Anna amber mining mine, which was founded in 1883 in the village of Pilmniken.

Since 1922, due to unprofitability, work began on the conservation of the mine, and soon the production was closed.

Currently, only small remnants of the Anna mine have been preserved, including the remains of the Anna mine retaining wall, above which the Anna Mine observation deck is located.

The observation deck is a small piece of soil.

The site offers panoramic views of the coast, quarries, part of the beach strip, the Baltic Sea and the monument to the victims of the Holocaust.

The observation deck is located near the northern border of the village of Yantarny. The approach is from Sovetskaya Street. More about the observation deck "Anna Mine"...

Learn more about all the sights in Yantarny...

Learn more about viewing platforms in Yantarny...

Equestrian complex

On the eastern outskirts of Yantarny, at the address : Lugovaya Street, 1, there is an equestrian complex "Becker", where everyone can ride a horse and take a horse ride, arrange a photo session with horses or take riding lessons.

Also on the territory of the equestrian complex are : rooms, a cafe and a Finnish sauna. Website : ksk-becker .

Where to go from Yantarny

The city of Kaliningrad is the administrative center of the Kaliningrad region and the westernmost regional center of Russia.

You can get from Yantarny to Kaliningrad by taxi, car or public buses.

Svetlogorsk is the largest and most developed resort city in the Kaliningrad region.

You can get from Yantarny to Svetlogorsk by taxi, car or public buses.

The resort town of Zelenogradsk , which has a long beach strip, a central pedestrian street, as well as historical sights and museums.

Curonian Spit is a national park with unique natural complexes: sand dunes, dancing forest, royal forest, lake "Swan", etc.

In 2000, the Curonian Spit was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

You can visit the Curonian Spit with one of the excursions, as well as independently, by car, taxi or by bus to one of the villages: Lesnoy , Rybachy , Morskoye .

The length of the Kush Spit is about 48 kilometers, the main and most interesting places of interest are located at a sufficient distance from the villages and from each other, so a trip by public bus is not the most suitable option for visiting the Curonian Spit.

How to get to Yantarny

The bulk of the guests visiting the region and the village of Yantarny, including, come to Kaliningrad, since all long-distance trains arrive in the city, and the only airport in the region "Khrabrovo" named after Empress Elizabeth Petrovna is located near the city. Flights to Kaliningrad →

From Khrabrovo Airport to Yantarny

Khrabrovo International Airport is located 55 kilometers from the center of Yantarny.

You can get from the airport directly to Yantarny by taxi or car.

The most convenient way to travel independently in the Kaliningrad region is by car. You can rent a car in advance, even from home, the car will be waiting for you immediately upon arrival. Rent a car →

Public transport from the airport to Yantarny does not run, you can get there with transfers through the center of Kaliningrad. You can find out how to get from the airport to Kaliningrad here...

From the center of Kaliningrad to Yantarny

You can get from Kaliningrad to Yantarny by taxi, car or public buses.

Rent a car in Kaliningrad →

From Kaliningrad Amber, and Amber in Kaliningrad, run the public buses that leave from the bus station of Kaliningrad, located near the southern J station at the address : Zheleznodorozhnaya ulitsa, 7. Also buses make several stops in the city of Kaliningrad, including a stop near the North station (Sovetskiy Prospekt, bus stop "North station").

Tickets can be purchased at the ticket offices at the bus station. If you board the bus at city stops, tickets can be purchased from the conductor.

Buses run daily. Approximately every hour from 06:25 a.m. to 21:15 p.m. (time may vary and depends on the season).

Travel time is about 1 hour and 30 minutes.

The exact bus schedule and ticket prices can be specified on the bus station website .

Buses make several stops in Yantarny, including near beaches, the final one in the village is Balebina Street 2A.

Yantarny can be visited with one of the excursions from Kaliningrad, for example :

Where to stay in Yantarny (hotels)

There are enough accommodation facilities in the small resort village of Yantarny. Basically, these are separate apartments (apartments) with all amenities, there are also hotels, guest houses and recreation centers.

The 5-star Schloss Hotel Yantarny (Schloss hotel) , located in a historic mansion, in the very center of Yantarny, surrounded by Becker Park, near the Central Beach.

This hotel is considered the best in Amber.

The hotel features: free Wi-Fi, spa center, sauna, fitness center, indoor pool with hot tub, terrace, restaurant and 24-hour lobby bar with fireplace.

The rooms are equipped with air conditioning, a flat-screen TV, a minibar, a seating area.

3-star Hotel Becker (Becker) located in the center of Amber, near the Central beach.

The hotel has free Wi-Fi, a swimming pool, a spa and wellness center, a German-style restaurant, rooms and apartments with fully equipped kitchens.

Aquatoria Hotel , located near Shakhta Anna beach

At the hotel : free Wi-Fi, parking, garden, lobby bar, summer restaurant and private descent to the coast.

From hotels also :

Near the beach strip of the Baltic Sea in Yantarny you can stay :

Near the beach of the Amber lake (Sinyavinsky) :

The village of Yantarny on the map

Tourist map of Yantarny