“I’m a bit biased, but I think it’s the greatest vessel ever made.” That was how her owner Adam, a Yacht Buoy reader and premium newsletter subscriber, put it when he got in touch and asked me to take a look at his boat. She’s M/Y ‘Care Bear’, a 95ft steel Ocean Voyager 95 Expedition listed for sale at $1,599,000 (link to listing below), and she’s about as far from a conventional 95-footer as you can get.

She was Adam’s first boat, and, to his credit, he runs her without any crew. In his words, “it’s great that I can single hand her as a 95’ twin screw. I just need my wife to throw the lines when parking.” She’s lying in Grenada at the moment, and he plans to cruise her back to America in January.

His message raises three questions: what it takes to run her without crew, what she costs, and what it would take to make her a family yacht. Adam shot some drone footage of her on a recent dive trip around the Grenadines, so here she is:

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From tarpon mothership to relief ship

The listing broker notes her as a 2013 build “built around a proven commercial hull design”, and Adam tells me she was custom built in 2014 as an expedition vessel on a new trawler-type hull. As ‘Chagos’, her listing says, she was customised as a fishing mothership carrying three custom flats boats, the shallow-draught skiffs used to stalk fish in very thin water. She crossed from Fort Lauderdale to West Africa on her own bottom and anchored off river mouths as a floating base for guides, her owner, guests, and charter clients chasing record-class tarpon.

Next came a year-long refit at Fairhaven Shipyard in Massachusetts, which, Adam tells me, had just finished when he bought her. The previous owner commissioned it to make her a support vessel for a large sailing yacht, and her master cabin, master bathroom, and lounge were removed to carry cargo. Adam has “invoices for over $800,000 worth of work”, and says that including three military-grade FLIR cameras, “a bit over $1,000,000 was invested”. The work included rebuilt stabilising fins, new Garmin navigation, a new fuel polisher and fuel transfer station, a new day tank and water tanks, an all-chain anchor conversion, and her battleship grey paint.

Adam bought her in 2021, during COVID, “because I wanted to help”. He has experience working with a remote medical group, and he wanted the means to move his family, team, gear, and supplies a long way. “We helped out stateside during COVID, did a lot of training, and later assisted with other crews during the hurricane in Grenada,” he says. As the listing puts it, her name reflects that humanitarian work.

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Built like a working ship

Her hull and decks are 5/16 in steel plate (about 8 mm), with 1/4 in (about 6 mm) for the bulwarks and house and 3/16 in (about 5 mm) for the pilothouse: the heaviest plate where the sea hits hardest, and lighter plate up high, where weight matters most. Steel also tolerates knocks and can be repaired by commercial yards far from home.

Four watertight bulkheads, two with doors, divide the hull into compartments designed to stop flooding in one space from spreading while the doors are shut. Seven dogged watertight aluminium doors, clamped hard against their seals, keep water out of the house if a sea comes aboard. That’s commercial-vessel thinking.

A 5,000 lb Palfinger knuckle crane serves her working deck. An aluminium mast with a crow’s nest gives her height, and Adam has found a clever use for the FLIR and colour camera at its top.

She runs on twin 350 hp Cummins NT855s, mechanical diesels turning big four-blade 40 in propellers through Twin Disc 3:1 gearboxes, a commercial-grade drive train built for hard-core endurance.

The refit’s new fuel polisher, day tank, and water tanks fit that brief. The polisher filters water and sediment out of diesel bought wherever you can find it, the day tank gives the engines a smaller, clean supply, and the transfer station moves fuel between tanks. Adam describes “redundant systems throughout”, and the listing shows two engines, two generators, and solar with a battery bank.

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One man, 95 feet

“It’s a very easy boat to operate,” says Adam, who credits the twin screws and ample power for making her easy to manoeuvre in harbour. With two propellers, you can twist her round by running one ahead and one astern. He’s unbothered by convention, too: “Many captains that I learned from don’t like to be seen using a bow thruster, but I find it helpful in strong winds for small adjustments.”

He also praises the wheelhouse visibility, and that masthead camera “makes parking a breeze when it’s pointed straight down”, giving him a bird’s-eye view as he comes alongside. At sea, he says her deep-V hull and stabilising fins give her “great manners in any seas”.

“It surprises many that I’m able to single hand such a large ship,” he says, “and it’s surprising to many that this is my first boat.” That’s Adam’s experience, built since 2021 with training from her previous captain, not a promise for every owner; more on that below.

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Life aboard as she is now

Her layout reflects her working life, and Adam himself expects that “a buyer is going to improve the interior”. Her listing describes three guest cabins below, three heads, and a laundry, plus a lower crew stateroom with four berths, while the former master cabin is used for storage. On the main deck are a second crew stateroom, a lounge, and a head, and the captain’s cabin sits aft of the pilothouse with its own head and outside shower. The stainless galley has a Garland commercial stove. For a family planning longer periods aboard, the obvious upgrade is getting back the private owner’s space the cargo conversion took away, and Adam already has a plan for it (more in the premium section below).

Water is where she looks like a ship built to stay out. West Marine’s guide puts comfortable liveaboard use at 4 to 8 gallons per person a day, so her 1,500 gallons would last a couple roughly 94 to 188 days, or a family of four about 47 to 94 days, from the tanks alone. The watermaker is rated at an impressive 2,200 gallons a day, enough on paper to refill them in under a day.

Two keel-cooled 30 kW Kubota generators are backed by 2,000 W of solar and a 1,600 Ah 24 V bank, so the batteries can take some of the load at anchor between generator runs. The Bahamas and the islands are Adam’s favourite cruising grounds, they love to dive and fish, and there’s a room set aside for dive gear.

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How she compares

M/Y ‘Footloose’, a 2008 Cheoy Lee 95 Motor Yacht, is for sale at $2,199,000 in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. She’s the same length but a very different boat: GRP, twin 1,650 hp Caterpillar C32s, and a conventional four-cabin, five-head layout with a main-deck master. A yacht like that usually runs with paid crew. Care Bear trades a conventional layout for steel, deck space, and a crane, and although she has crew cabins too, her owner chooses to run her himself. They suit different ideas of what a 95ft boat is for.

I’ve covered working boats turned yachts before: [Jezebelle](https://newsletter.yacht-buoy.com/p/84-feet-of-steel-for-175001-the-true), an 84ft steel conversion (since sold) that needed a yard budget to finish, and [Atlas](https://newsletter.yacht-buoy.com/p/195000-for-atlas-the-24m-ex-fishing), a fishing boat a family spent 8 years turning into their home. Care Bear’s systems have already been refitted, so her interior is a choice for the next owner rather than an unfinished project.

In the premium section, I’ve worked out what she burns, how far she could go, and what a family refit involves.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

If you’re already a premium subscriber, or you’re about to become one, thank you. Your support keeps both the Yacht Buoy YouTube channel and this publication going, independent and advert-free, so I can keep writing about and filming boats like Care Bear.

In the premium section, I cover:

- What she costs to run: fuel per 1,000 NM, range, and servicing

- Running a 95ft ship without crew: watchkeeping, US rules, and insurers

- Making her a family expedition yacht: Adam’s teak plan and how to scope it

- A buyer’s checklist for a 2010s steel ship

- My honest assessment

What she costs to run

Adam’s 15 gallons an hour, turned into dollars per 1,000 NM and a theoretical range. I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to.

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It was gusting around 25 knots when we took this brand new Elling E6 out for a mini sea trial. The wind was coming off the land, so the sea state was slight, and she handled the conditions very well. Her extra speed meant we could nip out and nip back in again, and since typical explorer yachts top out at around 10 knots, that extra power makes a great difference.

Elling and her owner invited me aboard to film a full tour when she’d only just been launched. I first wrote about Elling Yachts in April 2025, and at the start of the tour I asked what makes an E6 so capable. This piece answers that in more depth, so it makes sense whether or not you’ve watched the video.

Built to come back upright

Let’s start with where she comes from. The E6 is the flagship of Elling Yachts in Aalst, in the Netherlands, and was first launched in 2016. The business behind Elling has roots in workboat building going back to 1972; the first Elling yacht, the E3, followed in 1997 and the E4 in 2004, with E4s crossing the Atlantic from 2008.

She carries CE Category A, the “Ocean” rating. Under the Recreational Craft Directive, that’s the design category for open-sea passages where winds can exceed Force 8 and significant wave heights reach 4m and above, excluding abnormal conditions such as hurricanes and rogue waves.

Then there’s the part that sets Elling apart. The yard describes an ocean-going, Kevlar-reinforced hull with “exceptional stability and unique self-righting safety system”, and says the E6 has been “engineered with capsize technology”. Self-righting means the hull and superstructure are designed to bring her back upright if she’s ever rolled right over, and Elling didn’t leave that idea on paper. In March 2014, as I mentioned in my earlier piece, they rolled a production E4 through a full 360 degrees in a controlled test. That was an E4 rather than an E6, but it shows how seriously the yard takes the principle. Kevlar, the trade name for aramid fibre, is used in composite laminates for its toughness and resistance to impact, a welcome quality in an ocean-going hull.

Power comes from a single Volvo Penta D13. Elling’s website lists it at 1,000hp, and this boat’s owners chose the 900hp version. Alongside it sits a 75hp Volvo Penta D2 spare engine to get her home if the main engine stops, and Elling’s standard specification gives it its own 320-litre tank, so it isn’t relying on the main fuel supply.

Elling publishes a range of 2,500 nautical miles, with a 9-knot cruise listed, and the yard told me she’ll cover 5,000 nautical miles at 7 knots. Doubling the range by slowing just 2 knots sounds unlikely until you remember that water resistance climbs steeply with speed, so each extra knot costs more fuel than the last. Ease back, and the fuel burned per NM falls much faster than your speed does.

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Why 20 knots is a seamanship tool

Many explorer yachts are built around a full-displacement hull and economical speed, and the Nordhavn 40, M/Y ‘Aegis‘, I featured on 26 October belongs to that fine tradition. The E6 can cruise that way too, but she also has 20 knots on tap by Elling’s figure, and on a passage that gives you options.

Picture a hypothetical 60-nautical-mile hop with a 6-hour weather window. At 10 knots you’d need all of it; at 20 knots you’d be tied up in about 3 hours. If a forecast changes, covering ground quickly gives you more say over where you are when the weather arrives, which is our nip out and nip back in on a bigger scale. A full-displacement trawler rewards patience and keeps things simple, whilst the E6 gives you a choice of additional speed as-and-when you need it. Each suits a different kind of owner.

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A quiet saloon, with the engine close by

The sound levels in the saloon were very good, and I think some people are surprised by that, considering the engine on the E6 sits behind soundproofed access panels in the master cabin and the galley.

Elling credits an Aquadrive bearing and flexible coupling in the drive train for an “extreme low noise and vibration level”. Aquadrive explains that its thrust bearing takes the propeller’s push into the hull, whilst its coupling cuts the engine vibration that travels through to the boat. Elling also moulds the engine bed into the hull “for maximum strength and vibration absorption”, promises “excellent engine room insulation”, and lists double glazing in the deck saloon and a dual-chamber exhaust silencer as standard.

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Life aboard

Down below, Elling’s standard layout gives three cabins, six berths and three heads. The owner’s cabin has a king-size bed you can reach from both sides, a desk and its own full-size bathroom aft; the forward cabin has a queen-size bed and the forward bathroom; and the side cabin has two single berths and access to the third head. Both bathrooms have separate showers and heated towel rails, which makes a full boat far more comfortable.

The galley is set up for full-time living aboard: Corian worktops, a four-ring cooker, a full-size fridge with a separate freezer, and a washing machine with a separate tumble dryer. The large electric slide roof opens the saloon to the sky on a warm evening, and aft, a hydraulic tender garage keeps a Williams jet tender out of the weather and quick to launch.

For nights at anchor, the standard specification lists three 250Ah lithium service batteries, two 3.5kW inverter/chargers and a 7kW Northern Lights generator to top them up. Elling calls the E6 “fully equipped” for “long term living on board”, and her 1,200 litres of fresh water go a long way. The Boat Galley suggests planning on about 25 litres per person per day, so a couple using 50 litres a day would have roughly 24 days before needing to refill, before any reserve.

Whether she could cross the Atlantic on her own fuel is another question, and I’ve worked through it, along with her fuel costs, in the premium section below.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

A huge thank you to everyone who supports Yacht Buoy with a premium subscription, whether you’ve been here a while or have just joined. You keep both the YouTube channel and this publication going, so I can carry on filming and writing about boats like this one without adverts.

In the premium section, I cover:

- Fuel and range, worked out: litres, hours and euros per 1,000 nautical miles at 9 and 7 knots, with a 10% reserve

- Could an E6 cross the Atlantic on her own fuel? A real E6 crossing by way of Greenland, set against her range

- Self-righting in practice: what it depends on, and how it sits alongside CE Category A

- Living with one main engine: what the spare engine and its own tank add, and keeping them ready

- If I were acting as the buyer’s rep on a new-build E6: the questions I’d ask Elling before signing

- My honest assessment: who the E6 suits and what she asks of an owner

Fuel and range, worked out

Range figures are easy to quote and harder to picture, so I’ve turned Elling’s into litres, hours and euros. I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to.

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Nordhavn doesn’t build a 40ft boat any more. When PAE ended N41 production on 28 July 2026, which I wrote about in August, the smallest Nordhavn in build became the 46 MK II. If you want a Nordhavn this size now, the only way in is pre-owned, and that’s the first reason why ‘Aegis’ is being featured in this issue (link to listing below).

The second reason is simpler. I love the look of her with her flopper stoppers out, both booms swung wide and lines running into the water as she lies off a small rocky islet, looking for all the world like the fishing boats that inspired her design. It’s a profile with a working purpose, so that’s where I’ll start.

Aegis is a 2000 Nordhavn 40, hull number 14, listed by Nordhavn’s own brokerage team in North Palm Beach, Florida, at $349,000, roughly £261,000 or €312,000 at the ECB rate for 23 October 2026. For a small yet very capable ocean-going trawler with this much cruising kit, I think that’s worth a closer look. So what does it take to keep her going, starting with the 8,600 hours on her single engine?

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Flopper stoppers, explained

Paravane stabilisers are about as old-school as stabilisation gets, which is part of their charm. NOAA’s guide to the US West Coast albacore fleet describes fishing boats hanging metal “flopper-stopper” plates from outriggers either side. On Aegis, a boom swings out from each side of the mast, and from each one a chain runs down to a weighted stainless “fish”, a shaped vane towed below the surface.

The fish is shaped to dive, so it wants to stay down. As she rolls, the fish on the rising side resists being lifted and the pull on the boom slows the roll. It won’t stop her moving altogether, but it takes much of the sting out of the side-to-side motion that makes a long passage so tiring. Electric boom hoists launch and recover the fish and chain, saving a good deal of heaving.

At anchor, the same booms can carry hinged plates that sink freely and resist being pulled back up, the classic fix for a rolly anchorage, as PassageMaker’s account of living with paravanes describes. Aegis’s listing names the fish and chain she uses under way.

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Nordhavn says passive paravanes, “sometimes referred to as ‘flopper stoppers’”, are popular because they reduce roll at anchor, need virtually no maintenance and can be pulled out of the water when they aren’t needed, to avoid unnecessary drag. It calls active fins “the current method of choice for most Nordhavn owners”, and says they’re especially effective at a full-displacement hull’s cruising speeds.

Fins work at the touch of a button, but they’re a powered system with appendages under the hull. Paravanes have no hydraulics and nothing powered below the waterline. The price is a little routine: deploying and recovering the rig, keeping an eye on the booms, fittings, chain and fish, and allowing room either side and underneath while they’re out, so shallows and fishing gear need care. For a couple who like no-nonsense systems they can see and understand, that’s a fair trade, and to my eye she looks wonderful doing it.

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The Nordhavn 40 story

Jeff Leishman designed the N40 as a smaller full-displacement boat that could cross oceans with a couple aboard and room for the occasional guest. A 1999 PassageMaker article, still hosted by Nordhavn, notes the commercial fishing boat influence and names Pacific Seacraft in Fullerton, California, as the builder of the early boats, the run hull 14 comes from.

Then Nordhavn proved the idea. A production N40 circumnavigated between 3 November 2001 and 30 June 2002. Nordhavn’s detailed record gives 24,211 nautical miles and 151 days 3 hours under way, its overview describes 170 days at sea, and Nordhavn says the N40 holds the world record for the fastest circumnavigation by a production powerboat.

The round-the-world boat carried active fins as well as paravanes, and 26 years is a long time in any boat’s life. It does show the N40 was made for exactly the long, steady cruising Aegis has been doing. As far as I am aware, Nordhavn still has, or rather had, the only 40ft motorboat LOA that can be used to travel around the world safely.

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Why a 40ft Nordhavn is now rare

PAE’s July announcement ended N41 and N51 production in Istanbul after 54 boats, 44 of them N41s, citing economic conditions in Turkey. The moulds for both will be destroyed.

That leaves the Nordhavn 46 MK II, which I looked at in August, as the smallest in build. She’s 46ft 3in overall with a 15ft 9.5in beam and 57,498lb displacement, against Aegis’s 39ft 9in, 14ft 6in and 50,000lb. Marinas charge by the foot, and the bigger boat is more for two people to handle and berth. The 46 MK II brings a current design and more room; Aegis offers the same ocean-crossing idea in a smaller footprint.

According to Nordhavn’s brokerage, the present owners are her second owners and have looked after her with great care for 18 years, living aboard full-time for the past 7, cruising extensively and logging many offshore miles. The brokerage also lists detailed maintenance records among her particulars. Nordhavn’s distance pennant record for Aegis lists 20,200 nautical miles, through British Columbia, Mexico and Central America. It’s a lovely story for a 40ft boat: designed to cross oceans, then used as a home.

Life aboard

Of course, access to fresh water, beyond what is stowed away in dry storage, decides how long you can stay anywhere. The Boat Galley’s authors logged about 7 US gallons a day for two adults and a small dog aboard their own boat, a frugal routine rather than a rule; at that rate her 220 US gallons would last a couple about a month (roughly 31 days). With a Village Marine watermaker listed at 27 US gallons an hour, water becomes far less of a reason to head back to a marina.

The 1,200Ah lithium bank, 3kW inverter/charger and 160A alternator add up to a substantial house-power system for time at anchor. How long she can go without running the generator depends on the bank’s condition and usable capacity, and on what you run, so it’s one for the survey.

A Webasto hydronic furnace is just what you’d want on a damp British Columbia morning, and the two air conditioners take care of a Florida summer. Separate 30A shore-power supplies for the house and the air conditioning, with a crossover between them, are a thoughtful touch.

Inside, she’s warm, wood-lined and lived in, in the nicest sense. The galley has a Force 10 three-burner propane stove and oven, a double sink and Vitrifrigo drawer fridge and freezer. The saloon has a dinette and windows with cellular blinds, and there’s a Splendide washer/dryer, which anyone who has carried laundry round a strange marina will certainly appreciate. In the pilothouse, wraparound windows look forward from the helm, with a settee and table for a cosy second spot on passage.

Nordhavn’s N40 material describes a forward owner’s cabin and a guest cabin, true to that couple-plus-guests brief, with a double bed for the owners and a guest berth with its own storage.

On deck, a 121lb Rocna on about 360ft of chain, with a Fortress backup, is a generous anchoring set-up for a 40ft boat, and the Avon tender, Viking four-person life raft, and Para-Ring sea anchor complete the offshore kit. In fact, this is the first time I have come across a 40ft boat with 360ft of chain! Very impressive!

In the premium section below, I look at what those 8,600 hours mean and what she costs to run.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

A huge thank you to everyone who supports Yacht Buoy with a premium subscription, whether you’ve been here from the start or joined this week. You keep both the YouTube channel and this publication going, advert-free, and you let me keep writing about and filming boats like Aegis.

In the premium section, I cover:

- What 8,600 hours on her Lugger 668D mean, and three things I’d ask for

- Her range, worked out from Nordhavn’s own N40 test figures

- Running her from Florida: fuel per 1,000 nautical miles at a dated diesel price, and the quotes to get

- Getting her to the UK or Europe, and the paperwork to check

- What a surveyor looks at on a 26-year-old Nordhavn 40

- My honest assessment: who she suits and what she asks of an owner

8,600 hours: what the number tells you

This is the question I’d want answered first, and I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to.

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There’s a lot to like about M/Y ‘Ge-Jo’, but three things stood out when I filmed her for the channel. I love her range. I love her no-nonsense layout, which finds a lot of space in a boat her size. And I think she’s ideal for someone who wants to move to life afloat.

She’s a 22m Dutch Luxe Motor, built in steel and listed with De Valk Sneek (link below) at €549,000, VAT paid, which is about £460,000 or US$615,000 at the ECB rate on 22 October 2026. For that you get three cabins, five berths, 5,000 litres of diesel, 3,000 litres of fresh water and a Mercedes V8, fitted in 2006, with 425 hours listed. That’s a lot of liveaboard for the money!

So what does it cost, and what does it take, to live aboard her on Europe’s waterways? Here’s my tour first, with her full spec sheet straight after it.

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A lot of boat for her size

Ge-Jo is 22m by 4.95m, and her layout makes great use of every metre. The saloon is large and open with big windows down both sides, the galley and dining area are open plan with the wood stove close by, and there are three separate cabins: the owner’s with a French bed, a guest cabin with two berths, one above the other, and a single that the listing calls the crew cabin. The dinette converts into an extra berth for when the family descends.

That’s what I mean by no-nonsense. She doesn’t try to be a floating hotel; the space goes to the rooms you live in, and the machinery that makes a home on the water actually work. The trade-off is one shared bathroom, with a shower and a manual head. Headroom is 2.10m, rising to 2.20m in the saloon, and the beds in all three cabins are listed at 2.10m, so taller owners and guests can stand up straight and stretch out. Since it wasn’t listed in the spec sheet, I’ve worked out her range in the premium section below.

Her story

She’s a Luxe Motor 22, also known as the Dutch Traveller 22, designed by Van der Meijden Maritiem. The Santierul Naval Orsova SA shipyard in Romania built her steel hull in 2004, and the finishing work was completed in the Netherlands at the end of 2008. She has the long, low, dark-hulled look of a traditional Luxe Motor, with bright red and white trim, and the insulation and systems of a modern year-round home.

Life aboard

Warmth comes first if you’re living aboard through a Dutch winter, and Ge-Jo has three ways of making it: Kabola central heating, which can also heat the hot water, a wood stove for cosy evenings, and three electric kick-space heaters. All of that sits inside a steel shell lined with 30mm of polyurethane foam and fitted with double glazing, so the heat actually stays in.

Her 3,000 litres of fresh water go a long way too. Schenker, the watermaker company, suggests planning on 30 to 50 litres per person per day; at the upper 50 litres, a full tank lasts about 30 days for two, or 15 days with four aboard. The frequency of showers and laundry decides the real number, but that’s a fortnight or more on a quiet mooring. Black and grey water get separate 750-litre tanks.

The electrics are set up for living rather than weekending. Her 24V, 1,000Ah gel service bank, dated 2024, is roughly 24kWh, though you would rarely use all of a bank’s capacity. Four solar panels add 1.74kW at their rated output, a second alternator charges under way, and the 20kVA generator does the heavy lifting away from shore power. With a washing machine, a Miele dishwasher and a central vacuum on top, she runs like a house rather than a holiday home.

Then there are the spud poles. For readers who haven’t come across them, a spud pole is a long pole lowered straight down into the bottom to hold the boat in position; Kalkman Marine, which supplies them, calls them positioning and securing equipment. Ge-Jo has one at each end, each with a camera, so in shallow water with a suitable bottom you can stop for lunch on a lake, or wait for a bridge, without dropping an anchor or swinging about.

Where she can go

France’s smaller canals are built around the Freycinet gauge, which VNF, the French waterways authority, gives as boats up to 38.5m long and 5.05m wide, with a typical draught of 1.8m to 2.2m and 4m of air draft. Ge-Jo is 22m long, draws 1.20m and needs just 3.20m of air draft with her radar arch and mast lowered, so on paper she sits comfortably inside the length, depth and height limits.

Her beam is the tight one: at 4.95m she’s 10cm inside the nominal 5.05m, or 5cm a side before fenders. That’s the right side of the line, and it opens up a big slice of the small French network, but locks, bridges, water levels and closures vary, so you’d plan route by route with VNF’s online route planner. Dutch and Belgian waters have their own clearances, though her shallow draft and lowering arch and mast help there too.

The engine

425 hours is the number here that really catches the eye of a new owner. Her Mercedes-Benz OM402, a 250hp V8, is listed as fitted in 2006, and her listed 425 hours are low; how she’s been run and looked after is a question for the paperwork, which I come to in the premium section below. She drives a single shaft, and 55 tonnes on one screw asks for some skill alongside, so the 30hp bow thruster and joystick steering are welcome helpers in tight marinas and locks.

How she compares

De Valk has another Luxe Motor on its books. Gino is a 1930 steel Luxe Motor lying in Berlin, asking €347,900, VAT paid (checked 23 October 2026). She’s close in size at 21.33m by 4.85m, but her sales copy describes four cabins for up to eight people, with en-suite bathrooms, and she has an impressive 9.5kW of solar alongside a 160hp Scania.

Neither is the better boat. Gino puts more people under one roof with their own bathrooms, whilst Ge-Jo offers a hull more than 70 years younger, bigger tanks (5,000 litres of fuel to 3,000, and 3,000 of water to 2,000) and a 250hp V8 around a simpler layout. If you’re new to these boats, my Dutch steel liveaboard guide covers the wider picture.

So what does it cost to live aboard her? I’ve priced it in the premium section below, along with a question I’m asked a lot: could a boat like Ge-Jo work as a part-time home for, say, an American who spends 3 or 4 months a year in Europe, and earn her keep on Airbnb for the rest?

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

A big thank you to everyone who’s a premium subscriber, whether you’ve been with me for a while or you’ve just joined. Your support keeps both the YouTube channel and this publication going, advert-free, and lets me keep filming and writing about boats like Ge-Jo.

In the premium section, I cover:

- What a year aboard costs: a dated berth rate for 22m in Friesland, the 2026 French waterways toll and diesel priced per engine hour

- The navigation certificate, skipper’s licences and VAT-paid status for a 22m pleasure boat on EU inland waterways

- Her range, worked out from 5,000 litres and 9 litres an hour

- Looking after a 2004 steel hull, her engine, generator and gel batteries

- Could she be a part-time home for an American owner, and let on Airbnb the rest of the year?

- My honest assessment: who she suits and what she asks of an owner

What a year aboard costs

Berths, tolls and fuel for a 22m liveaboard, priced from published 2026 rates. I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to.

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Most people who saw Atlas lying on calm water would assume she’s still earning her living in the North Sea as a rugged and very capable working vessel. She has the long blue steel hull, high bow and tall wheelhouse of a boat built to fish, and I love her steady sheer, the way her deck line sweeps up to that purposeful bow. Look closer, though, and the clues start to pop up on your visual radar. Her bow carries her name in big white letters rather than a fishing number, and there are bicycles, a RIB and a family sign reading “Atlas Initiatief” on deck. To the trained eye, or at least an eye with a sense for explorer yachts, she’s a home that happens to look like a fishing boat.

The story behind this boat is one of the many things that I love about her. A family spent 8 years turning a 1974 fishing cutter into the boat she is today, and they’ve lived aboard ever since. She’s now for sale privately in Bergen, Norway, at €195,000 (negotiable) EU VAT paid, roughly £164,000 or $219,000 at the ECB reference rates for 20 October 2026. For 24m of steel with a family home already built inside, that’s a figure that really does pique your interest.

So what does it take to keep a 24m converted working boat from 1974 as a home? Where the listing’s summary and the sellers’ detailed sheet differ, on draft, tanks and cabins, I’ve used the sellers’ sheet.

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Atlas at a glance

According to the sellers, Atlas was built in 1974 by the Ustka shipyard in Poland as a fishing cutter, a viskotter to the Dutch. After doing some research, I found that Ustka’s municipal history dates the yard’s first steel fishing vessels to 1971, so she’d have come from its early years. She flies the Dutch flag and, the sellers say, is officially registered as a sea-going pleasure craft.

She’s 24.30m overall, 23.21m on the waterline and 6.59m in the beam, with a 2.50m draft on the sellers’ sheet and a 12.50m air draft. The draft and air draft point her at coastal cruising rather than Europe’s smaller canals, which is how the family have used her. Underneath is a steel displacement hull with a skeg, and a single Caterpillar 3408 PC driving a shaft through a Twin Disc 514 gearbox. The listing gives the Cat 365hp and 7,729 hours, and she carries 11,500 litres of fuel in two tanks.

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The Breda years

The family say they refurbished Atlas in Breda, in the Netherlands, between 2015 and 2023 “with great care and enjoyment”, and moved aboard in 2023. Since then they’ve cruised the coastal waters of the Netherlands, England, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and through their Atlas initiative, they say, artists regularly join them aboard to work on projects or research.

Plenty of us have looked at an old fishing boat and wondered what she’d be like as a home. This family found out, then kept her moving from country to country with people coming and going.

The skeg, and why I see it as a bonus

The dry-dock photos from her refit show something I’m always pleased to see on a single-screw boat: a substantial skeg running aft beneath the propeller to the foot of the rudder. For readers who might be unfamiliar with the term, Wärtsilä’s marine encyclopedia describes a skeg as a fin-like structure near the stern that, in a single-screw arrangement, supports the lower rudder and shaft area and helps directional tracking. On a long, single-screw hull like hers, that’s sturdy support for the rudder and a little extra help holding a steady course, especially in large following seas.

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Handling her with one engine

No bow or stern thruster is listed in the sellers’ systems or the listing’s equipment, and the photos show none. Her next owner will handle 24m of steel with one propeller and a rudder, the way working boats like her have long been handled.

A single propeller kicks the stern sideways when going astern, known as prop walk, and the direction depends on which way it turns. Once you know it, you use it, picking the side you come alongside so the kick tucks her stern in. Springing on and off the quay with a line and a touch of power lets her pivot where you want, and a heavy hull carries her way, so approaches are planned early, taken slowly and, where possible, made into the wind or tide. It’s a satisfying skill once it clicks.

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Life aboard

The conversion hasn’t hidden her character. Heavy portholes with hinged deadlights sit in light, modern walls, and timber steps lead up to a wheelhouse with a traditional wooden wheel and broad, timber-framed windows.

The sellers describe a double cabin, two single cabins and an alcove berth; a mess with storage under the benches and a second head they list as unfinished; a galley with a four-burner gas stove and oven, a 150 L fridge and a 70 L freezer; and a bathroom with a shower and washing machine. The wheelhouse has two captain’s chairs, a chart table and thermally insulated glass. Then there’s the multifunctional space, a room under a 2.50m x 1.25m deck hatch with its own wood stove, which could just as easily be a studio, an office or perhaps even a workshop.

The heating suits northern waters: floor heating in the cabins, galley, mess, wheelhouse and multifunctional space, a 12kW diesel water heater with a 150 L buffer tank, and that wood stove. Picture a wet October, like it is here now in London, or an evening in Bergen with the stove going and warm floors underfoot, and you can see why a family made her home.

Her two water tanks hold 1,275 litres. As an illustration, at 30 litres per person per day, the top of West Marine’s typical cruising range, that’s about 21 days for two or 10 for four, before laundry. The Schenker ZEN 150 watermaker is rated by its maker at 150 litres an hour on 600W, so at that rate it would make a day’s water for four in under an hour.

The sellers also list 2,500Wp of solar, a 48V 306Ah lithium bank (about 14.7kWh nominal), a separate 24V 720Ah service bank and a Kipor 10.2kW three-phase generator. That’s a generous mix of charging and storage for a liveaboard, though how long she’d go between charges depends on how you live aboard, and a winter in the northern latitudes gives the panels far less to work with.

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That walk-around engine room

I love her engine room. It’s a large walk-around space with chequer-plate flooring around the big yellow V8 Cat, with the Kipor further along. Space to move around a main engine makes the routine checks easier to keep up, and on an engine like this, routine is what keeps it going for years.

How far she’ll go

The sellers give a range of 4,940 nautical miles at 6.5 knots, burning 15 litres an hour. In the premium section, I work out what that means once you keep a sensible reserve in the tanks. I also work out what her range would be at 7.5 knots rather than 6.5, as 6.5 knots tends to sit at the lower end of displacement speeds.

How she compares

As a private sale she has no broker’s stock to sit beside, but I’ve written about loads of converted working boats that make good company. Twelen, the 21.4m, 1979 ex-government sounding vessel, was asking €149,500 when I covered her in September; Atlas is about 2.9m longer, with a fishing past and a family home built inside. Jezebelle, the 84ft steel shrimp trawler in Bayou La Batre, was $175,001 when I wrote about her in August, a project still waiting for her conversion, whereas Atlas’s work is done. Salvator, a Belgian steel fishing trawler long converted as an explorer, shares her working-boat roots at a similar size. Those were prices at the time, not today’s market.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

Thank you to every premium subscriber, existing and new. Your support keeps both the YouTube channel and this publication going, advert-free, and lets me keep writing about and filming boats like Atlas.

In the premium section, I cover:

- Her range worked out from the sellers’ figures with a 10% reserve, in hours, days and nautical miles, plus an estimate at 7.5 knots

- What every engine-hour and every mile costs in fuel at dated Dutch and UK diesel benchmarks

- What it takes to keep her: surveying a 1974 steel hull, the Cat at 7,729 hours, haul-outs, berths and insurance

- Her Dutch registration, EU VAT-paid status and the paperwork worth asking for

- What it would take to get her to the United States, under her own power or by ship

- My honest assessment: who she suits and what she asks of her next owner

Her range, worked out

The sellers’ range comes with no reserve stated, so I’ve added one and turned it into hours, days and miles. I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to!

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Although I’ve featured quite a few Bering Yachts on my YouTube channel, I’ve never been aboard M/Y ‘Dzam’, but I already know two things I love about her: her seakeeping and her range. She’s a 2012 Bering 60, a steel explorer weighing 97 tonnes at full load, with a full-displacement hull and tankage for 8,700 litres of diesel. That’s the recipe for a steady, purposeful explorer in a seaway, and a tank that size means you don’t have to think about the next fuel dock every couple of days.

She’s also currently for sale with the very yard that built her. Bering Yachts is offering Dzam themselves from Antalya, on Turkey’s south coast, at $1,100,000 (link below), roughly €981,000 or £830,000 at the European Central Bank’s reference rates of 15 October 2026. That’s a lot of steel and range for the money, and it raises the question I’ll come back to: how would you pay for a boat like her?

Dzam belongs to Bering’s Exploration series, built for long-range cruising with more contemporary styling. She measures 18.3m (60ft) overall, 17.2m on the waterline, 5.7m in beam, and draws 1.8m. Her hull is steel, and she is rated CE Category A. Bering lists her twin Cummins QSB5.9 diesels at 225hp each at 1,700rpm, both continuous-duty rated, with 2,623 hours on the port engine and 2,616 on the starboard, turning five-blade propellers. She cruises at 7.5 knots, tops out at 9.5 and has a listed range of 3,000+ nautical miles at cruising speed.

Inside, she has two staterooms, a crew cabin, two heads, a Seakeeper gyro stabiliser, bow and stern thrusters, a watermaker, and a generator. She looks the part, too, with a tall bow, high, squared-off topsides above a red boot stripe, big dark saloon windows and a flybridge with generous seating.

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Why I love her seakeeping

Weight is the starting point. At 97 tonnes, Dzam carries a lot of mass for a 60-footer, and her full-displacement hull keeps it down in the water rather than lifting onto the surface. That inertia keeps her from being thrown about by every short wave, and a boat like this one tends to move more slowly and predictably.

The Seakeeper adds to that. A gyro stabiliser uses a spinning flywheel to resist rolling, and it works at anchor as well as under way, which is lovely when a swell finds its way into an anchorage just as dinner goes on the table. It tames roll rather than every kind of motion.

Her CE Category A rating is the open-sea design category under the EU’s Recreational Craft Directive, intended for voyages where the wind may exceed force 8 and significant wave heights reach 4m or more, abnormal conditions excluded.

And her range

That listed range is Bering’s figure, and real results depend on weather, sea state, loading and how she’s run. The principle is simple, though: a displacement hull at a gentle speed needs relatively little power, and Dzam carries 8,700 litres to feed it. At 7.5 knots, 3,000 nautical miles is 400 hours of running, which is nearly 17 days non-stop. That means fewer fuel stops, the freedom to fill up where the diesel is good, and planning longer passages instead of hopping between marinas. I love that about her.

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What “continuous duty” really means

Marine diesels aren’t sold with a single power figure. Cummins publishes ratings tying power and rpm to how hard and how often an engine works, and lists its QSB5.9 family at several outputs and speeds, each matched to a duty.

At one end is Continuous Duty, which Cummins intends for continuous-use applications with a 70% to 90% load factor, typical of ocean-going displacement vessels. At the other is High Output, for recreational boats used infrequently with variable loads, typically a 10% to 30% load factor, with full power limited to 1 hour in every 8. One is set up to run steadily all day, every day, and the other for short sprints with plenty of easy running in between.

Bering’s continuous-duty rating for Dzam’s engines, at 225hp and 1,700rpm, matches the use she was designed for: long passages at a steady cruising rpm, hour after hour. That also explains why a 97-tonne explorer doesn’t need loads more horsepower. Almost all of her 60ft sits in the water, and a full-displacement hull pushes water aside rather than climbing over it, so beyond a speed set largely by her waterline length, extra power mostly makes a bigger wave and burns more fuel.

Her hour meters average a little under 190 hours a year over 14 years. Hours alone say nothing about condition either way; they’re a planning figure, and I’d ask to see the engines’ service records alongside them.

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Life aboard

Two staterooms and a crew cabin is a layout I like on a boat like this: space for the owners, a cabin for friends or family, and somewhere for a hired skipper on a long delivery or an extra berth when she’s full. Two heads keep mornings civilised with guests aboard.

The saloon is wide and light, with big windows, pale upholstery and dark joinery, and the galley shares its space with the dinette, so whoever’s cooking isn’t shut away. It has a dishwasher, fridge, deep freezer, and microwave, plus a washing machine and air conditioning. On a boat with this much range, the deep freezer helps when you’re far from the shops, and laundry aboard means clean sheets needn’t wait for the next marina.

Her 3,785 litres of fresh water are easier to picture using the World Health Organization’s figure of about 50 litres per person per day for a home with an intermediate level of water access. It’s an illustration, not a yacht consumption figure, but on that basis a full tank would last about 38 days for two people or 19 days for four, with nothing held back. The watermaker can top it up whilst conditions and the source water allow.

Bering Yachts, the yard selling her

Bering’s story began in 2007 with a 50ft all-metal boat built in Foshan, China. Today the company has shipbuilding facilities in Antalya, Türkiye, and Burgas, Bulgaria, and its model pages run from this 60 up to a 165, alongside a family of expedition catamarans. I’ve written about the yard before, including the Bering 88 sea trials. Most of the time, a pre-owned explorer changes hands through a brokerage, so it’s unusual, but not unheard of, to find one offered by her builder.

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How she compares

When I wrote about the Bering 76 ‘Lemanja’, launched in 2022, she weighed 148 tonnes and carried 22,700 litres of fuel, with twin 404hp Cummins QSL9s, three guest cabins plus crew and a claimed 4,000 nautical miles at 8 knots. Dzam is a more compact version of the same idea, with about two-thirds of the weight, under 40% of the fuel, and a layout for a couple with guests.

Bering is also selling a 2022 Bering 70, ‘Levanna’, from Antalya, displayed on YachtWorld at $3,138,208 on 19 October 2026 (a converted figure that can vary). She’s 73.5ft and 10 years newer, with four guest cabins, four heads and twin 200hp John Deere engines, yet she’s listed with 2,076 US gallons of fuel to Dzam’s 2,300. Levanna suits a bigger group, whilst Dzam puts Bering’s long-range thinking into a more compact package for roughly a third of the money.

Which brings me back to how a buyer could finance a boat like her.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

A big thank you to every premium subscriber, whether you’ve been here for years or joined this week. You keep both the YouTube channel and this publication going, advert-free, and make it possible for me to keep writing about and filming boats like Dzam.

In the premium section, I cover:

- How a buyer could finance a boat like her, with a worked deposit and loan example on her $1.1m price

- What lenders look for in a 14-year-old yacht lying in Turkey, including age limits, living aboard and the UK and US differences

- The money beyond the price: survey, getting her out of Antalya, import VAT and duty, fuel, berthing and her range with a reserve

- My honest assessment: who she suits, what she asks of an owner and what I’d ask for as a buyer’s rep

How you could finance a boat like her

Whether a lender will finance her is each lender’s call, and her age, location, and where she’ll live next all shape the answer. I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to…[article continues below]

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One of my favourite things about M/Y ‘Aristo’ is where her tender lives. Her boat deck sits a level below the aft deck, so the tender can be launched without disturbing anyone sitting out there. Picture an evening at anchor with friends aboard: someone runs ashore for some cheese and wine while everyone else carries on with supper. It’s a small piece of thinking, but it tells you how she was meant to be used.

Aristo is a Stentor 1600, launched in June 2004, designed by Vripack Yacht Design in Sneek and built by Stentor Yachts SRL in Romania. She’s asking €395,000, VAT paid, roughly £334,000 or $443,000 at the European Central Bank’s reference rate on 15 October 2026 (the fuel prices and berth tariffs further down were checked on 16 October).

I’ve filmed her for the YouTube channel, and you can watch the tour here once it’s live:

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Her essentials

She’s 16.00m overall and 14.95m on the waterline, with a 4.65m beam, a 1.30m draft and a 3.25m air draft once her mast is lowered hydraulically. Her 33-tonne multi hard chine hull is built from 5mm steel plate, with 4mm for the deck and superstructure, and sits on a long keel. A single 185hp Perkins Sabre M185C on a shaft gives her 8 knots cruising and a top speed of 8.5. Her 5,000 litres of diesel, carried in two steel tanks, give a listed range of about 3,750nm at 7.5 knots. She has two cabins, both en suite, and six berths.

Why she caught my eye

Five things drew me to her, starting with the Vripack design. Dick Boon opened the studio in Sneek in 1961, and if you read my piece on the Vripack Searocco 1500 ‘Aegir’, you’ll know how highly I rate their seagoing steel boats.

Then there’s her 5mm steel hull. Steel’s weldability means a qualified yard can repair damaged plate by cutting it out and welding in new, following established practice such as the American Welding Society’s Guide for Steel Hull Welding. On a boat designed to cross open water, that matters. Her original plate thickness also gives a surveyor a clear baseline (more on that below).

I love her flared bow, which pushes choppy water and spray outwards as she meets a wave instead of letting it climb over the foredeck. Pair that with a long keel, which helps a displacement hull like this one to hold her course, and you have the right recipe for long passagemaking days whilst cruising along at a steady 7 or 8 knots.

The aft deck has spacious U-shaped seating on teak, a door straight out from the saloon and a wet bar with its own sink and fridge. On a liveaboard, that’s where breakfast, sundowners and most of the summer happen. Below it sits that boat deck, where her hydraulic crane and davits do their important work.

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What Category A means for where she can go

The EU Recreational Craft Directive (2013/53/EU) sets four design categories. Category D covers winds up to force 4 and significant waves up to 0.3m (with occasional waves of 0.5m), C goes up to force 6 and 2m, and B up to force 8 and 4m. Category A, Aristo’s rating, covers winds that may exceed force 8 and significant waves that may exceed 4m, excluding abnormal conditions such as hurricanes.

So she was designed for open-sea passages and not just coastal hops, though the category describes her design rather than a forecast anyone would choose to go out in. Her Vetus fin stabilisers reduce roll for comfort without changing what weather is sensible, and her single engine gives passage planning a little extra weight, which I cover in the premium section below.

Her 1.30m draft and 3.25m air draft also make some shallower, lower inland routes worth investigating, bridge by bridge and lock by lock, so she could cross open water one month and potter along the waterways the next.

When you first lay eyes on her profile, the forward part of the vessel gives confident ‘Bay of Biscay’ vibes, whilst her stern resembles something you would perhaps spot cruising the inland waterways. For me, these dual design characteristics make this boat even more intriguing.

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Life aboard, and who I think she suits

This is where Aristo makes her case as a home. Each cabin has a 2.0m French bed, hanging space and drawers, and its own en suite with a shower and electric toilet, so guests get their own space and nobody queues up for the shower in the morning. The dinette converts to a berth, which is how she reaches six. For full-time life, she’s best suited to a couple, with room for family and friends to come and stay on board.

The interior is teak, with teak-and-holly floors and 2.0m headroom in the saloon, which gives her a warm, cosy feel without anyone having to stoop. Her Kabola central heating also supplies the hot water, and with air conditioning throughout, double glazing and foam-plate insulation, she’s set up for the colder months as well as summer.

The Corian galley has a double sink, a four-burner Siemens hob, a combination microwave-oven, a dishwasher and a separate fridge and freezer. A Miele washer-dryer and a central vacuum take care of two of the least romantic jobs aboard.

She carries 2,500 litres of fresh water in stainless tanks, plus 325 litres of black water and 430 litres of grey. At The Boat Galley’s figure of around 25 litres per person per day for comfortable cruising, and assuming the whole tank is usable, that’s about 50 days for two people or 25 days for four. Showers and climate will move that, but I think it’s a generous margin.

Her Mastervolt electrics include six 200Ah service batteries, two 2,500W inverters for household kit at anchor, and a 4.5kW isolation transformer, which separates the boat’s electrics from shore power, a sensible thing on a steel hull. An 11kVA Kohler generator handles heavier loads.

The Stentor story

Aristo pairs a Dutch design with a Romanian build. A 2005 report in the Romanian newspaper Jurnalul described the yard, then Stentor Maritime, as founded in 1998 by Dutch entrepreneur Karel Boersma at Oltenița on the Danube. Its administrator said it averaged seven boats a year for western European customers and had orders booked through to 2008. Aristo was launched in June 2004, in the middle of that busy spell.

The family includes the [Stentor 1300](https://newsletter.yacht-buoy.com/p/vripack-stentor-1300-steel-trawler) and the [Vripack Survey 15](https://newsletter.yacht-buoy.com/p/the-399000-vripack-survey-15-why), both of which I’ve written about, as well as the 1500 and the 1600. Set Aristo beside a 2003 Survey 15 OC and the 1600’s character comes through: she’s about a metre longer, with two cabins instead of three, nearly twice the fresh water and more fuel. It’s a layout that puts comfort and autonomy for two ahead of extra berths.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

Thank you to everyone who supports Yacht Buoy as a premium subscriber, whether you’ve been with me for years or joined this week. Your support keeps both the YouTube channel and this publication going, so I can keep writing about and filming boats I choose on their merits, without adverts.

In the premium section, I cover:

- Looking after a 22-year-old steel hull: what thickness readings against her original 5mm and 4mm plate tell an owner, and the three things I’d ask for

- Berths and fuel: two dated 16m berth tariffs in the Netherlands and the UK, dated diesel benchmarks at her listed burn, and what to price yourself

- Where Category A could take her: her listed range with a 10% reserve, and what one engine means for passage planning

- The Stentor family in more depth: how a 1300, a 1500 and a Survey 15 compare with her

- My honest assessment

Looking after a 22-year-old steel hull

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Picture the morning after the house is sold. The kettle is on in a steel wheelhouse, the mooring lines are wet with dew, and the only question on the agenda is whether to potter along a Dutch canal today or wait for a calm day to head out to the coast. For a lot of you, that isn’t idle daydreaming. My £98k Dutch kotter tour has been watched 164,000 times as I write, and the €229,900 Kruiskamp Bakdekker 1400, a 14m steel cruiser I called a tiny home on the water, has 95,000. You aren’t just admiring Dutch steel; plenty of you are quietly working out whether you could sell up and move aboard one.

It’s a lovely dream, and a reasonable one: a well-kept Dutch steel cruiser can be a capable boat and a cosy home, with the European waterways on her doorstep. So I’ve taken the questions a potential owner would normally ask before putting the house on the market and worked through them with official sources and boats I’ve featured. Think of it as my Nordhavn guide for the boats you watch most.

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Is a Dutch steel trawler the right boat for this life?

“Dutch steel trawler” is my general shorthand rather than a single boat type. Kotters and spiegelkotters draw on working fishing boats; the spiegelkotter is named for her flat, mirror-like transom, like M/Y ‘Jip’, the Noorderlicht 50 I featured in July. Then there are bakdekkers such as the Kruiskamp, trawler-style motor yachts like the Flevolution 1500 RE and the Vripack-designed Searocco 1500, and luxe motor-style boats named after early motorised Dutch barges. For living aboard, the layout matters much more than the builder’s plate.

Why steel? Well, a welded steel hull is robust, and a qualified welder can repair it. In return, it asks for care and a proactive approach to maintenance. Coatings and anodes keep corrosion at bay, and because steel conducts heat, insulation and ventilation decide whether winter feels snug or damp. That isn’t a negative, just the job that comes with the material, so I’d study a boat’s coating history and insulation as closely as her engines. Many first-time buyers I have met over the years get caught out by this.

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Inland, coastal or offshore?

“Explorer” on a name board doesn’t make a boat ocean-going. EU design categories describe the conditions a boat was designed for: A for winds above Beaufort 8 and significant waves above 4m, B up to Beaufort 8 and 4m, C up to Beaufort 6 and 2m, and D for sheltered water. M/Y ‘Aegir’, a Searocco 1500, carries Category A; the Kruiskamp is Category C. Boats built before the rules took effect on 16 June 1998 often have none, which is why the 1991 Moonen 56 I featured is listed as exempt.

Personally, I would be happy to take a CE Cat C vessel across the North Sea, but only with a good weather window. Most of the rescues my former colleagues and I were involved in during my time in the Royal Navy and RNLI came down to new boaters thinking the sea acts like a boating lake. Or that they could call the emergency services with their mobile, despite being 15nm offshore.

On the canals, draft and air draft rule. The Kruiskamp draws 1.20m with a listed minimum air draft of 2.95m once her mast is lowered, while Aegir comes down from 5.50m to 3.60m. Those centimetres decide which bridges are open to you.

How much home do you get?

The boats I’ve featured run from 14m to 18m. The Kruiskamp has a domestic fit-out that makes longer stays aboard feasible. Aegir, at 14.97m, has two cabins and four berths. The 16m Flevolution has three cabins, two heads, heating and a washer/dryer, while the 17.80m Moonen, M/Y ‘Contentus III’, adds double glazing, foam insulation, diesel central heating, a washer and a generator. For a couple, a third cabin becomes a study or somewhere for visiting family. As an illustration, at a generous 50 litres each a day and a fully usable tank, two people would get about eight days from Aegir’s 850 litres of fresh water, 10 from Flevolution’s 1,000 and 15 from the Moonen’s 1,500.

What does a good one cost?

These are asking prices when I featured each boat, not current offers. Conversions throughout use the European Central Bank rate for 13 October 2026: €1 = £0.8446 = US$1.1188. I checked all the official guidance in this guide on 14 October 2026.

- About €150,000 to €250,000: Jip (14.99m, owner-completed on a KBS-welded hull) was €235,000 VAT paid in July 2026 (about £198,500 / $262,900). The 2005 Kruiskamp (14.00m) was €229,900 VAT paid in September (£194,200 / $257,200).

- About €250,000 to €500,000: Flevolution (16m) was €299,000 in September (£252,500 / $334,500). Contentus III (17.80m, 1991) was €355,000 VAT paid in October (£299,800 / $397,200). Aegir (14.97m) was €489,000 VAT paid in September (£413,000 / $547,100).

- €500,000 plus: M/Y ‘Valerie’, a Pieter Beeldsnijder PB55 built by T&T Yachting (18.40m, three cabins), was €569,000 in July (£480,600 / $636,600).

Aegir is nearly 3m shorter than Contentus III yet was listed for €134,000 more: design, category, machinery and fit-out set the price, not length.

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Before you make an offer

Budget separately for an out-of-water survey with ultrasonic hull-thickness readings (on an older steel boat, the most useful document you’ll get), a sea trial, delivery, registration and insurance from completion. “VAT paid” needs paperwork showing which territory, and EU VAT paid doesn’t make a boat UK VAT paid.

On Dutch waters, the government requires a vaarbewijs (boating licence) for a pleasure craft longer than 15m, or a fast motorboat capable of more than 20km/h. Contentus III at 17.80m is over that line, while Aegir at 14.97m sits just under, so check a borderline boat with the Dutch authorities. The ICC with CEVNI is widely recognised on European inland waterways, but check each country on your route, and Ofcom treats the ship radio licence and your Short Range Certificate separately.

Many people are surprised that, here in the UK, you don’t need a licence to skipper your own pleasure boat. Before I sold my insurance business, I would often meet a fellow entrepreneur who had sold their business, gone out and bought a Princess or Sunseeker as their first boat, and then the boat would get left in a swanky marina as the new owner realised that they had bitten off much more than they could chew.

For registration, the UK Ship Register’s Part 1 takes pleasure vessels and can support a marine mortgage. Part 3, the Small Ships Register, needs the owner to live in the UK at least 185 days a year, which matters if you plan to spend most of it abroad. In the Netherlands, RDW registration applies to fast craft under 20m, so a displacement trawler won’t necessarily need it.

Making her your home

Whether you can live aboard depends on the berth rather than the country. Dutch rules are local; Jachthaven Biesbosch, for example, doesn’t allow permanent residence without the harbourmaster’s permission. In the UK it depends on the berth and navigation authority (where an inland authority applies the Boat Safety Scheme, you’ll need its certificate or an exemption), and a residential mooring can count for rip-off council tax (my UK rent-versus-boat piece goes deeper). In France, the VNF vignette lets you navigate; it isn’t permission to live anywhere.

The bigger surprise is time. UK citizens can spend no more than 90 days in any 180 across the Schengen area without a visa or residence permit. A non-EU-registered boat owned by someone established outside the EU can normally stay 18 months under temporary admission, but that’s the boat’s clock, not yours.

Before the house is sold, I’d get written acceptance of your new address from your bank, insurer and doctor, because a marina address isn’t automatically a residential one. Winter heating, condensation, water supply and ice, shore power, internet, laundry and pets come down to the boat’s equipment and the berth’s terms, so I’d choose the berth almost as carefully as the boat.

Before you call the estate agent: my checklist

- Find the berth first, and get permission to live aboard in writing.

- Know your time limits: 90 days in any 180 across Schengen on a UK passport, and your boat has her own clock.

- Check which licences your boat and your route need.

- Budget for an out-of-water survey with hull-thickness readings.

- Ask for the VAT paperwork, not just the words “VAT paid”.

- Talk to a marine lender about age limits before you fall for a boat.

- Get an insurance quote that says you’ll be living aboard.

- Plan your winter: heating, insulation and condensation.

- Sort your address with your bank, insurer and doctor.

- Know your way back before you need it.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom” In the premium section below, I cover:

- What it costs to keep her: published berth prices for 12m, 15m and 18m boats in three countries, the French waterways vignette, today’s diesel prices and red diesel

- How to price the rest before you buy, from a buyer’s rep’s point of view

- VAT and Brexit: what “VAT paid” means when an EU boat comes to the UK, plus finance

- What you stop paying when the house goes, and the way back if the life doesn’t work out

- My honest assessment: who this life suits, and who should think again

It’s thanks to my premium subscribers that I can keep both the YouTube channel and this publication going, advert-free, filming and writing about these boats. Whether you’ve just joined or have been with me a while, thank you!

What it costs to keep her

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When I shared photos of M/Y ‘Jade Panama’ on my Instagram, they reached hundreds of thousands of people, and I knew I had to write about her. A forward-thinking staff member at Worth Avenue Yachts added me to their mailing list, which was a great move. Otherwise, I never would have known about this beautiful boat...

It isn’t hard to see why she travelled so far online. Worth Avenue Yachts, her listing broker (Scott Hauck, link below), says original invoices show she was priced at $6.9 million in 2001. Today she’s offered at $995,000, about 14 cents for every dollar on those invoices. Her story is every bit as appealing as the numbers: she was designed for a retired couple, “neither of whom were mechanics nor technicians”, so they could cruise far offshore without crew.

Getting aboard has become far more affordable. The question I wanted to answer is what it takes to keep her.

Meet Jade Panama…(video/image credit: Worth Avenue Yachts),

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M/Y ‘Jade Panama’ was launched in July 2001 as Watermark, and later carried the name Chillin. She’s a Rayburn Custom Yachts 76 “Flush Deck”, built in British Columbia, Canada, to a design by naval architect Howard Apollonio.

She measures 76 ft 0 in (23.16m) overall, with a 21ft (6.40m) beam and a 5 ft 4 in (1.63m) draft. Her hull is cored fibreglass, she’s US-flagged at 110Gt, and Worth Avenue’s spec sheet lists twin 800hp Caterpillar 3406E diesels, with a 10-knot cruise and a 15-knot maximum. She carries 2,598 US gallons (9,834 litres) of fuel and 400 US gallons (1,514 litres) of water, and sleeps six guests in three staterooms.

She’s lying in Bellevue, Washington, on Lake Washington, listed by Scott Hauck at Worth Avenue Yachts for $995,000. At the European Central Bank’s reference rates for 9 October 2026, that’s roughly £753,000 or around €888,000. A lot of boat for the money.

She has an unmistakable broad, white, flush-deck profile, a tall bow rail, and covered side decks running forward to the pilothouse doors. The flybridge sits under a hardtop, and the hydraulic mast and hardtop lower together, reducing her air draft from 29 ft to 19 ft 10 in.

This boat has the naval architecture of a vessel with significant presence on the water. Her deck layout and configuration suggest a boat that can handle rough weather thanks to its no-nonsense profile.

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An explorer yacht built around two people

Her first owners were an experienced yachting couple who wanted a sea-kindly hull for extended offshore cruising, with the range to cross the Atlantic without refuelling. Just as important, they wanted to handle her themselves.

That brief shaped almost everything aboard: labour-saving systems, redundancy wherever it’s critical, and simple, reliable systems for everything she needs to run. For her next owner, that means fewer specialist jobs and fewer single points of failure. Because the couple planned to cruise remote waters, they chose components that were available and serviceable worldwide. The owner was on site every day of the build, which Worth Avenue describes as a collaboration between the owners, their architect, two professional surveyors and the builder.

She was engineered to the American Bureau of Shipping’s rules for motor pleasure yachts, the standard that sets how thick a hull must be and how strongly it’s framed for the loads it meets at sea. She was never classed, so there’s no ABS certificate, but the strength was designed in.

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Her hull is fibreglass around a Corecell foam core, far stiffer for its weight than solid glass, and Corecell’s maker, Gurit, tests it specifically for slamming, the hammering a hull takes coming off a wave. The foam insulates against cold and noise too. Vinylester outer layers resist osmotic blistering better than ordinary polyester, the keel is solid laminate with no core to crush if she touches bottom, and Kevlar toughens the likeliest impact areas.

Apollonio also drew her for comfort: a hull meant to damp motion, bow sections shaped to resist pitching and Naiad stabilisers for the roll. Her engine room intakes even run up to the top deck, so heavy water can’t find its way below. She was built for open-ocean work, and to be a comfortable home while she does it.

Worth Avenue says she was the smallest Rayburn ever built, by a yard, and that the yard mainly built much larger custom yachts, which helps explain her bigger-boat equipment list.

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Across the Atlantic and back

From her launch, the original owners lived aboard full time. Their route took them from Vancouver through the Panama Canal and along the north coast of South America, across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, back across the Atlantic, then through the Caribbean and the Bahamas, up the US East Coast and on to the Canadian Maritimes.

A couple who weren’t mechanics lived aboard full time and crossed an ocean twice. For anyone who has stood on a pontoon wondering what it would be like to just keep going, that’s quite something.

Two further owners cruised her on the East Coast from 2008 to 2015, before she returned to the Pacific Northwest. She’s been on Lake Washington ever since, and she has been upgraded along the way, including Maretron monitoring in 2023, a new tender in 2022 and a 2020 service of the stabilisers, rudders and propellers.

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Life aboard

From the aft deck, the salon runs forward under Honduran mahogany joinery, with a dining table that extends to seat five and a pass-through to a U-shaped galley with a dishwasher, trash compactor and ice maker. Beyond the day head, the pilothouse has its own settee and table, with room for two people to pass without disturbing whoever is at the helm, which matters on a long night watch.

Down a curved stairway, a foyer with a study, desk and library sits between the cabins, beside a laundry with a Miele washer and dryer and a walk-in stainless steel cold store. The full-beam master has a queen berth and “his and hers” heads either side of a walk-in shower. The forward VIP has a queen and its own en suite, and the port guest cabin has over-and-under bunks, also en suite. For a couple living aboard, that’s two guest cabins for visiting family and a study of their own.

Comfort comes from chilled-water air conditioning with reverse-cycle heat, Northern Lights 32kW and 16kW generators, a Victron Quattro inverter/charger, Naiad stabilisers and hydraulic bow and stern thrusters. A 2,000lb Steelhead davit handles the 2022 Highfield 15ft tender with its 90hp Honda.

So how long could you stay out? The Boat Galley suggests 4 to 6 US gallons (15 to 23 litres) per person per day for comfortable, careful cruising. On that basis, her 400-gallon tank would last two people roughly 33 to 50 days, four people 17 to 25 days and six people 11 to 17 days. Her Sea Recovery Aqua Whisper watermaker has a nominal rating of an impressive 1,800 US gallons (about 6,800 litres) a day under the maker’s reference conditions. If it delivered that rate, it would refill the tank in a little over 5 hours, but it was rebuilt in 2023 and hasn’t been used since, so her first long trip will show what it really delivers.

Fuel works the same way. At her listed 8-knot burn of 7.4 gallons an hour, 2,598 gallons is about 351 hours of running, or roughly 14 and a half days non-stop, before any reserve.

If a home afloat appeals on a smaller scale, my look at Nordhavn 47 Happy, a $849,000 home afloat for two makes good companion reading.

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The numbers that make the story

Worth Avenue says original invoices put her at $6.9 million in 2001. In September 2025, Yachting Magazine reported her for sale at $1.55 million. Today she’s $995,000: about 14.4 cents on each invoiced dollar, and $555,000, or about 36%, below the 2025 figure. Those are nominal numbers across 25 years, so they show how far her asking price has travelled rather than putting a value on her.

Worth Avenue also lists Cinnabar VI, another 2001 76-footer, at $699,000 in Stuart, Florida. She’s a Grand Harbour with MTU engines and a 19ft beam, so builder, machinery and coast all differ, and I couldn’t find a like-for-like long-range 76-footer on the same broker’s books. The more telling comparison is Jade Panama against herself. At 8 knots, her fuel table gives 2,811 nautical miles on full tanks; at 10.6 knots, 1,288. Bring her down to 6.9 knots and the same table gives 3,588 nautical miles.

For another big boat at a surprising price, see A 91ft steel explorer yacht you can actually afford?

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”, because my premium subscribers keep both the YouTube channel and this publication going. There are no adverts here, and I choose every boat I feature for its merits. So whether you’re already a premium subscriber or you’re about to become one, a massive thank you!

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In the premium section, I cover:

- A year around Seattle: a published berth rate for a 76-footer, and her fuel bill at 50, 100 and 200 engine hours.

- What 6,600 hours on the Caterpillars tells a buyer, and the three things I’d ask for.

- Her fuel table as a planning tool: reserve-adjusted range and the fuel cost per mile at 8, 9 and 10.6 knots.

- Can a couple still run her without crew? What was built in for it, and what her MARAD waiver does and doesn’t allow.

- My honest assessment: who she suits and what she asks of an owner.

A year around Seattle

What do a berth and fuel come to for a 76ft yacht on Lake Washington?…[article continues below]

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Most people looking at a 1991 motor yacht expect the engines to be the big question. With M/Y ‘Contentus III’, the replacement has already been done: she was fitted with two brand new John Deere diesels in 2018, and De Valk lists just 65 running hours on them since.

But the engines are only part of her appeal for me. I love her styling, from the white, high-sided hull with its blue stripe to the long rectangular windows. I love that she’s steel throughout: hull, superstructure and deck. I think she’s in great condition and ready to go. And I love how spacious she is, which is exactly why the question in the title is worth asking.

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The essentials

Contentus III is a Moonen 56, built in 1991 and offered by Julian de Heer at De Valk Loosdrecht for €355,000, VAT paid. That’s roughly £300,500 or $396,800 at the European Central Bank’s reference rates for 7th October 2026.

She measures 17.80m x 4.75m, with a 1.60m draft and 2.00m of headroom. Her round-bilged steel hull has a full keel and twin rudders, and her decks are teak over steel. She has 3 cabins and 6 berths, and 2 x John Deere 4045 AFM85 diesels of 180hp each, on shafts, give her a listed maximum of 8.5 knots. Her CE category is recorded as exempt (I explain why in the premium section below).

A superyacht yard’s steel beginnings

Moonen describes itself today as a Dutch boutique superyacht builder. After doing some research, I found that its story began with LADY M, delivered in 1981, which set the yard’s reputation for long-range yachts with steel hulls and aluminium superstructures. Moonen’s own fleet history shows an impressive run of steel motor yachts through the 1980s and 1990s, and that’s where Contentus III belongs. She comes from the chapter before the superyachts, and she’s a way to own a piece of the yard’s much earlier work.

The 2018 repower

Her two 180hp John Deeres went in new in 2018. They’re freshwater-cooled through heat exchangers, with dry exhausts, and turn fixed propellers through PRM hydraulic gearboxes and Aquadrive thrust bearings. On a 1991 boat, that’s a major job already done. What 65 hours means for a buyer is one of the things I also cover in the premium section below.

Why steel, and why this hull

There’s a practical reason Dutch steel yachts have such a loyal following. Steel can be cut and welded if a repair or modification is ever needed. Her round-bilge displacement hull is designed to move through the water rather than climb onto the plane, and her listed maximum is 8.5 knots. De Valk describes her as ideal for extended stays on board, and the specification shows what that means: Naiad Multisea II stabilisers to damp roll, hydraulic bow and stern thrusters for tight marinas, and double glazing as well as foam insulation.

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Life aboard

The deck saloon is the heart of her, with a dinette, a sliding door to the aft deck, and teak joinery and floors. The galley has granite worktops, a Neff electric cooker, a Siemens dishwasher and fridge, a separate Electrolux freezer and a microwave, and there’s a Candy 3.5kg washing machine.

The owner’s cabin has a double bed and is served by the main bathroom, which De Valk lists as shared. It has a decent-sized bath with a shower in the tub and a double basin, and a bath on a 17.80m motor yacht is worth pointing out, especially if your better half insists on one. The guest double has its own shower and toilet, and the third cabin has L-shaped bunks, handy for children, grandchildren or an extra pair of hands.

For year-round comfort, there’s diesel central heating (listed as a Webasto D8LC) and 16,000 BTU Frigoboat air conditioning. Her electrics are set up for living aboard, with a house bank of twelve 2V Mastervolt cells rated at 748Ah, a Mastervolt Mass Combi 24/4000-120 inverter-charger, two isolation transformers for shore power and a Fisher Panda generator with 600 hours. A dedicated hydraulic generator drives the thrusters. Up top, the flybridge has a second helm, a deck crane handles her Carib DL11 tender and its Honda outboard, and her mast lowers electrically.

Her fresh-water tank holds about 1,500 litres. West Marine’s guide to boat water systems suggests 4 to 8 US gallons (roughly 15 to 30 litres) per person per day for comfortable living with full showers and regular cooking. At that rate, assuming the whole tank is usable, a full tank lasts about 25 to 50 days for 2 people, 12 to 25 days for 4 and 8 to 17 days for 6. Run the bath often and you’ll be nearer the shorter end, but for a couple that’s still weeks between fills!

How she compares on De Valk’s books

I looked at De Valk’s other current steel listings of 17m to 18m, checked on 8 October 2026:

- The Eurotrawler 1750: €449,500 VAT paid, at De Valk Costa Blanca: 16.95m x 5.20m, built in 2005 and launched in 2006, with twin 145hp Ivecos.

- The Pacific Prestige 170: €450,000 VAT paid, at De Valk Corfu: 17.30m x 5.35m, built in 2007, with twin Volvo Penta D6-280s.

- The Vennekens Trawler 1800, €695,000 VAT paid, at De Valk Sneek: 18.00m x 5.40m, with a steel hull and deck and a composite superstructure, built in 2010, with twin 255hp Caterpillar C7s.

All three share her three-cabin, six-berth layout, and each is newer, beamier and asking more. I give my view on what that difference means in the premium section.

It’s thanks to my premium subscribers that I’m able to keep my YouTube channel and this publication going, writing about and filming boats like Contentus III. So, if you’re a premium subscriber, or you become one, a huge thank you for your support.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- A year at a Dutch berth: a dated, published 18m berth tariff near Loosdrecht, with shore power and water costs, and what the figure leaves out

- What 65 hours really means: the John Deere 4045 AFM85 explained, what the repower spares an owner and the three things I’d check

- How far can she go? Why I won’t quote her range yet, and the one measurement that lets you work it out

- No CE category? What “exempt” and categories A to D mean, and what her build says about the waters she suits

- My honest assessment: who she suits, what steel asks of an owner and how her price sits against De Valk’s other steel yachts

A year at a Dutch berth

Let’s start with a local benchmark for the cost that comes round every year, whether you cruise or not.

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When Patricia fell for Hecate Ranger, she and Clive were living in a house with 11 acres on Denman Island, and, like many of us, she’d grown tired of life ashore. She wanted to get back to a nomadic life on the water. “I fell in love with her lines and her space,” she wrote when I asked her about it, “and could imagine us living aboard.”

You can see what she meant. M/V ‘Hecate Ranger’ is a 66-foot wooden workboat with a white funnel banded in green, cowl ventilators, and a mast and boom on her upper deck, with room enough behind that working profile for a cosy home. Patricia and Clive are selling her privately (details below) at C$250,000, which is roughly US$175,400, £132,700 or €156,500 at the Bank of Canada’s rates for 5 October 2026. She lies at a marina in Cowichan Bay on Vancouver Island, flying the Red Ensign.

By Clive’s figures, she’s 66 feet long, 18.5 feet in the beam and 9.5 feet in draft. She was built in 1962 by West Coast Salvage & Contracting in Vancouver, carvel planked in fir on oak frames, and she cruises at 9.2 knots on a single 435hp Caterpillar 352 diesel turning a 4-foot propeller, with a bow thruster for close quarters.

Patricia and Clive have lived afloat since 1990. Hecate Ranger is their third liveaboard boat: Clive built the first, they converted the second, and the third was Patricia’s decision. “Clive is the Captain, and I am the Admiral,” as she puts it. They bought her in September 2021, and an American captain brought her home to them in BC from the States.

In Patricia’s words, selling is “a simple matter of age and health”, and she needs someone younger and adventurous enough to take her to sea, where “she runs so well and is proud and strong.” It’s a story of stewardship, and it raises the question at the heart of this piece: what does it take to own and look after a classic wooden working vessel as a home today?

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The majestic queen of the Forest Service fleet

She was built for the BC Forest Service’s survey and patrol fleet, to work Hecate Strait and the waters around the Queen Charlotte Islands, now Haida Gwaii. The Classic Yacht Register calls her the largest boat the service ever built and “the queen of their fleet”. She worked under the Canadian Red Ensign; Canada didn’t adopt the maple leaf flag until 1965.

After the Forest Service auctioned its fleet in 1984, her first private owner cruised her to Alaska again and again. Then came the two men who owned her for about 22 years and, as Patricia says, turned her from a working vessel into what you see today. In 1999, Anderson Shipwrights in Seattle enclosed her aft tow-winch deck as a covered fantail, extended the upper deck and rebuilt and reinforced the bulwarks. Where a winch once earned its keep, there’s now a round table with windows all round.

In the winter of 2016, according to the Register, Haven Boat Works in Port Townsend refastened and recaulked her hull from the waterline down, with 4,000 new fasteners and 285 linear feet of new planking.

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What a heavy wooden hull does well

An older survey describes 2.5-inch fir planking on 4 by 2.25-inch oak frames, under a 2-inch plywood deck. That’s a heavy wooden structure, and it has real advantages.

Carvel planking can be renewed a piece at a time, and the 2016 work shows it: new planks and fastenings went in below the waterline, and the boat that came out was still the 1962 boat that went in. Timber is also a natural insulator, so wooden hulls generally avoid the cold, sweating inner surfaces of uninsulated metal ones, and heavy wooden displacement boats are known for a steady, easy motion and a quieter, softer ride. They’re qualities of the type, and they’re why boats like her keep their admirers. I went into this further when I wrote about Capri.

Of course, wood does ask for attention, and she’s had it. In 2021, Clive tells me, the engine was rebuilt, the cutless bearing replaced and the bow and stern gunwales rebuilt, and this year she’s been painted throughout. Patricia and Clive haul her every 2 years by choice. “She’s our home so we want to know how her hull is doing,” as Patricia puts it, though their insurer only asks for a haul-out survey every 5 years. The latest was done at her June 2026 haul-out at Menzies Bay Shipyard, and the owners say it’s available to view. Clive describes her as being in “very good condition”.

Starting on air

Her Caterpillar is an air-start engine. Instead of an electric starter motor, stored compressed air provides the force to crank it. Big commercial diesels have long been started this way because a reservoir of air can turn a heavy engine over hard, and it’s a lovely piece of working heritage. The wheelhouse pairs that heritage with a Simrad suite of radar, autopilot, AIS, rudder angle indicator and jog stick, plus VHF, a compass, Wi-Fi and Starlink. In Clive’s words, her 12,000-litre fuel tank is always kept full.

Life aboard

In the photos I’ve seen, the wheelhouse is varnished timber, with a big spoked wheel, a brass binnacle, a helm chair and forward windows with wipers. The saloon has a dining table and chairs, settees and a door with a decent-sized porthole. The galley has varnished cabinetry, a stainless range and oven, a sink, an island and a door straight out on deck. Aft, through a stable door, the enclosed fantail has a round table, chairs, windows all round and a ladder up to the upper deck.

The Captain’s quarters, just off the pilothouse, have a double berth. Below, on the lower deck, there’s a cabin with a double berth conversion and a single berth in another. There are two heads: the main one on the main deck, with a toilet, sink and shower, and a second on the lower deck with a toilet and sink.

Heating comes from a Kabola hydronic system with a hot water tank (you can see radiator panels in the saloon), plus propane on-demand hot water. Power comes from a 35 kW Nissan generator, a solar array making about 6 kWh a day, a 24-volt Rolls Surrette battery bank and Outback inverters, which is kit chosen for living aboard rather than visiting.

She carries 1,035 gallons of fresh water, which is around 20 days for two, even at a generous 25 US gallons each a day. A 14-foot Lifetimer tender with a relatively new 30hp outboard, serviced every year, rides on the roof and is launched by a 1-ton crane. Her Cowichan Bay marina allows year-round living aboard, and although the slip doesn’t go with her, Clive says it’s very likely a new owner could carry on mooring there.

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A fair comparison

After doing some research, as I always do for these pieces, I found one wooden Pacific Northwest classic of similar size currently for sale: Wyrill, a 1931 Boeing Custom in Seattle, listed at US$199,950 when I checked on 6 October. She’s 62 feet long, with a 15-foot beam, 6 feet of draft and a 2013 Cummins 5.9-litre diesel of 210hp, and her broker says she was mostly used to entertain senior management of a pulp and paper company at Ocean Falls, BC.

So one carried executives and the other patrolled. Hecate Ranger is 4 feet longer, 3.5 feet broader and 3.5 feet deeper, and her C$250,000 is about US$175,400. These are asking prices, not valuations, and the boats differ in age, machinery and history, but together they sketch a small, rather special corner of the market.

From speaking with the owners of Hecate Ranger, it is clear just how much love and affection they have for this beautiful vessel. They are not selling her because they want to, and I mention this only because, having featured over 500 boats now, both here in this newsletter and on my YouTube channel, I have learnt that when you can feel the love that an owner has for their boat, then you can easily deduce from that passion that a lot has gone into making sure that the boat is the best it can be.

And for a buyer, that connection often means something far deeper than just another boat listing.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section below, I cover:

- What she costs to keep as a home: the yearly figures Patricia and Clive have shared

- Running her: what an air-start engine, a single propeller and a bow thruster mean for the people handling her, and her fuel

- What I’d check if I were acting for a buyer, from the June 2026 survey to the turnkey inventory

- The handover, and Clive’s offer to show the next owner how to run her

- My honest assessment: who she suits and what she asks of an owner

It is thanks to my premium subscribers that I am able to keep my YouTube channel and this publication going. So, if you are a premium subscriber or if you become one, then I would like to say a huge ‘thank you’ for your support.

What she costs to keep as a home...[article continues below]

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I film a lot of boats (more than 500 now, I think), but few stay with me the way M/Y ‘Scintilla Maris’ has. Her owners, whom I have met a few times now, let me follow her from the final stages of her build at Damen Maaskant in the Netherlands right through to her launch. And, if I am being honest, I’ve felt attached to her ever since.

Part of that is the people. Her owners are incredibly down to earth and a real joy to be around; they’re passionate about her. As a boy, the owner used to draw pictures of trawlers, which is something I also did as a kid. It is a minor detail, but one that has become part of my subconscious attachment to Scintilla Maris. When I say she’s a masterpiece of naval engineering and design, it comes from someone who knows where that kind of dream actually starts.

Now she’s moving on. She’ll be at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show from 28 October to 1 November, and on 5 November she sells online through Boathouse Auctions, with no reserve, to the highest bidder (link to auction below). Burgess, her central agent, lists her at $16M, and its brochure gives an appraised value of $23M.

If you haven’t seen my tour of her yet, here it is:

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She’s 45.6m (150ft) long, with a 9m beam, a 5.4m draft and a gross tonnage of 499, built with a steel hull, an aluminium superstructure and an iroko deck. Ten guests sleep in five spacious, bright and airy cabins (a master, two doubles and two twins), and eight crew have four cabins. She flies the Marshall Islands flag, is lying in the USA and is a new build, delivered in 2024.

From HD23 to the owner’s suite

Her hull is recorded as originally built by Maaskant in 1988, as the Dutch beam trawler HD 23 Vertrouwen. In my yacht tour video, I described her as the first of eight sister ships from the yard, now part of the Damen Group. Beam trawlers like her worked the North Sea seabed for sole, plaice, turbot and monkfish, and Dutch fishing press reports which I found online put her North Sea career at around 20 years, ending in 2005. She became available through a decommissioning scheme, so her current owners bought her in 2006. Because of their business commitments, the project was deferred for several years, and work at Damen Maaskant resumed in 2019.

Damen Maaskant completely stripped her interior steel to bare metal and removed the old propulsion system, interior, and decking; with the hull bare inside, the yard also took out the dents which had accumulated during her working life. One can only imagine the grit and determination that went into building her, let alone the financial commitment. Few yards can take on the level of work needed to the standard Damen Maaskant delivered.

Not long after she was launched, I sat down for lunch with the owners and representatives from Damen Maaskant. The owners explained that when they saw what was happening to the old fishing fleet, they knew they had to try to save one of the hulls before it was scrapped. So, Scintilla Maris is not just an incredible expedition yacht. She is a living memory of the dwindling Dutch fishing fleet she once served.

One of the neatest results of the project, aside from the wheelhouse and engine room, lies below decks. Her full-beam owner’s suite sits in the old fish hold, and the hatch that once closed over the catch (image below) now lets daylight down over a vast owner's cabin. On the state-of-the-art bridge, an illuminated model of HD 23 shows where she started life. A very nostalgic nod to her former life working the unforgiving North Sea. Her bridge is one of the best I have seen for an explorer yacht her size. I doubt very much that you would find a better equipped bridge on a <50-metre explorer yacht.

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A new build on a recycled hull

Her captain is emphatic that she is “a new build / recycled hull”. Damen describes her as a new-build explorer yacht in the existing hull, and in my tour I called her “really a new build explorer in an existing shell”. I am labouring this point only because she is so much more than a ‘conversion’. Her owner is precise about what was kept: only the bare steel hull and parts of the aluminium superstructure were reused. They stripped out 100% of the infrastructure, grit-blasted the hull and superstructure inside and out, and only then began the new construction, with RINA approving every modification. New are the hybrid diesel-electric propulsion, systems, and interior. Damen Maaskant rebuilt her and handled the naval architecture and exterior design; Vripack designed the interior. In her owner’s words, she is “a hybrid propulsion expedition yacht with a battleship-strength commercial hull”. One early priority for her current owners was getting her under 500GT, compared with about 570GT when the project began, largely by creating more semi-open spaces.

Why reuse the hull? Her captain says it was chosen “for its strength, seaworthiness, seakeeping qualities and safety, as well as for sustainability”, and that replicating a hull of this calibre, while possible, would be unnecessary and ecologically irresponsible when one already exists. My view is that building something this capable from scratch today would take at least 5 years and cost far more, because materials cost more than they did when she was commissioned.

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What she was built to do

Her brochure advertises 16,000 nautical miles at a 9.5-knot cruise on just one of her three generators, with 13.5 knots available when needed. Her RINA class carries Unrestricted Navigation, and dynamic positioning lets her hold station where anchoring isn’t an option.

In April 2024, she left the Netherlands on a ten-month shakedown that Vripack puts at about 11,000 miles: London (where I had the privilege of catching up with the owners once more), the Outer Hebrides, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, where Vripack says she skirted the east-coast ice floes, then Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Canadian and US coasts, Bermuda and home. Vripack also reports that heat recovered from the generators warmed her external steel handrails in Greenland, the owner’s idea, and one that certainly earned its keep!

The steps some of my viewers argued about

Midships on both sides, sections of hull and bulwark were cut away for staircases leading down to water level. In the comments on my tour, viewers called them “very clever”, but they also asked thought-provoking questions about the hows and whys behind the engineering.

Her owner’s reason is practical. At anchor, the tender can be boarded on whichever side is the lee side, sheltered from the wind and swell. A steel box reinforcement under each staircase means the cut-outs add to the hull’s stiffness.

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What a hull like this does well

Her captain calls this hull “battleship-strength”. Indeed, having served on a number of different warships, I would say that her hull is better than “battleship-strength”. In the tour I gave her plating as 10mm above the waterline and 15mm below, thick enough to avoid the washboard look of frames showing through thinner plate.

I break down her full RINA class notation in the premium section below.

Life aboard

For months aboard, the layout matters as much as the steel. The crew live forward in the whaleback, reaching the main deck without climbing a ladder. Thirty main-deck skylights bring daylight below, while floating floors and low-frequency insulation keep noise and vibration down; on her mini sea trial she was super silent. For long seasons living aboard, that bright, quiet interior counts for a lot.

If working pasts appeal, my pieces on the former research ship that can launch a submarine and Twelen, the ex-government sounding vessel, make good companions.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”, because my premium subscribers make it possible for me to write about and film boats like this one. There are no adverts here, so if you’re a paying subscriber, or you become one, a massive thank you!

In the premium section, I cover:

- Crewing her: a sourced salary scenario, and why no honest all-in figure exists yet.

- Range and Tier III: what changes inside an Emission Control Area, and how SCR uses urea.

- Her hybrid system and full class notation explained, and what her listed notation means for high-latitude cruising.

- How the no-reserve auction works for a buyer, from deposits to “as is” terms.

- The records I’d look at before bidding.

- My honest assessment: who she suits and what she asks of an owner.

Crewing her: the cost you can put a number on

Accommodation for eight crew tells you a lot about what Scintilla Maris asks of an owner, before she burns a litre of fuel…[article continues below]

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The seller had told Mat Armstrong that Capri’s engines overheated after a storm, with a repair estimate that would make an experienced buyer wince, let alone a first-time motor yacht buyer. Then Mat and his team worked through the cooling system and found a closed seawater valve. They reassembled the strainer, opened the valve, and Mat reported a cooler run of about 90 minutes….

He was careful not to call her fixed: 90 minutes can’t show how two big MTU diesels behave over hours under load in big sea states. Getting a motor yacht running when you bought her without knowing what was wrong is one bill; keeping a 1991 22m wooden yacht is another. Meet M/Y ‘Capri’

Capri is a 1991 Cantieri Navali Liguri Ghibli 22, and Mat’s video about buying her had more than 31 million views by 3 October 2026.

Her fullest description comes from an earlier, now-sold De Valk listing: she is 21.95m long, has a 5.48m beam, 1.40m draft and 48t, with a wooden hull, deck and superstructure and a teak deck. Twin 1,000hp MTU 12V 183 TE 92 diesels drive through shafts, with a listed 15kn (17.3 MPH) cruise and 30kn (34.5 MPH) top speed.

She’s long and low, with the classic 1990s angular enclosed wheelhouse, a flybridge under a radar arch, red trim and waterline, and a broad foredeck. Teak runs along the side decks and helm areas, and below it’s warm mahogany.

Her sheer line is beautifully simple, and although she doesn't have much bow flare, she has a significant spray rail that helps keep the vessel's wetted area to a minimum.

The layout is built for company: four guest cabins with eight berths, four bathrooms, 1.95m saloon headroom and a separate two-berth crew cabin. Add the air conditioning, cabin floor heating, two generators and an induction cooker and combi oven, and it’s easy to picture two families sharing a summer along the coast.

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Where the Ghibli came from

After doing some research, I found that Tuxedo Yachting House’s family history says Aldo Ceccarelli acquired a yard at Riva Trigoso in 1962, and that in the 1970s the shipyard and designer Aldo Caliari created the Ghibli brand. The family also acquired Cantieri Navali Lavagna in 1980 and built an aluminium Admiral 22 in 1982, a different yard and boat; Capri is a wooden Ghibli. No credible production figure for the 22 turned up, but I found one sister ship that is for sale today.

A bargain on paper…?

In his video, Mat says Capri would have cost €1.7m new, which, according to the original paperwork handed over, it did, and that he found a previous auction at around £500,000, 3 years earlier. We don’t know what Mat paid for the boat. But, as any owner will tell you, the longer the LOA, the bigger the bills.

One marina Mat looked at quoted €1,295 a month, with a 20m maximum. Capri is 21.95m, and those extra 1.95m turn a tempting relocation into no marina berth at all. Of course, you could drop the hook just off the coast and pay no marina fees at all, but when you are working on a project boat, that is not really an option.

So, for the time being, Mat is staying put, which is probably no bad thing when, from what I can tell, he bought her without a sea trial or his own survey, relying on the seller’s earlier one. That is not as rare as you might think!

But that is one reason I have a huge amount of respect for Mat. Anyone who has purchased a boat around the 22 metre mark will tell you how long the checklist is when looking at a new boat. There are usually weeks, if not months, of back-and-forth communication between the seller and the buyer, most of the time with a broker or buyer’s rep involved.

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So, the sea trial and survey are just two components of what is usually a very long and often expensive process. For example, a buyer will typically want to check the full service history of all major machinery, including the engines, generators, start and service batteries, and trim tabs.

It is also common practice, especially with a wooden hull, to put the boat on the hard and have a professional surveyor inspect the hull. During my stint in the RNLI (the UK’s search and rescue service that is crewed by volunteers), my former oppos and I would often get called to a boat in distress that had been taken out for the first time by someone who had just acquired the vessel but did not go through the survey process.

And, of course, the sea doesn't care if you are in a bit of a situation after just buying a boat. It is unforgiving and often takes no prisoners.

It is also always a good idea to have the tanks inspected, especially on a boat of this vintage with steel fuel tanks. The last spec sheet I found lists the watermaker as defective, so unless it’s been repaired since, it will need a thorough service at least, and quite possibly replacement.

She has enough capacity for 2,000 litres of fresh water, but if you work on the basis that, with 8 people on board, each person uses 50 litres of fresh water per day, then you are looking at around 5 days at sea before you would need to come back alongside and fill up the freshwater tanks (without a watermaker).

The thing is, people buy ‘project boats’ all the time and then flip them into something that matches their own taste. But this is the first time I have heard of someone new to yachting acquiring a project boat without going through the usual steps, which is one of the many reasons I think Mat has notched up 31 million views; people new to motor yachting don’t normally start out like this! And this makes the story, from a boating perspective, even more interesting.

The useful question is what a yacht like Capri costs to keep: a berth that fits, regular lift-outs, a wooden hull and two steel fuel tanks that, if original, are as old as she is.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”. A quick thank you to everyone in The Wardroom: your support keeps Yacht Buoy advert-free and independent, and lets me keep writing about and filming boats like Capri.

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In the premium section below, I cover:

- Keeping a wooden hull and the benefits of wood over steel, aluminium and GRP

- A 2026 annual berth for a 22m yacht in Cádiz plus one priced lift-out, with the berth-holder discount, VAT and exclusions

- An indicative 5-year haul-out, antifouling and survey scenario for a wooden hull, and how wood differs from GRP, steel and aluminium

- What 1991 steel fuel tanks need checking, from water and diesel bug to corrosion, and what replacement involves

- My honest assessment of Capri against a live, refitted Ghibli 22, and why no profit or resale figure is possible yet

- Why the boat does not have a CE Category and what conditions I would be happy to take her out in, from a former Royal Navy Sailor and former RNLI crew’s perspective, of course!

Keeping a wooden hull…[article continues below]

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The Prestige X60 that I have just featured on my YouTube channel gives you several ways to spend the same afternoon aboard. There’s the large saloon, with its facing sofas and galley close enough to keep whoever’s on cooking duties in the conversation. Open the wide electric sliding door, and the cockpit joins in; upstairs, the flybridge offers another table and somewhere for the rest of the family to disappear with a book.

That arrangement is the starting point for this 2023 example, listed with Mark Hesselmans (De Valk in Loosdrecht) at €1,595,000, VAT not paid (link to listing below). She’s a GRP motor yacht measuring 18.70m overall, with a 4.87m beam and 1.31m draught. The question is how all that living space works over several weeks, and what it takes to keep the boat behind it running.

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Room to spread out

Her trawleresque (superstructure) profile reflects how those spaces stack up: a heavily glazed saloon beneath the flybridge, a shaded cockpit aft, and a hydraulic bathing platform below the transom. The foredeck lounge adds somewhere separate again. Rather than everyone gathering around one outdoor table, you can split up without retreating inside.

The galley’s long U-shaped counter sits alongside the lounge, while the dining table sits in the cockpit for al fresco dining. Preparing lunch, eating it and heading out to the cockpit are all part of the same shared space. The flybridge has its own wet bar and helm, with seating and a table aft beneath the overhead cover. For a boat used as a base for longer holidays, those choices add a bit of variety to the day.

Prestige’s roots are in Jeanneau’s shipbuilding know-how, with more than 30 years behind the brand. The X60’s specification credits Garroni Design, J&J Concepts and Prestige. This is a different starting point from the unfinished steel conversion in my Jezebelle article: here, the domestic equipment already includes a dishwasher, washing machine/dryer, watermaker and air conditioning.

She has three guest cabins plus a separate single crew cabin. Below the living spaces are twin 600hp Cummins QSC 8.3 diesels driving Zeus pods, with 113 advertised engine hours. The Onan 19kVA generator shows 227 hours, and for stability there’s a Seakeeper gyro. Her boat-specific fuel specification is two 1,045-litre tanks, while fresh water is carried in two 380-litre tanks.

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Thank you to everyone who supports The Wardroom. Your subscriptions help me keep writing about and filming boats independently, without adverts, and make these more detailed ownership features possible.

So, if you do become a paying subscriber, or are already one, then ‘thank you!’

In the premium section below, I cover:

- Living with the layout: privacy, daily routines, docking and machinery access.

- A 100-hour Dutch season: berth and fuel arithmetic, plus the servicing and yard costs still to budget for.

- The machinery behind the comfort: what the hours and maintenance records need to tell us.

- My honest assessment of the asking-price context: a current De Valk alternative and the cruising pattern that suits this X60.

How would the layout work for you?

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There’s a desk in HAPPY’s guest cabin… It’s a small detail beside the tall bow, flybridge, and stack, but quite useful if your idea of living aboard includes answering emails and checking stock prices rather than permanently abandoning civilisation, as tempting as it may be. You could spend a summer moving between harbours, work when you need to, then clear the desk when friends come to stay.

HAPPY is a 2004 Nordhavn 47, hull number 16, offered by Jeff Merrill Yacht Sales for $849,000 (link to listing below) in Southwest Harbour, Maine. JMYS says her second owners have had her for 12 years, cruising the Atlantic seaboard mainly in summer and keeping her in heated, covered storage in Maine over winter. It’s a pleasingly ordinary use for a boat with such a purposeful appearance: go somewhere, stay a while and enjoy being aboard.

A silhouette that makes sense

Look along her grey hull, and you can see how much of her shape is devoted to shelter. The bow rises well above the aft cockpit, with substantial bulwarks forward. Above it sits that forward-raked pilothouse glazing, followed by another level for the flybridge and its hardtop. She isn’t trying to conceal any of this behind a low, sporty roofline. That is not what Nordhavns are about.

The starboard side-deck profile explains the arrangement particularly well. There’s overhead cover, an overhead handrail, and steps leading forward toward the Portuguese bridge. Aft, the boat deck extends over the cockpit, creating another sheltered place to sit and enjoy the view. The tender lives upstairs on the dedicated boat deck, rather than occupying the outdoor space where you’d like to have lunch.

That height gives her a busy and meaningful profile, especially around the stack and flybridge, but the long dark window band helps tie the white superstructure together. She looks like a boat designed around what actually happens when you spend weeks aboard, not just the view from the quay.

Where the 47 fits

For those who might be new to the explorer yacht scene, Nordhavn’s story began with Pacific Asian Enterprises moving into displacement motor yachts with the Nordhavn 46 in 1989. The Jeff Leishman-designed 47 followed in the early 2000s. HAPPY’s brochure records her builder as PAE/South Coast Marine in Xiamen, China, with a solid-fibreglass hull.

The 47 is now a retired model. Her hull also provided the basis for the later 52, which developed the layout and gave owners a larger cockpit. That makes the 47 an interesting place to look if you like the family’s raised-pilothouse arrangement without automatically moving up a model.

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Two cabins, rather than a floating guesthouse

The accommodation plan gives the owners an island queen berth with access on three sides, while the forward guest cabin combines a double berth with that desk. There are two heads and a separate pilothouse watch berth. For a couple with occasional visitors, it’s an attractive division: somewhere to sleep, somewhere to work and somewhere to keep watch without turning the saloon into a makeshift cabin.

The equipment list is equally domestic. A Miele electric cooker, oven and dishwasher sit alongside Sub-Zero refrigeration, with a separate washer and dryer aboard. Outside, the advertised 14ft Novurania tender has a 60hp Yamaha outboard and its own crane. That’s useful equipment for spending time away from a berth, although the domestic comforts bring electrical demands of their own.

JMYS currently advertises a 7.5-knot cruising speed and a 9-knot maximum. Her main engine is a 174hp Lugger, backed by a separate 40hp Yanmar wing engine. The distinction between having a second means of propulsion and duplicating everything the main engine does is worth exploring before you get carried away with the shopping list.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”, because my premium subscribers make it possible to feature boats like this one. You will find no adverts here, and I choose all the boats I feature based on their capabilities rather than advertorials. So if you are a paying subscriber, or you become one, then I would like to say a massive ‘thank you!’

In the premium section, I cover:

- The dry stack and keel cooler: what they change about the main engine installation.

- The wing engine and hydraulics: how the propulsion and hydraulic power arrangements differ.

- Living aboard: the practical jobs before relying on the equipment list.

- Maine ownership costs: seasonal berthing, shore power and local servicing rates.

- My honest assessment of the bigger alternative: what another $526,000 buys through the same broker.

What the machinery buys you

HAPPY’s engine installation deserves a closer look because the useful details go well beyond the 174hp on the spec sheet…[article continues below]

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I like the forward-raked wheelhouse windows on this Flevolution 1500 RE. They give her that traditional trawler look, especially with the high bow and long blue hull beneath them. She is one of those boats where I see a picture and immediately want to write about her, because I know many of my subscribers will appreciate her lines and naval architecture.

She’s a 16-metre motor yacht currently offered by Blu Yachting at €299,000, with EU VAT paid and brokerage commission extra (direct link to listing below). The broker places her in Aprilia Marittima, Italy, and records a 1998 build with first launch in 2000. With three cabins, twin Perkins Sabre diesels and enough domestic equipment for a longer stay, there’s quite a lot of boat to get comfortable in.

A word on commission

Blu clearly lists its commission separately. That can look unusual beside US or UK listings, where the seller generally pays the broker from the sale proceeds. In the US, around 10% is common, often shared between the listing and buyer’s brokers, with the rate agreed individually. EU arrangements vary: published Dutch seller fees include 5% and 6% plus VAT, while some Italian brokers charge both buyer and seller. Here, the extra buyer’s fee needs to be added to the purchase budget (Blu makes that distinction clear from the outset).

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Her lines and the weight above them

From the side, the white bulwarks draw your eye along the hull and up towards the bow. The glazed wheelhouse stands quite tall for a boat with this LOA, but the long foredeck gives the profile some breathing room and a more balanced profile. Above it sits the flybridge under a blue bimini, while the cabin roof extends over the aft deck.

With a wheelhouse this tall, the weight above it deserves some thought. If the bimini and its supports are lighter than a rigid hardtop and its supports, that saves weight high up and, all else being equal, keeps the centre of gravity lower. It also helps offset some of the windage issues that can crop up with a conventional hardtop.

There’s plenty of substance beneath that profile, too: Blu Yachting lists a 4.70-metre beam, 1.50-metre draught and 40-tonne weight, with construction described as steel/aluminium.

The yard behind the name

Flevo Jachtbouw, also presented as Flevoship Holland, is a family yard in Nijkerk in the Netherlands. Its company profile traces its origins to 1985, and today the yard describes its business as custom sailing and motor yachts up to 35 metres, with dimensions and materials tailored to the customer.

Its portfolio stretches from Martin Bekebrede-designed Noordkaper and Zuidkaper sailing yachts to the Flevo 49 OC and PB1940 motorcutter M/Y Marlin. The build history records a 48ft Noordkaper delivered in 2020, the MV10 tender project in 2021 and, moving into support-vessel work for Lynx Yachts, a Crossover 27 launched in 2022. It’s a varied background for the yard behind this rather traditional-looking trawler.

For readers interested in the variety of Dutch boatbuilding, my article on the No Limit 13.20 explores another yard with its own approach.

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Taking your time aboard

The twin Perkins Sabre diesels are listed at 136 PS, or metric horsepower, each, with Blu Yachting quoting 7.2 knots cruising and 8.5 knots maximum. There’s only a modest amount of extra speed available, so she makes more sense for someone happy to settle into a seven-knot cruising day than someone hoping to make up lost time with the throttles.

That unhurried pace goes with accommodation offering six berths and two heads, plus three fridges, a washing machine and a dryer. The listed capacities are 1,000 litres of fresh water and 2,300 litres of diesel, while an 8kW generator, bow thruster, Vetus fin stabilisers, heating and air conditioning round out the main equipment list.

The seller reports replacing the lithium service batteries in 2023/24, installing new starter batteries in 2025 and renewing navigation equipment across 2020–2022. Antifouling and zinc anodes were renewed in August 2025, according to the same description.

For a couple or family considering longer periods aboard, the appeal is the combination of space and domestic equipment. Looking after it all, and finding a berth and yard that suit a boat of this size, are where the ownership budget starts to take shape.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”. Thanks to my paying subscribers, I can feature boats in this newsletter and on my YouTube channel. So, if you do become a paying subscriber, then ‘thank you’ and if you are already a paying subscriber then I appreciate your support. Premium subscribers start at less than the cost of a decent sandwich and coffee in your local marina.

In the premium section, I cover:

- Purchase-commission examples and a Dutch home-port budget covering berthing, winter storage, servicing and a repair reserve.

- The machinery and electrical details that matter during longer stays aboard.

- Liveaboard planning, including the tender and outboard excluded from the sale.

- What another €41,000 buys in a Selene 47 offered by the same broker.

Buying her: the commission in euros

Using the €299,000 asking price, here are three illustrative buyer fees, assuming 22% Italian VAT applies to the commission:

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Look along her cream-coloured hull, past the round portholes and up to that enclosed wheelhouse. The Kruiskamp Bakdekker 1400 has a lovely sense of proportion: a long foredeck, an uninterrupted sheer and an aft seating area tucked behind the superstructure. There’s space to move around outside, while the large wheelhouse windows bring the view indoors.

Built in 2005, she’s listed with Joep Molenaar at De Valk Loosdrecht for €229,900, VAT paid (link to listing below). Her listed dimensions are 14m by 4.20m, with a 1.20m draft and 18-tonne displacement. That’s around 46ft of steel cruiser, with a single Perkins and a domestic fit-out that makes longer stays aboard feasible.

Where she comes from

Kruiskamp Almelo’s own yachtbuilding story starts in 1991 with a Shogun 33OK. Its historical portfolio includes Shogun, Rogger, Bakdekker, Sleper and Twenkruiser designs, supplied from bare hulls through to completed boats. The company’s website now says it has stopped taking new work, which is a shame.

Bakdekker is the type/model name here, rather than a separate builder. This example dates from 2005, and Kruiskamp still documented the 1400 in a 2016 brochure. A reliable launch date or production total hasn’t emerged. That later brochure describes a standard package and not this boat’s individual build specification.

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What the chines mean afloat

Her steel hull is hard chine, with an angular change between hull surfaces rather than the curved transition of a round bilge. Those edges can help damp rolling as water separates around them. How much they help depends on the shape, conditions, speed and loading.

You can’t realistically rank the boat’s seakeeping from that label alone. A broad, stiff boat may resist an initial heel yet return quite sharply; a round-bilged boat can have a more gradual motion. Beam, centre of gravity and underwater geometry matter quite a lot in both cases. Neither shape tells us her ultimate stability, which also depends on reserve buoyancy and where water can enter as she heels.

In head seas, bow entry, deadrise, speed and wave steepness influence relative impact with the motion of the waves. Hard chine doesn’t automatically mean slamming, any more than round bilge automatically means ocean-going. My No Limit 13.20 article offers another steel-hull design to explore alongside this one.

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A Perkins and some unusual batteries

De Valk lists a 135hp Perkins Sabre M135, showing 3,127 hours, driving a four-blade propeller through a ZF Hurth gearbox and shaft. Hydraulic steering serves inside and outside helms, with an electric bow thruster for close manoeuvring.

The M135 is a naturally aspirated six-cylinder diesel with rotary-pump fuel injection. Routine oil, filters, belts and cooling-system checks are familiar jobs for a competent owner. Perkins’ handbook includes a 400-hour or 12-month service trigger, whichever comes first, so low annual hours don’t remove the calendar commitment. Injector and valve work definitely belong with someone trained for them.

I don’t often see Rolls batteries on the boats I cover. These are Rolls Battery Engineering products from Canadian manufacturer Surrette. De Valk lists two S12-230AGM batteries, dated 2022, specifically for the bow thruster. Each is 12V and rated at 210Ah over 20 hours, or 230Ah over 100 hours.

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Low bridges and European waterways

Her listed minimum air draft is 2.95m, and her mast lowers manually. The exact stowed configuration and loaded draft still need to be measured for a chosen route.

For Dutch cruising, Rijkswaterstaat’s route information provides the bridge, lock and water-level checks. On the Canal de Bourgogne, published 38.5m by 5.1m locks, 3.5m headroom and depths from 1.6m look promising on paper. Availability is separate: the central section’s 2026 season ended on 7 September.

The Canal du Midi needs closer attention as its published restrictive lock dimensions are 29.7m by 5.5m, with 1.4m water depth, leaving little draft margin. Bridge arches offer 3.3m on the centreline but less towards the sides.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section below, I cover:

- Category C: what her plate tells us and why, despite her pedigree, she is a CE Cat C boat rather than CE Cat ‘A’

- The Great Loop: dimensions, shipping and electrical preparation.

- Running costs: annual and 5-year examples, plus yard bills.

- My honest assessment of the asking-price context: De Valk alternatives and who she suits.

It is thanks to my premium subscribers of this newsletter that I am able to cover the costs associated with featuring these boats, such as travel costs, time, etc., so if you do become a paying subscriber, or are already one, then thank you!

Category C, with a useful job to do

Under the current EU definitions, C covers design conditions up to Beaufort 6 and 2m significant wave height. Category A covers design conditions with winds exceeding Beaufort 8 and significant wave heights exceeding 4m, excluding abnormal conditions. These are design categories, not instructions to head out whenever the forecast falls below a number!

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During a recent shift spent scanning the horizon for boats to write about, I found a 42ft trawler dry-moored in Everett, Washington, called Sea Prince III. As of this writing, it’s listed on NW Yachtnet in Seattle for $89,500 (link to broker’s website below). That number buys a finished, heated trawler motor yacht rather than a project, with the broker inviting a full top-to-bottom survey, and she is already in the country where most of you reading this actually live. So, no shipping quote, no import saga and no currency conversion.

You could view and then motor off into the sunset without having to get your passport, assuming (as you are one of my US readers).

She started life in 1986 as a working boat. The broker identifies her as a Deltaga-built Dungeness crab boat, constructed on the Fraser River in British Columbia with a solid, heavily laminated fibreglass hull. Deltaga is documented as a BC builder of fishing vessels, and that is about as far as the public record goes. In 2010, per the listing, she was professionally rebuilt to yacht standard by Nanaimo Shipyards, a long-established commercial yard on Vancouver Island whose everyday work has included ferries, tugs and, of course, fishing boats. That is the kind of yard you want behind a claim like “rebuilt to yacht standard”, and that rebuild file would be high on my document-request list.

Her looks tell the same story from the waterline up. The haul-out photographs show a full, commercial bow with a large bulbous appendage below the waterline, a dark green hull with a yellow boot stripe, and long rubbing strakes with rolling chocks standing proud of the hull sides. Above all that sits a flush-sided, welded aluminium deckhouse that looks more like a purpose-built small ship than the usual production cruiser. Her stern is broad and workboat-like, with a skeg-hung rudder and a well-protected propeller, and the upper deck is a big, flat social space with davits and a control station. She reads as exactly what she is: a working hull given a second life as a private cruiser.

Those underwater details are worth a moment, because you rarely see them on a 42-footer. A bulbous bow is there to reduce wave-making resistance when its shape is matched to the hull’s speed and displacement, which is a naval architect’s way of saying it was drawn to let a slow boat slip along on less fuel. The rolling chocks along her bilges generate damping as the hull rolls, taking the edge off beam seas and rolly anchorages. And the skeg-hung rudder with a protected prop should make a crab-pot line or an uncharted lump far less likely to end your season. None of that is marina queen yacht styling; it is fishing-fleet pragmatism, and exactly what you want underneath a cruising trawler.

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The engine room holds a single John Deere 6068 Turbo, a 6-cylinder diesel used widely in industrial and marine applications, with around 4,400 hours and backed by John Deere’s US dealer and parts network. She swings a 32in bronze propeller through a 3:1 gear, and the 2019 yard bill covered the pulled and balanced shaft, a new stuffing box and new Groco bronze seacocks. The broker’s headline claim is what made my nautical radar ping: 7 knots on 2 US gallons of diesel an hour, from 400 gallons of tankage. I dig into what that actually means for range below.

Inside, she is set up for two people to live aboard very comfortably. There is one ensuite queen cabin forward, with convertible settees in the salon and pilothouse, taking total berths to 5. The galley is U-shaped with bar-top seating, the head has a walk-in shower, heating comes from a Dickinson diesel stove plus engine hot water, and the joinery is tropical hardwood with 6’2” of headroom. Recent kit includes AIS from 2024, AGM house batteries from 2020, a Victron isolation transformer from 2021 and a commercial hydraulic drum windlass hauling an 83lb Mantus anchor on 100ft of new chain. A 10ft Highfield RIB with a 9.9hp outboard lives on the swimstep davit.

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If you have read my pieces on the 1954 Matton tug conversion or Jezebelle, the $175,001 shrimp trawler, you’ll know I have a genuine soft spot for working boats given second lives. The difference here is that someone else has already done the converting, and the asking price is still in project-boat territory. A very rare combination indeed.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”. Thanks to my paying subscribers, I can keep digging into boats like this one. So, if you are a premium subscriber, or you become one today, then I would like to say a massive thank you!

In the premium section below, I cover:

- What 400 gallons actually buys you: the range arithmetic behind the 2 gallons an hour claim.

- The survey that matters: what to check on a 40-year-old solid GRP hull with an aluminium deckhouse and a 2010 rebuild

- What she’d cost to run: Everett moorage, insurance due diligence, a 5-year maintenance budget and the cross-border paperwork

- My honest assessment of the price: what her own broker’s alternative costs, and who should be looking at her

What 400 gallons actually buys you

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There is a Vripack-designed steel trawler currently lying with De Valk in their covered marina in Sneek called ‘Aegir’, and she is the boat in my latest video tour. Her broker, Henk de Vries, lists her (link below) at €489,000 with VAT paid. This is the companion article, covering what the video did not: her ocean rating, the 2023-2025 refit work, and what she would cost to keep and to move over the next 5 years.

Let us start with her sleek lines, because they give you an idea of what she is before the spec sheet does. Her bow is fine and flared, with high freeboard and a sheer rising towards a substantial stem and anchor arrangement. The topsides run long and fairly straight, a dark blue steel hull under a white steel superstructure with a stainless rubbing strake the full length of her.

Aft, she finishes in a near-vertical transom with a bathing platform and a decent-sized cockpit. The pilothouse carries big windows above a long band of side glazing, and the flybridge is compact and practical. Side decks, high rails and opening gates all point the same way: she was drawn for moving about safely at sea.

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The design comes from Vripack in Sneek, and if you have read my pieces on the €695,000 Vripack Trawler 1960 or the Vripack 69, you’ll know why that name matters.

Dick Boon opened the studio in 1961 and built its identity on practical long-range boats. The Doggersbank series helped earn Boon the description “Father of the Expedition Yacht”; the 1985 Doggersbank Offshore became the studio’s international breakthrough, and their research vessel Turmoil, now Pioneer, became the first yacht to run the Northwest Passage in 2001, then the first to do it twice in 2010.

Today the studio numbers around 40+ designers, engineers and naval architects. The broker record lists Searocco Yachts of the Netherlands as her builder; I could not find a fuller history of that yard, so if you know more about Searocco Yachts, then please feel free to leave a comment below.

Her spec carries a CE Category A rating, and it’s worth pointing out what that covers.

Category A is the EU design category for craft designed for winds that may exceed force 8 and significant wave heights of 4 metres and above, excluding abnormal conditions such as hurricanes. In simple terms, her design envelope is offshore gale conditions. It is a design threshold rather than a condition report, though, so on a 2003 boat I would still want the relevant survey, which is standard practice.

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De Valk says a huge amount was invested in her between 2023 and 2025, and the spec sheet backs that up with dates. 2023 brought a Kabola KB40 central-heating system and new Simrad depth and log instruments. 2024 added a 1,500W Lofrans windlass, 100m of stainless anchor chain and a washer/dryer.

2025 was the big year: a full 12V/24V/220V electrical overhaul, new Redtop batteries across the start, generator and bow-thruster banks, twin Simrad NSS9 Evo 3S radar/GPS displays, new stainless propeller shafts with water-lubricated bearings, fresh antifouling and a serviced Onan 7kW generator. That is a serious systems renewal programme and not just a lick of paint with some minor touching up here and there.

Two practical numbers are worth highlighting as well. Her air draft is 5.50m, dropping to 3.60m with the hydraulically lowering mast, which opens up much of the European bridge and canal network; I personally would still measure her in the lowered configuration before committing to a low bridge. Headroom is a generous 2.00m in the saloon.

She is round-bilged with a box keel, and that combination is the heart of her impressive seakeeping story. A round-bilge hull turns smoothly from bottom to topsides rather than meeting at a hard chine, and at displacement speeds that generally means efficient flow and a gentler, more progressive motion in choppy conditions.

The trade is that round-bilge boats can roll more freely, which is exactly why she carries hydraulic fin stabilisers to damp that roll underway. A box keel like hers can provide a deep spine of protected structure low down and contribute to straight tracking; exactly how hers is arranged is one for the surveyor to confirm.

The rest of the file: 14.97m overall, 4.94m beam, a shallow 1.30m draft, 32 tonnes displacement and 5mm steel hull plating. Twin Volvo Penta TAMD41H diesels of 145hp each deliver an 8-knot cruise and 10-knot top speed, fed by 3,200 litres (845 US gallons) of fuel, with 850 litres (225 US gallons) of fresh water. Below, she sleeps 4 in 2 cabins, each with a 2.0m French bed and its own en-suite shower and toilet.

You might be wondering why the fuel capacity for a CE Cat A boat is not larger, but it all comes down to what the owner wanted from the boat, and her range reflects that. Many owners never intend to cross the Atlantic or the Pacific. Instead, they are content knowing they can get from Northern Europe to the Med without stopping every other day for fuel.

And a CE Cat A vessel is exactly what you need if you have your sights on the Bay of Biscay, which can turn very gnarly in a short period of time.

My overall impression is that she has been very well maintained and looked after by an owner who clearly spent a lot of time and effort on what must have been their pride and joy. She is ready to go cruising, and being steel in both her superstructure and hull, she will take on some serious conditions, which is exactly what you would expect with an explorer yacht.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”. Thanks to my paying subscribers, I can travel around Europe and film boats like Aegir. So, if you are a premium subscriber or indeed you become one, then I would like to say a massive thank you!

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In the premium section below, I cover:

- Steel hull maintenance at 23 years old: what she needs and a realistic 5-year budget

- Stabilisers and engines: service cycles and 5-year cost ranges for the hydraulic fins and the twin TAMD41Hs

- Shipping her to the United States: a working estimate for getting her across the pond.

- My honest assessment of the Atlantic question: whether she can cross on her own hull, and her price against her Dutch steel cohort

What a 23-year-old steel hull asks of you

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There is a 60ft custom steel expedition trawler currently lying at Gold Coast City Marina in Queensland called ‘Reel Steel’. Launched back in 2000, she completed an internal refit in June 2026, according to her broker.

Her listing (link below) quotes ‘just’ 18 litres of diesel an hour at an 8-knot cruise, and a range beyond 3,000 nautical miles from a 7,000-litre (1,850 US gallon) fuel tank. Not bad for a trawler yacht of this size and displacement.

At the time of writing this blog, the broker lists her at AU$950,000, but if you want to make an offer, you will need to confirm the current asking price, as another source lists it as ‘POA’. For the budgets below, I use rounded equivalents of US$675,000, €590,000 and £505,000 (17th Sept 2026).

The builder behind her

The listing credits J. Reynolds of Auckland as builder and Hakker as the designer. I could not find a fuller yard history or reliably connect other builds to that name for this one. If you know anything about J. Reynolds of Auckland, then feel free to leave a comment below.

In terms of her lines and profile, her bow is high and strongly raked, with a long raised foredeck behind hefty bulwarks, and her sheer is modest rather than swept, giving her the profile of a small ship. High freeboard runs back to a full aft body and a broad, squared-off transom. The wheelhouse sits forward with the accommodation area behind it, sheltered seating on the lower aft deck and an open deck above.

As with many explorer yachts, the foredeck is her working space. A fixed mast and boom handle tender lifting, a RIB stows between mast and wheelhouse (the inventory counts two aboard), and winch and cable hardware for what the broker describes as steel batwing stabilisers, fitted this year, sits on deck. Everything in those proportions reads as a displacement passagemaker drawn around a steady 8-knot cruise.

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The spec sheet lists a single Gardner 6LXTD in the engine room, a 250hp turbo diesel with around 1,900 hours, serviced in July this year. For those wondering about single-engine redundancy, a three-phase electric get-home motor sits behind it, credited with a modest 5 knots. Power comes from 36kVA and 8kVA generators, 800W of solar and a 5kW inverter under a Victron Cerbo GX; navigation is Furuno with 64nm radar, plus Starlink Offshore.

Below deck, she sleeps 8 across 4 cabins, and every cabin has its own shower and head, which is unusual generosity on an 18.29 metre hull. With 5,500 litres (1,450 US gallons) of fresh water, that layout would keep 2 couples or a family living aboard comfortably for weeks at a time.

One more detail before you ring James Paul at World Wide Boat Brokers: the listing says the owner is open to property or vessel swaps!

For a potential buyer based in North America or Northern Europe who is wondering whether she could be bought ‘home’, the distance from Queensland makes the cost of delivery a central part of the decision.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section below, I cover:

- Own bottom to the US East Coast: route, fuel, crew, Panama, and the delivery insurance some owners forget

- Own bottom to Northern Europe: Suez versus the Cape, and the honest elapsed time

- Shipping her as deck cargo, and how VAT and duty change the budget

- My honest assessment of her price against named comparables, and who should bring her home

The budgets below are illustrations in US dollars, using stated assumptions, and are therefore not delivery quotes. Route, fuel availability, crew, insurance and import treatment need confirming for the actual voyage, but you can use the information below as a rough guide.

Her own bottom to the US East Coast

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