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Imagine that somebody showed you a boat with an abundance of solar panels scattered around the coach roof and the deck. You are told that the boat pretty much runs itself, so no marina bill, no need to wrestle with shore power cables in the middle of the night when you arrive late at the pontoon. No extortionate diesel bill and no more having to constantly plan your coastal passages according to your next fuel stop.

Just you, the sun’s rays, and a large battery bank doing all the work while you sit back, relax, and enjoy the seascape, rejoicing in the fact that you have just invested in the ultimate off-grid seaborne adventure.

Of course, this is a genuinely appealing idea both to existing boaters and landlubbers who are yet to be captured by the calling of the sea. The thought of generating your own ‘free’ power, living wherever you decide to drop the hook, and not having to worry about the cost of diesel or how big the marina’s electricity bill is going to be.

For anyone who has spent decades handing over their money to pay for the aforementioned, the phrase “solar powered yacht” sounds like the ultimate life hack.

A solar-powered motor yacht can cut your reliance on shore power and/or diesel, especially as the technology behind solar arrays and batteries accelerates. But what it won’t do, at least, not yet anyway, is take you to true zero.

Even with a motor yacht that is covered in solar panels, you will still need a generator, as you might not be lucky enough to be cruising in the latitudes where the sun is powerful enough (in terms of the solar energy reaching the panels) to give you enough photons to meet your on-board living needs. So, most of the time, you will need to fire up that diesel generator to top up your batteries.

Understanding where the line sits between total autonomy and subsidised autonomy is worth spending a bit more time researching, which is exactly what I did for this article.

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The Vessel That Started This Conversation

I wrote about an epic solar-powered ‘floating mansion’ recently called ‘Shine Down’ (last time I checked, that article had been read nearly 800k times).

Her asking price of $15M gives you just some idea of how truly epic this bespoke vessel really is. Now, granted, you cannot take Shine Down offshore as she is designed for inland waterways.

She is a 120ft Breaux Brothers GLV-120 that acts as a formidable example of what can be done with the right vision and the right amount of capital. If you want to gain an insight into what it costs to live aboard a solar-powered boat, then Shine Down is a good place to start, not because of her asking price, but because of her capabilities when it comes to making maximum use of current technology.

Shine Down is endowed with 108 high-efficiency solar panels along with a 300+ kWh lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery bank. That is a serious amount of solar power and storage capacity and is well beyond what a typical cruising boat carries. But does this replace the grid and the diesel, or does it just reduce the bills?

The Numbers You Won’t Always Find in the Brochure

Shine Down is based in Florida. So, with the Floridian sun hitting those 108 modern and high-efficiency panels, you are looking at around 130 to 194 kWh per day, on average. Of course, this depends heavily on the amount of cloud cover and the season. But even taking those two variables into account, you are looking at a serious amount of solar power being generated.

But that number is not fixed, and that is where some issues might start to creep in. Why? Well, a vessel of this size, running AC on a 24/7 basis through an unrenting (by an Englishman’s standards) summer, galley equipment, lighting, water systems, entertainment and nav electronics will normally consume somewhere around 130 to 310 kWh per day.

In the middle of summer, with copious amounts of solar hours and moderate use of the AC, the numbers more or less balance. But, outside of the aforementioned equilibrium, they might not.

For example, during the winter months or when the cloud cover is extremely thick, the amount of solar-generated energy could drop to around 40 to 100 kWh on a typical day. But you will not want to turn off the AC and expose yourself to unrelenting heat and humidity. Of course, there will be exceptions to this ‘rule’, but most people will probably want to retreat to the cool air-conditioned air.

Running the AC on full power means you have a deficit of around 200 kWh daily. Assuming that your batteries are NOT able to absorb the extra use needed, then it will be time to fire up the diesel generator so you can top up the batteries until the photons come back out in force once again.

This is not a failure in design or planning. It is just physics. But it does mean that “off-grid” fossil fuel-free living is harder to accomplish. That is one reason why most solar-powered motor yachts on the market today will have something like: “grid-independent most of the time, with a diesel generator as backup for the rest” in the brochure.

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What the System Costs to Buy and Run

Based on my research, a 300 kWh LFP battery bank runs somewhere in the region of $60,000 to $90,000 based on current pricing (excluding the sort of stuff you can buy on Temu!). That is before you have to fork out on panels, wiring, labour, inverters and charge controllers. Of course, on a smaller vessel, the outlay will be proportionate to, generally speaking, the LOA and beam of the boat.

When it comes to investing in the batteries, then the good news is that, thanks to some very clever chemistry and engineering, LFP batteries tend to be rated for 10 to 20 years of continual service. That is around 6,000 charge cycles at an average of 80% depth of discharge, assuming you have an advanced battery management system that is handling the balancing.

When you run the numbers, the depreciation on a battery bank that size works out to somewhere around $2k to $4.5K a year.

The role that a generator plays on board a solar-powered motor yacht often gets just a few minutes of talk time. It is not just there for emergencies. Anyone who is 100% ‘anti-generator’needs to understand what living on board a boat 365 days a year actually looks like.

A generator is there for the winter months, for the grey days or for when the sun refuses to break through the clouds for weeks on end. So, it would make sense to budget for running the generator some of the time. I am yet to speak with a liveaboard owner who has been able to spend an entire year living just off solar energy aboard a boat. I am sure that will change at some point, so, stay tuned and make sure you subscribe to this newsletter for updates!

Who This Works For

If you operate your vessels in waters where it is reliably sunny for most of the year, keep your AC from being turned on from, say, 10:00 hours until 21:00 hours. You don’t mind firing up the generator for a few hours during the darker months; then a decent solar-powered system will drastically cut your fuel bill. It is a real saving, and for the right owner in the right climate, it is worth the investment.

Personally, I would be interested to hear from anyone who has a decent solar power setup and lives on board their boat 365 days per year somewhere like the Middle East. But, during my own travels in that part of the world, I never came across anyone living on a solar-powered motor yacht. Although I have not been to the Middle East for quite some time, I am sure that has probably changed by now.

If you are envisioning living on board a solar-powered motor yacht, with zero running costs (utilising the anchor way of life), then a production-level motor yacht that does not cost over $1M, as far as I am aware, does not yet exist.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”. It is thanks to my premium subscribers that I can travel around and film interesting boats, so it is the premium section where I live to give something back.

In the premium section, I cover:

- The real annual running cost comparison: solar-plus-generator versus a conventional diesel-only power plant, in dollars, across a full cruising year

- Battery bank sizing by boat length: what a realistic system actually costs for a 40, 60 and 100-foot vessel, not just a $15 million outlier

- The solar maintenance calendar: panel cleaning, inverter servicing, and the generator hours you will actually rack up even with a “solar” boat

- My honest assessment of when solar pays for itself: the break-even point, and the cruising pattern that gets you there fastest

- My vision for the future: What I think solar-powered boats of the future might actually look like.

The Real Annual Running Cost: Solar-Plus-Generator vs Diesel-Only

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Van der Valk has been building high-quality steel motor yachts in their Waalwijk facility since 1967. By the time the popular Continental series arrived in the late 90s, the 15.50 had become their signature product and firmly put them on the coastal cruiser map outside of their native Netherlands. Inspired was built in 2007 and, by the listing broker’s own admission, is one of the best equipped examples of the 15.50.

First off, let’s start by taking a look at her steel hull. She was built with a hard chine, known in Dutch as “knikspant”. This means that, as opposed to smooth round-bilged hulls, the chine configuration has been set up with distinct angles. There are a few benefits of having a hard chine, and one of them is a more comfortable ride in the confused seas which you often encounter off the coast, especially here in Europe. A hard chine also means that the boat is more stable and predictable when motoring at displacement speeds. A round bilge hull is harder to engineer, but many of the explorer yacht owners I know prefer the motion of a hard chine hull.

Inspired’s hull is 5mm thick, and her superstructure is 4mm thick, so even though this vessel is a Cat B boat, she can still withstand some heavy weather; the type that is often encountered when you cruise in the North Sea, especially in the harsh winter months. The hull specs alone are a large part of why these boats have such a formidable reputation for holding their condition over long periods of time, rather than needing ongoing structural work that large steel vessels often require.

Watch the yacht tour and then come back to this article (assuming you have not already seen the video!)

She has an LOA of 16.10 metres, with a beam of 4.6 metres and a draft of 1.45 metres. This reasonably shallow draft means that the boat can be operated in parts of the Dutch and Belgian inland waterway networks where larger vessels simply cannot go. Being a Cat B vessel, you are not going to be crossing the Atlantic in this boat, so her next owner will no doubt find the relatively shallow draft a big bonus. Her air draft is just 3.45 metres, so worrying about clipping the radar mast as you edge under the countless bridges in Europe should not be a problem on most waterways.

She is fitted with twin Volvo Penta D4 diesels. Each one produces 180 horsepower, or 132kW, giving her a top speed of 10 knots, which is a few knots above general displacement speed. The twin engines, although more expensive to maintain, will no doubt appeal to many owners, not least because it means that even with a single fouled prop, you still have a means of moving. During my time in the RNLI, we would often respond to distress calls made by skippers who had fouled their props when moving west along the Thames.

With tides running at in excess of 5 knots, you only have a very small area to drift before you make contact with the shore or a ship! Personally, I think that twin engines for coastal cruising would be my preference.

When it comes to close-quarter manoeuvring, she has both a bow and a stern thruster. They are hydraulic, so if you are battling against the tide and the wind, you should not need to worry about the motors overheating, which is always in the back of your mind when you are using electric thrusters. I personally have never had to stop using a bow or stern thruster for fear of it overheating, but I know plenty of boat owners who have. She also has Naiad stabilisers as well, which for a boat of this LOA I think is a rare addition.

Liveaboard Credentials

Inspired sleeps four across two cabins, with two bathrooms. The interior is finished in cherry wood, which is a choice that lends itself to a warm and cosy living environment. The saloon has also been recently restyled by her current owner, which says a lot about how this boat has been maintained. I have been on many boats where the interior has been left to degrade. Now, I am not saying that a degraded interior lends itself to poor machinery maintenance, but what I am saying is that a boat owner who looks after the interior rarely lets the machinery on board go beyond its regular maintenance cycles. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule.

She also comes with a full Raymarine nav package with software that has been specifically designed for this boat. During the boat tour, I had some issues trying to figure out which function opened the large sunroof in the wheelhouse, but that is just because I do not speak Dutch (the broker did show me, but when I film boats, my short-term memory gets sacrificed in favour of concentrating on where and what to film!). Her dashboard has been updated, and she has new electrics including a 2-volt gel battery bank and a Quooker instant hot water tap in the galley. A nice touch.

Her central heating comes from a Kabola boiler, which is an incredibly popular installation on almost all explorer-style motor yachts. Kabola has a fantastic reputation, and I can understand why most of the boats which I feature have Kabola systems installed. She also has air conditioning and her washer/dryer means that you do not have to identify marinas to stay in based on their laundry facilities (or lack thereof).

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In terms of tankage, she can carry 2,200 litres of fuel and has enough fresh water capacity for 1,100 litres. Black water capacity comes in at 500 litres. For my North American readers, that’s around 530 US gallons for fuel, and around 291 gallons of freshwater, so plenty of capacity for medium range cruising itineraries.

If I purchased this boat, then I would take her down to the Mediterranean as she is more than capable of making that voyage from the Netherlands, accross the north sea, over the English Channel, across the bay of biscay (without having to hug the coast) and then down to Gibralter, a place that is synomous with Royal Navy Sailors getting rubbish tattoos (something that I managed to avoid getting when I visited Gibralter when serving aboard HMS Sheffied (F96).

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”, as it’s my paying subscribers who enable me to fund my trips aboard which allow me to feature boats like Inspired. If you do become a premium subscriber, then thank you!

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In the premium section, I cover:

- What 2,200 hours on twin D4s really means: how these Volvo Penta diesels age, what servicing looks like at this point in their life, and the questions worth asking before survey

- Chine hull versus round bilge, clearly explained: the real handling and maintenance trade-offs of Van der Valk’s construction method compared with the round-bilged steel hulls used by other Dutch builders

- The market for well-equipped Continental 15.50s: how a fully specified example like Inspired compares with less complete boats of the same model on the market today

- My honest assessment of what this specification is actually worth: whether the equipment list here justifies a premium over a base-specification sister ship

What 2,200 Hours on Twin D4s Actually Means

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I always think that there is a special kind of boat worth writing about just because she was never built to be marvelled by the explorer yacht community. No yacht designer sketched her lines with an owner’s tastes in mind. There was no exclusive naming ceremony with a bottle of bubbly and a crowd. She was built to work, and she worked for a government agency most of her guests probably never heard of, for 25 years.

Her name is Terschelling, and if you have never heard of her before, then that is rather the point.

Launched on 23 September 1963 from the yard of the Zaanlandse Scheepsbouw Maatschappij in Zaandam, this vessel was built for the Royal Netherlands Navy and given the pennant number ‘A948’. However, she did not stay in that role for long.

Within the same year, she was transferred to Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch government department responsible for the country’s vast network of intricate waterways, coasts and public works, and put to work as a buoy-laying and supply vessel in the Wadden Sea and along the Dutch coastline. For the next 25 years, that was her mission. Placing and upkeep of the vital navigation buoys that keep merchant ships off the sandbanks of one of the busiest and shallowest coastal regions in Europe.

She was decommissioned on 10th January 1989, after roughly 25 years in Rijkswaterstaat service.

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What happened next tells you why boats like this are worth writing about. She did not go to a yacht refit yard. She went to Plymouth here in the UK. She became a dive and salvage tender, working first under Boston Marine and later GEOSA Ltd. Over the ensuing 10 years, she was quietly present at some genuinely momentous moments in British maritime history. She was involved in operations at the Plymouth Breakwater Fort in the mid-1990s. She also served as a base ship for the Resurgam and SubMap projects.

In 2001 and 2002, she supported trials of the Autosub autonomous underwater vehicle for what was then the Southampton Oceanography Centre. This was vital work that was quietly building the foundations of modern underwater robotics. In 2003, she was part of the support fleet for the Mary Rose project, which was one of the most significant maritime archaeology efforts the UK has undertaken.

I only found this out after a detailed dig through Dutch and British maritime records, which turned up a career including a Dutch government pennant number, a British dive charter business, and survey work over the wreck of Henry VIII’s flagship, two decades after the Mary Rose herself was raised from the Solent. That is not a résumé you see often in the explorer yacht space. This is a boat that has earned her keep, twice over, in two different countries, doing two completely different jobs.

Which brings us to job number three…

In 2023, The Polarship GmbH of Hamburg took ownership and set about a conversion, completed under class, to turn her into an Arctic expedition yacht. As you can imagine, the work was significant. The old buoy deck has given way to a 70 square metre panorama saloon. Crew quarters once intended for Rijkswaterstaat deckhands have been substituted by six en suite cabins, accommodating up to twelve guests.

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The previous operator’s marketing refers to two 5.3 metre Zodiac tenders with 60hp outboards for shore excursions and wildlife watching. However, the current spec sheet lists a more modest Inmar dinghy with a 60hp Parsun outboard. She retains her impressive Ice Class 1 rating, which is the credential operators look for when planning itineraries to Svalbard, Greenland, and the Arctic coast of Norway.

Ice Class 1 is worth lingering on. It is a classification society rating (the Dutch and German societies use slightly different ladders, but the principle holds across them) that certifies a hull’s steel thickness, framing and propeller protection for operating in first year sea ice of a given thickness, so largely the kind of ice you meet at the edges of the Arctic shipping season rather than a vessel built to force her way through multi year pack ice like a true icebreaker.

It sits below the heavier Polar Class and Finnish Swedish 1A Super ratings used by dedicated icebreakers, but it is considerably more than a classic steel hull holds. In practice, it means Terschelling can push into brash ice and loose first year ice at the fringes of Svalbard and the Arctic Norwegian coast with a real margin of safety that a non ice classed explorer yacht won’t have, which is precisely why operators pursuing that itinerary look for the rating specifically rather than treating it as a ‘nice to have’ addition.

The Polarship’s marketing invoked images of polar bear watching in Svalbard, orca snorkelling off Arctic Norway, and Christmas voyages to high latitudes. It is a vision that clearly appeals to those searching for the last fragments of untouched nature. The vessel itself is more than capable of supporting such ambitions regardless of what Mother Nature throws at her (and her guests)

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On 14th July 2026, insolvency proceedings were opened against The Polarship GmbH. The company’s website is still live and, at the time of publishing this article, still describes a season of epic expeditions that, as things stand, nobody is booking.

That is why Terschelling is currently listed with De Valk Hindeloopen at €1,200,000, VAT exempt, with broker Hans Visser noting that “the existing business, including its operational activities and commercial opportunities, may also be acquired, granting a unique turnkey expedition enterprise with immediate earning potential ” (link to listing below). Read frankly, that means the boat and the business plan are both on the table.

For me, this proposition changes the question a potential buyer ought to ask from “is this a good boat” to something rather more useful…

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

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In the premium section below, I cover:

• The Bolnes engine reality: what it actually costs to keep a single 1963 Bolnes eight-cylinder diesel running today, who still services them, and what a rebuild looks like when the first manufacturer stopped making parts in 1989

• Reading an insolvency correctly: what actually happens to a vessel and her operating business when the company behind her collapses, and the specific questions a buyer needs answered before touching the “turnkey enterprise” claim

• The market comparison: how Terschelling’s €1,200,000 stacks up against Beauport, Sherakhan, and other government-hull-to-explorer conversions I have covered, and whether this price reflects the work already done or the seller’s urgency

• My honest take on what this conversion is actually worth: a line-by-line look at what twelve guests, six cabins and Ice Class 1 genuinely justify, and where the number stops making sense

The Engine Room Few People Talk About

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She has had no fewer than ten names in 44 years. Sara Blue of England. Lady in Red. Legend of Tintagel. Piano Bar, for a long charter run through the 1990s and 2000s that old-hand Mediterranean crews still remember her by. Today she is Kokomo Nights, a 47.55-metre motor yacht built by Picchiotti in Viareggio in 1982, and she is based in the waters around Athens doing something almost no other charter yacht her size will do.

You can charter her for a single day…

Most people never get far enough into the yacht charter process to discover the rule this breaks. Ask a broker for a single day aboard a 45-metre-plus steel hulled superyacht anywhere in the Med, and in high season the answer is typically no. Seven nights is the accepted minimum duration for boats this size, not a marketing minimum but the number the commercial machine, crew, fuel planning, provisioning, is built around. Kokomo Nights runs that same weekly programme, from £120,000 ($156,000 / €139,200 / CA$214,800 / AU$237,600), with the same seven-night minimum as everyone else in July and August. But alongside it, she also offers something her peers largely don’t: a single day, just over £19,000 ($24,700 / €22,040 / CA$34,010 / AU$37,620), no week required.

A Boat With a Genuinely Interesting Past

Before the charter arithmetic, it’s worth knowing what you’re actually stepping aboard, because Kokomo Nights is a more interesting boat than her current name suggests.

She was designed by Arthur DeFever, the American naval architect whose name any trawler enthusiast will recognise instantly. DeFever is the man behind the DeFever passagemaker line, the long-range, full-displacement trawler yachts that quietly built an entire cruising philosophy around going anywhere, comfortably, without hurrying, [the kind of design lineage I’ve written about before](https://johnjohnsonyachtbuoy.substack.com/p/this-trawler-yacht-was-designed-to). Finding his name on a 47-metre superyacht is a genuine crossover moment between the explorer yacht world I usually write about and the superyacht world Kokomo Nights now lives in. Vincenzo Ruggiero worked alongside him on the design, and her interior was styled by Shawn Paulic, refreshed in her 2026 refit.

She was built at Picchiotti’s Viareggio yard, and 1982 was not a quiet year for that yard. The same year Kokomo Nights was launched, Picchiotti delivered the 103-metre Al Said for the Sultan of Oman, then one of the largest yachts in the world. She still remains in Omani state service today, converted in recent years to a Royal Navy of Oman training vessel and renamed Al Mabrukah. Picchiotti itself is one of the oldest shipbuilding names still in existence anywhere, founded in 1575 in Tuscany, credited as the first yard to build recreational motor cruisers in series back in 1902. Kokomo Nights is reportedly the third-largest yacht the yard ever built. That is serious pedigree sitting underneath a boat most people have never heard of.

Under the surface she is steel hull, aluminium superstructure, teak decks, three decks, full-displacement, twin Caterpillar diesels giving her a cruising speed around 12 to 13 knots and a genuinely long-legged range for her size. This is not a boat built to make rapid progress between anchorages. She was built to go a long way, comfortably, and simply happens to spend her working life in the beautiful Aegean.

What the £19,000 Day Rate Actually Means

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting for anyone who understands how this market prices things. A single-day charter is already a rare product at this size, most operators won’t sell one at all, for exactly the reasons above: turning a boat and a ten-person crew around for one day costs the operation nearly as much effort as a full week, for a fraction of the return. When yachts in the 40-metre-plus bracket do offer a day rate, the accepted industry rule of thumb is that it costs a quarter to a third of the weekly rate, not a simple seventh.

On that rule, a boat chartering at £120,000 a week should command something in the £30,000 to £40,000 ($39,000-$52,000 / €34,800-€46,400) region for a single day. Kokomo Nights offers hers at just over £19,000, roughly a sixth of the weekly figure. She isn’t just rare for offering a day charter at all. She is priced below the bottom of her own market’s day-rate band for doing it.

For a Yacht Buoy reader who has never chartered anything bigger than a day boat, that is the number worth sitting with for a moment. This is not a discount on a fixed weekly rate, and it is not a knockdown deal to fill an empty gap in the calendar. It is a genuinely rare product, priced aggressively, on a boat with real pedigree underneath her.

What a Day Aboard Actually Looks Like

Picture leaving the Alimos marina area near Athens in the morning aboard a boat with a deck jacuzzi, two Kawasaki jet skis, two Seabobs, a pair of electric bikes, waterskis, a paddleboard, a foilboard, full scuba kit and snorkelling gear, and a 9.2-metre Axopar chase tender sitting ready on the aft deck. Ten crew, including a British chef on his third Mediterranean season aboard her, look after up to twelve guests, a ratio most 5-star hotels would struggle to match. Wi-Fi and Starlink keep you connected if you need to be, and at-anchor stabilisers mean that whichever bay you drop into for lunch, the boat sits genuinely still under you.

Be realistic about range on a single day. Athens sits at the edge of the Saronic Gulf, and at her cruising speed you are looking at a swim-lunch-sunset day rather than an island-hopping marathon. Aegina is the classic run, close enough for several hours ashore and back with time to spare. Agistri and the little islet of Moni make an easy swim-and-lunch pairing just beyond it. Poros is the ambitious option, a longer run each way but doable in a full day. Hydra is right at the edge of realistic, more steaming than time in port. The Cyclades, Mykonos, Paros, and the rest, are simply not reachable and back in a single day at her pace, so don’t expect that itinerary. What you get instead is the Saronic done well, from a boat that would normally cost you a week’s commitment to set foot on.

This is exactly the kind of explorer yacht charter that rewards a bit of research before you book, which is what I try to offer with every vessel I cover, including [Over The Rainbow of London](https://johnjohnsonyachtbuoy.substack.com/p/over-the-rainbow-of-london-a-classic), another Mediterranean charter yacht with a history worth knowing before you step aboard.

For more information regarding her day rate, and her weekly availability, click below:

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If you’re looking at a longer charter, seven days or more, on Kokomo Nights or another yacht like her, get in touch with me directly at john@yacht-buoy.com and I will handle it personally.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The full cost breakdown: APA, gratuities, provisioning, and port fees on top of both the day rate and the £120,000 weekly rate, and what a genuine “all-in” figure looks like for each

- How she compares to the rest of the Greek day-charter market: real comparable day rates on yachts her size and larger, and why hers sits where it does

- A 44-year hull with a 2026 refit: what buying into a 1982 Picchiotti, rather than a brand-new charter yacht, actually means for the on-board experience

- My honest assessment of the value: whether the single day or the full week makes more sense for different kinds of guest, and where the £19,000 day genuinely earns its place

The Full Cost Breakdown

The £19,000 day rate and the £120,000 weekly rate are both starting points, not final bills.

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I want to start this particular article with an important number that will mean something to anyone who has spent time around this category of boat: 75-04.

That is Saginaw Bay’s yard number, and it tells you two things immediately. First, that she was the 4th hull built to this exact specification of the Northern Marine 75. Second, and more interesting, that according to the boat’s own listing, only 4 hulls were ever built to it. An 18.5-foot beam, lower freeboard than the larger 75s that followed her down the ways. Owners of these particular hulls, and Northern Marine itself, regard them as perhaps the best boats the yard ever produced.

For reasons which I am sure you will understand, that is not the kind of claim I take at face value. But by the time you have read the rest of this piece, you will understand why it holds up…

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The Vessel

Saginaw Bay is a 2000 Northern Marine 75, 75 feet and 4 inches LOA, with an 18.5-foot beam and a 7-foot maximum draught. She is asking $3,199,000, listed with LC8 Marine (link below), and currently based in Seattle, Washington, on a 100-foot slip.

She is a one-owner boat for 22 years. Built in Anacortes, Washington, and delivered to her first owners in 2000, she stayed in their hands until a private sale to her second owner in 2022, who has since completed a comprehensive electronics, networking, and systems modernisation with the stated intention of taking her worldwide.

Her hull is moulded fibreglass, built to comply with or exceed ABS rules, in a full displacement form with a bulbous bow. Of course, that bow shape is not decorative. On a full displacement hull, a well-designed bulbous bow reduces wave-making resistance at the vessel’s natural hull speed, which on an explorer yacht like this translates directly into fuel economy over long passages rather than outright speed. Saginaw Bay cruises at 10 knots at 1,600 RPM, which is exactly what a 75-foot full displacement hull of this configuration should be doing.

Propulsion comes from a single Lugger L6140AL2 diesel, rated at 700 horsepower, showing 3,156 hours. However, this is not the engine she was built with. Her first owners, a Seattle family who had her constructed from the outset and cared for her meticulously, replaced the original build engine a few years into ownership with the higher-output commercial-duty Lugger currently installed. There was, by all accounts, nothing wrong with the stock installation. They simply wanted more power and performance once they had lived aboard her for a while and understood what they wanted from the boat. That is worth noting for what it says about the kind of ownership Saginaw Bay has had: an owner who upgraded a working system rather than merely maintained it, and who kept the same hands-on boat manager and captain involved throughout construction, maintenance, and the eventual repower.

Backing that single main engine is an ABT Get Home Drive, running off either of two 20kW Northern Lights generators via hydraulic power take-off pumps. On a single-engine boat, this is precisely the kind of redundancy that matters. A pure single-engine configuration with no independent backup propulsion is a genuine consideration for anyone planning serious offshore and transoceanic passages. A single main engine paired with a hydraulic get-home drive that can run off either generator is a materially different proposition, because it means a main engine failure does not strand the vessel, it simply slows her down while she motors along on backup power.

Fuel capacity runs to 4,396 gallons across a day tank and 4 wing and lazarette tanks, giving a quoted range approaching 4,600 nautical miles. Fresh water capacity sits at 1,436 gallons, and the boat carries a 70-gallon-per-hour Sea Recovery watermaker in the lazarette with remote monitoring, which matters considerably for genuine long-range independence rather than range on paper alone.

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The Builder

Here is where Saginaw Bay’s story gets more interesting because Northern Marine’s own history is a genuinely remarkable one, and it is worth understanding before you evaluate any Northern Marine hull, this one included.

Northern Marine was founded in 1995 by Richard “Bud” LeMieux, in Anacortes, Washington. LeMieux did not arrive at explorer yacht building from a design school or a marketing background. He spent more than 20 years building commercial fishing vessels and small workboats at Delta Marine in Seattle before starting his own yard, and that commercial pedigree is baked into everything Northern Marine subsequently built. The yard’s first vessel, Spirit of Zopilote, a 62-foot long range cruiser, was completed in 1997 for the well-known television producer Bruce Kessler, and it set the template: seaworthy, over-engineered by recreational standards, and designed for an owner-operator couple rather than a full-time professional crew.

Over the following decade, Northern Marine built roughly 28 explorer yachts ranging from 35 to 152 feet, including the 152-foot megayacht Lia Fail (later renamed Sorcha), a genuinely world-class example of the yard’s capability at the top end. In 2007, the 80-foot trawler Julianne won Showboats International’s award for Best Full Displacement Motor Yacht Under 45 Metres, built specifically for owners who wanted a boat they could run themselves as a captain-and-wife team rather than a boat that needed professional crew to operate. Throughout this period, Northern Marine was also one of the first North American yacht builders to adopt resin-infusion composite construction, a technique that improves the strength-to-weight ratio of a fibreglass hull and superstructure, ahead of most of its competitors.

Then came the difficult years. The 2007-2009 recession hit the yard hard, as it hit most American builders of this type, and Northern Marine passed through a succession of ownership changes. In 2011, a former Northern Marine employee assembled a team that licensed the brand and resumed building, but a launch incident involving a 90-foot hull, unrelated to the design or construction quality of the vessel itself, slowed the yard’s post-recession recovery further. In 2015, a Northern Marine customer named Jay Bernstein, who had a 57-footer under construction at the yard at the time, acquired a controlling interest in the company. Bernstein’s own boat, Agave, launched in early 2017, and he set about steering the yard forward with renewed investment.

Then, in November 2018, misfortune struck again. Bernstein died in a mountain biking accident.

That could easily have been the end of the story. It was not. Northern Marine’s core team, the highly skilled craftsmen and the design, engineering, and project management staff who had stayed through every ownership change, remained intact throughout. When the opportunity arose to acquire the yard’s assets, Peter Whiting, managing partner of Seattle Yachts, did not hesitate. Whiting was already an established trawler yacht builder and broker in Anacortes through the Northwest line, well acquainted with the Northern Marine team and their work, and he understood exactly what a small semi-custom shipyard offers buyers that a large production builder cannot. Seattle Yachts acquired the brand, the intellectual property, the existing tooling for several hull and superstructure sizes, the yard facility itself, and two hulls already in progress.

That acquisition holds today. Northern Marine currently builds three model lines: the 57 Raised Pilothouse, the 64 Raised Pilothouse, and the 70 Expedition Yacht, available in either forward or aft pilothouse configurations. All three sit within what the company itself, and the wider market, regards as its genuine sweet spot: domestically built, full displacement expedition yachts between 50 and 90 feet. Over more than forty builds across three decades and three separate ownership eras, Northern Marine has weathered a recession, a launch incident, and the tragic death of an owner who believed in the yard, and it is still building boats in the same Anacortes yard today.

Saginaw Bay comes from the earlier era of that story, the period when a small, commercially minded yard built boats to individual owner specifications rather than a fixed model line, before the current 57/64/70 range settled into place. Given that only 4 hulls were built to her exact specification, and that both owners and the yard itself regard those particular hulls as among the best Northern Marine ever produced, she represents a genuinely narrow window into the yard’s original, most hands-on production period.

Life Aboard and Recent Investment

Saginaw Bay has spent her ‘working’ life predominantly as a Pacific Northwest cruiser, based out of Seattle, and the November 2025 survey confirms her as being in excellent condition with all maintenance current.

She carries 4 staterooms and 4 full bathrooms, plus a fifth half bathroom in the cockpit, laid out across a portside flushdeck design that opens up the interior living space without sacrificing the operational deck access that a working expedition boat needs. The saloon combines a U-shaped seating arrangement with an 8-person dining table, a large kitchen with dark honed granite counters, and full-height storage. All 4 staterooms are finished with bookmatched cherry joinery, and the owner’s suite sits on its own private level directly below the pilothouse.

The current owner’s 2024-2025 refit is comprehensive rather than cosmetic. Navigation electronics were fully replaced with Garmin 9000 series 4K displays and Maretron monitoring throughout the vessel, Marine Starlink was installed, new fuel lines were run from every tank to the central engine room manifold, and a new dripless shaft seal was fitted. The stabilisers were serviced in September 2025, alongside a full bottom paint and Propspeed application. This is the kind of refit that addresses the unglamorous, structural side of ownership rather than simply the visible finishes, and it matters more to a serious buyer than a fresh coat of varnish ever will.

That large aft boat deck, distinctive for a 75-foot expedition yacht, carries a 3,000-pound crane capable of rotating 358 degrees to launch to port, starboard, or the stern swim platform. It currently holds a new Highfield Sport 560 tender with a Honda 100 horsepower engine, alongside space for a second tender or a full collection of kayaks, paddleboards, and bikes. For an owner who wants genuine flexibility in how they use a boat this size, rather than a fixed single-tender arrangement, that is a meaningful practical advantage most 75-foot yachts simply do not offer.

Taken together, what you are looking at with Saginaw Bay is a rare-specification hull from a builder with a genuinely remarkable survival story, kept by a single family for 22 years, repowered deliberately rather than out of necessity, and brought fully current by a second owner with serious long-range intentions before a change in personal circumstances put her back on the market.

There is more to say about what actually owning her costs, and it is not all straightforward.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The single-engine, twin-generator redundancy question: what the ABT Get Home Drive genuinely buys you against a true twin-engine layout, and what I would want confirmed before survey

- Servicing a Lugger L6140AL2: parts availability, typical service intervals, and what commercial-duty diesel support actually looks like on the US West Coast

- What $3.2 million actually buys against the current market: how Saginaw Bay compares to a new Northern Marine 70, and to comparable pre-owned Nordhavn and Selene tonnage in this size and price bracket

- My honest assessment of the price: whether the rarity of this specification, and the scale of the recent refit, genuinely justifies the asking figure

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The Wardroom

The Single-Engine, Twin-Generator Redundancy Question

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Most of what I write about on here is boats you could buy, if you had the money and the inclination. Steel hulls, engine hours, survey reports, the kind of decisions that take months and a broker on speed dial. This one is a bit different. This is a boat you could actually book, this summer, for the price of a decent weekend away, and step off at the end of the day having genuinely had one of the best afternoons of your holiday.

Her name is Lady Lola, and she works out of Stanići, a small spot just down the coast from Omiš in southern Dalmatia.

It helps to know a bit about Omiš before you step aboard. For roughly 200 years, from the 12th century into the 13th, this stretch of coast was ruled by pirates, the Kačić family among them, who used the mouth of the River Cetina and the rocks either side of it to hide fast ships and ambush anything sailing between Split and Dubrovnik that hadn’t paid its tribute. You can still see the fortresses, Mirabella and Fortica, watching over the town from the hills, built to spot trouble coming and to hold it off when it did. It is not the sanitised, resort-brochure version of the Adriatic. It is a genuinely old stretch of coastline that has been fought over and lived in for a very long time, and that history is still written into the landscape when you sail out of it.

That is the water Lady Lola sails….

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She is a proper classic, built in 1948, 15.2 metres of vintage motorboat character with 130 horsepower doing the work, and she carries up to twelve guests in comfort. There is a wide bow deck for lying in the sun, an aft deck set up for the kind of long, sociable lunch that becomes the whole point of the day, and below deck, three cabins with six berths and a small galley and lounge, in case a group ever wants to keep her for more than a single day. For the tour I am talking about here, though, it is a day trip: 9 hours, out and back, starting and finishing at Stanići.

She comes with a skipper who speaks English, and a crew that runs the boat, the food, and the whole rhythm of the day. She is run by a local chap called Adriano, whose listing carries 30 reviews and a full five-star average, which in the world of holiday boat trips is not a small thing to have earned.

I went looking for what past guests actually said, because a five-star average on its own tells you nothing about what the day is actually like.

Maria Elena took her extended family, eleven of them, in June this year, and called it “simply the highlight of our vacation,” praising Adriano and his crew for being “welcoming, service minded, kind” from the first booking message through to the end of the day. Sarah, who went the previous September, said she’d “thoroughly enjoyed” the trip and would “definitely recommend” it. Irina, writing in German, called it “a highlight for us,” praising the food specifically as “simply fantastic.” Ella described it as “the most unbelievable day, definitely the highlight of our trip to Croatia,” and singled out the itinerary itself, the chance to stop somewhere new, as one of the best parts.

Read enough of those reviews and a pattern shows itself. Nobody is talking about the boat’s top speed or her deck fittings. They are talking about Adriano, about the food, about a day that felt looked after from start to finish. That is worth more than most spec sheets.

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What a Day Aboard Actually Looks Like…

The day starts at 10am from Stanići. It takes around an hour to cruise across to the island of Brač, and once you arrive, you get a choice of where to spend your morning. The listing gives you three options: Pučišća, Postira, and Supetar (Brač’s main town). All three offer completely different days out, so it is worth knowing what you are choosing between.

Pučišća is the pick if you want the story behind the stone under your feet. The whole town is built from the pale limestone quarried in the hills directly above it, stone so prized that it was reportedly used in Diocletian’s Palace in nearby Split back in the 4th century, and, according to local tradition (disputed by some historians, but repeated often enough to be part of the town’s identity), in the White House in Washington DC. What makes it more than a pretty backdrop is the Stonemasonry School (Klesarska škola) in the town centre, one of only three schools left in Europe still teaching manual stone-carving by hand, and open for visits through the summer. You can watch students working the same stone their grandfathers worked, in a harbour built entirely from it.

Postira is the quieter, more workaday choice, and none the worse for it. It is still a genuine fishing town: Sardina, the local fish-processing company, has kept the harbour busy for generations, alongside a solid olive oil trade. There is less to “see” in the postcard sense and more to simply sit in: a pebble beach in the centre of town, stone buildings along the water, and a working harbour rather than a curated one. If your idea of a good stop is a coffee, a wander, and not much of an agenda, this is it.

Supetar is the liveliest of the three and the island’s main town, the one most ferries from Split actually dock at. It is closely associated with Ivan Rendić, the pioneering sculptor generally regarded as the first major figure in modern Croatian sculpture, who settled in the town in 1921 and lived there until his death in 1932. The Ivan Rendić Gallery in the town centre holds a substantial collection of his work. Beyond that, Supetar has the most going on of the three: a real waterfront, more cafes and shops, and beaches running right from the centre of town. If your group wants a bit of buzz alongside the history, this is the stop.

Wherever you choose, you get free time to explore before lunch is served back on board: fresh grilled fish or meat, with salad or grilled vegetables on the side, and your choice of beer, wine, or soft drinks included in the price. No faff, no extra menu to sort out, just a hearty meal cooked using local ingredients and served while you are anchored somewhere good.

After lunch, the crew take you to some of the more isolated bays on this part of the Adriatic, the kind of spot with clear water and nobody else around, for swimming, sunbathing, and snorkelling (equipment is provided, along with water toys). You head back towards Stanići at 5pm, arriving with a full day behind you and, by every account I have read, a genuine reluctance for it to be over.

Cancellation is flexible: full refund if you cancel 24 hours or more before the start, minus service fees and commission. There is no security deposit. Bring sun protection, as the listing points out, and not much else.

If a day like that sounds right for your group, you can check availability and book directly here:

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom” where the premium section covers real per-person cost, group-size economics, private vs shared charters, and an honest verdict.

By the way, If you want the other end of the Mediterranean charter spectrum, from a modest Adriatic day boat to a genuine explorer-yacht experience, have a read of Sherakhan: The Dutch Navy Training Ship That Became One of the World’s Great Explorer Yacht Charters or Over The Rainbow of London, a 1930 classic with a story every bit as good as her charter offering.

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Charter Intelligence: Lady Lola, Omiš, Croatia

The Real Per-Person Cost…[article continues below]

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4,995 hours. That is what is showing on both engines of the boat you just watched me walk through, following my recent visit to the Netherlands, and she was built in 2002. Do the maths and that works out at a little over 200 hours a year, which is low usage for an explorer style motor yacht of this age, and it is worth understanding exactly why before we go any further.

This is Valerie, a Pieter Beeldsnijder PB55: 18.40 metres of round-bilged Dutch steel, CE Category A rated, with just one owner from new. She has spent every single winter of her life in a heated shed, and now, for the first time ever, she is for sale, through Sterkenburg Yacht Brokers in Drimmelen, at EUR 569,000 (link to listing below).

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A Round-Bilged Hull, Built by Someone Who Knew What He Was Doing

Pieter Beeldsnijder was one of the most respected names in Dutch yacht design, a career that ran nearly 60 years and touched more than 2,500 vessels before he passed away in 2016. He trained at Royal Huisman and Feadship, two of the most serious yards in the business, and went on to design superyacht interiors that picked up ShowBoats International and World Superyacht Awards. His PB-series kotters are a smaller, more personal thread in that career: round-bilged Dutch motor yachts built for genuine sailing characteristics and a timeless look, rather than headline speed.

That round bilge is the detail that helps set her apart from a lot of what you will see in this size bracket. Instead of the flat, welded panels of a multi-chine hull, a rondspant hull is rolled and formed into one continuous curve from keel to sheer. It is a genuinely harder job in the yard, and it shows in the way she carries herself: a smoother hull form and a gentler motion when the sea state gets confused, rather than the harder, more abrupt roll a chined hull can give you.

She was built by T&T Yachting in Zevenbergen, a solid regional Dutch yard with a track record in custom steel motor yachts through this size range, working alongside Drinkwaard for the interior joinery: cherry wood throughout, warm, traditional, and finished to a genuinely high standard.

Twin Ivecos, and Why 4,995 Hours in 24 Years Is the Real Headline

These are her original engines: twin Iveco AIFO 8065 M12 diesels, producing 120 horsepower apiece, 240 horsepower combined in a 48-tonne yacht. That is a genuinely conservative power-to-weight ratio for a hull this size, and it is a deliberate one: this is a boat built around efficient, low-revving displacement cruising at 8 knots, the same philosophy that underpins the long-range explorer yachts a lot of you will already know from this channel, just applied here to European coastal and inland waters rather than open-ocean passages.

The AIFO 8065 M12 is drawn from Iveco’s industrial engine family, a straightforward, well-proven unit rather than anything highly stressed or exotic, and it has a genuinely good reputation and strong parts availability across Europe and North America. Drive is through conventional shafts: simple, proven, and exactly what you would expect on a boat built for reliable, unfussy cruising.

What actually matters here is the 4,995 hours. Across 24 years, that works out at barely over 200 hours a year, a genuinely low-usage boat, and it tells you a story about how she has been kept. A single, careful owner who commissioned her from new, wintered her every year in a heated shed, and clearly used her rather than neglected her, but never hammered her either. That combination, low hours plus documented, careful storage, is about as good a starting position as you will find for a 24-year-old steel motor yacht.

Why Her Fuel Tanks Are Smaller Than You Might Expect

Here is something worth understanding in full, because it is the question I imagine a fair few of you asked while watching the yacht tour: why does an 18.4 metre, 48-tonne yacht like this carry only 3,130 litres of fuel?

The honest answer is that not every owner commissioning a build like this in 2002 was imagining an Atlantic crossing. At a genuine 8-knot cruise, twin 120hp Ivecos of this type burn somewhere in the region of 10 to 15 litres an hour combined. She has a genuinely useful range for coastal and inland European cruising: the North Sea, the Dutch and Belgian waterways, a passage down to the Mediterranean and back. It simply is not built for ocean crossings, and it was never meant to be.

Compare that with a true ocean-crossing explorer yacht of similar displacement, which typically carries fuel equal to 50 to 70% of her weight rather than the roughly 6% Valerie carries here, often running to 5,000 or even 8,000-plus litres to guarantee genuine transatlantic range. Valerie’s tankage sits closer to what a sensible coastal cruiser needs, which is exactly what her first owner asked for. Smaller tanks are not a shortcoming here; they are evidence of a boat built honestly for the life she was actually going to lead, rather than over-specified for a passage her owner never intended to make.

Worth flagging early for anyone reading this from outside Europe: those same tanks mean Valerie cannot cross an ocean under her own power, so a buyer in the United States, Canada or Australia is looking at professional shipping rather than a self-delivery passage. That is a real cost to factor into the total picture, and I go through what shipping actually runs to each of those three destinations in the Wardroom below.

Comfort, Kept Simple and Kept Working

The rest of the specification reads the same way: sensible, well-chosen, and clearly used rather than just installed and forgotten. Hydraulic bow and stern thrusters, which matters more than it sounds; hydraulic systems are cooled by the fluid running through them, so you can lean on them continuously in a genuinely tight lock or a difficult crosswind without them overheating and needing to rest, unlike an electric thruster. Air conditioning, central heating via a Kabola boiler (a genuine, well-regarded Dutch diesel-heating brand), a built-in dehumidification system, and a central vacuum system, the kind of detail that tells you the original owner thought about comfort at a genuinely granular level rather than ticking a options-list box.

Her electrical system runs on a Mastervolt 24/75 charger and 24/2500 inverter, both mid-range units from one of the most respected names in marine electrical integration, more than sufficient for galley, heating, and cabin systems between shore power connections. Navigation runs on a full Simrad suite (log, depth, wind, GPS, plotter, compass) with a Simrad/Robertson autopilot, Shipmate VHF, radar, and AIS, a genuinely serious navigation and safety package for a boat of this size.

Below decks, three cabins sleep six: a spacious owner’s cabin with its own en-suite, a guest cabin in the bow, and a third cabin with bunks, plus a separate guest toilet. Two WCs and two showers across the boat, double glazing throughout, and a genuinely comprehensive comfort list, washer, dishwasher, full galley, salon and dinette, warm water on demand, a swimming platform and ladder.

At EUR 569,000, and with a single careful owner, a heated winter shed every year of her life, and hours this low for her age, Valerie represents exactly the kind of boat a serious buyer hopes to find and rarely does.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The full engine and drivetrain picture: what 4,995 hours on an Iveco AIFO 8065 M12 actually means for remaining service life, and what a pre-purchase survey should focus on given her age

- The real annual cost of keeping her: fuel, berthing, insurance, and servicing on a twin-Iveco, 48-tonne steel motor yacht

- What it actually costs to ship her to the USA, Canada or Australia: real shipping figures, import duty differences between the three, and why one route lands dramatically less than the others

- What a single-owner, heated-shed history is genuinely worth: how much weight that provenance should carry with a surveyor and a buyer

- My honest assessment of EUR 569,000: how she compares against the wider Dutch steel motor yacht market right now

What 4,995 Hours Really Means for the Iveco AIFO 8065 M12..[article continues below]

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There is a particular red she is painted in that you do not see often on a trawler hull, a deep oxblood rather than the navy or black that dominates this category, and it works because it does not try to hide what she is. She sits low and purposeful in the water, flybridge shaded, radar dome mounted high on the mast... The kind of profile that reads the same whether she is idling off a Turkish anchorage or working her way north through open water. Nothing about her silhouette suggests a coastal weekender. Everything about it suggests a vessel built to go somewhere and stay there for a while.

The vessel in question is a Vripack Trawler 1960, built in 2010 by Tufan & Brothers in Turkey, and she is currently offered at €695,000 through Sjoerd Paddenburg at De Valk Loosdrecht. At 19.60 metres LOA with a 5.60-metre beam and 1.50-metre draught, she displaces 57.5 tonnes, a figure that tells you immediately this is a genuine displacement platform rather than a semi-displacement hull wearing a trawler’s clothes. She carries CE Category A certification, the ocean-going classification, and that single fact does more work in this price bracket than almost anything else on the specification sheet.

Vripack’s naval architecture needs little introduction to anyone who follows this category closely. The Dutch studio, founded in 1961, effectively defined the modern trawler yacht through Dick Boon’s original Doggersbank design, and every vessel carrying the Vripack name since has inherited that same underlying logic: displacement hull forms, practical deck arrangements and a design philosophy that prioritises seakeeping. What makes this particular example interesting is where she was built. Tufan & Brothers is a Turkish yard with a growing reputation of its own, most recently announcing a 40-metre superyacht project at their Tuzla facility, and steel construction of this kind, executed to Vripack’s specification outside the Netherlands, has become an increasingly common route to genuine Dutch design pedigree at a materially lower build cost.

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The hull itself is a multi hard chine configuration in steel, painted that distinctive red, with a woodcore superstructure sitting above it. That combination, steel below the waterline and a lighter composite structure above, is a deliberate weight-management decision rather than a compromise. It keeps the vessel’s centre of gravity low, which matters directly for stability and roll characteristics, while avoiding the added upkeep burden of steel plating in areas of the vessel that see the most sun, salt and general wear. It is standard practice across this category of build, but it is worth understanding precisely because it shapes what a surveyor will be looking at closely, and where.

Propulsion comes from twin John Deere 6068TFM diesels, rated at 225hp (165.6kW) each and turning through Twin Disc 5061 gearboxes at a 2.43:1 reduction ratio onto fixed five-blade stainless propellers. The 6068TFM is a genuinely commercial-grade platform, built by John Deere for workboats, fishing vessels and long-duty trawler applications as much as for pleasure craft, and it carries the parts availability and dealer network reach that comes with an engine built primarily for people who cannot afford downtime. At 1,500 hours on the clock, these are engines still well inside their useful service life. Cruising at 9 knots against a maximum of 10, she burns approximately 24 litres per hour combined, giving a range of 1,130 nautical miles, figures that place her comfortably within genuine coastal and short-ocean passage-making capability rather than marina-to-marina cruising alone.

She has not sat idle either. In 2020 she went through a comprehensive cosmetic and structural refresh: hull, superstructure and exterior fully repainted, teak surfaces refurbished or renewed, interior ceilings replaced, and the engine room stripped and repainted with all mechanical parts serviced or changed. That alone would be a reasonable maintenance story for a vessel of this age. What sets this listing apart, in my opinion, is what happened in 2025. A genuinely substantial follow-up programme covering hull thickness gauging, a full bottom strip and repaint, shaft seal and bearing renewal, underwater light replacement and a complete recarpeting throughout. Taken together, that is not routine annual servicing. That is the kind of pre-sale preparation that normally shows up as a survey finding list, already actioned before the vessel ever reached the market.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The engine room in full: what 1,500 hours on the John Deere 6068TFM actually means for remaining service life, and what the Twin Disc gearbox and 2025 shaft seal renewal tell you about how she has been run

- The 2025 maintenance programme, line by line: what hull thickness gauging results should tell a buyer before survey, and why a full bottom strip the same year is unusual to see already completed

- The generators, the watermaker and the electrical system: twin ONAN 13.5kW sets both sitting at exactly 3,000 hours, what that pattern suggests about how she has been operated, and the Mastervolt system behind them

- My honest assessment of €695,000: how she compares against the wider Category A steel trawler market at this size, and what that price genuinely buys against what it does not

The Wardroom

The Engine Room in Full

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A reader got in touch to point me toward this one, and I am glad they did. If you know a boat with a story worth telling, I want to hear about it too.

I want to start with a video (credit: Off Center Harbor), because it puts you straight aboard in a way words on a page cannot.

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It is a short piece, filmed by Off Center Harbor, one of the better classic-boat channels doing this kind of work, and it puts you on deck with George and Patrice, the couple who own and live aboard her now. George explains the boat in the first thirty seconds, and it is worth repeating word for word: “This boat was drawn by Bill Garden for neighbours of his near Vancouver Island, British Columbia. So it’s a very local boat in all kinds of ways. The materials it’s built with are local. Douglas fir, white oak, and red cedar.”

Then the detail that matters most to anyone actually considering a boat like this: “It’s a long-range seaworthy boat. And we’ve taken it to Southeast Alaska and back. So that’s the range of the boat since I’ve had it, Pacific Northwest to Southeast Alaska.”

That is an owner, on camera, telling you exactly where he has taken his boat.

Her name is Arctic Light, however, as is often the case, she was not always called that.

The Name She Was Born With

Before Arctic Light, she carried two other names. She was launched as Ocean Lady, the name she kept for her first year or two on the water, before becoming Nisku, the name she held for the 25 years Duane owned her. She was later renamed Griffin during a subsequent owner’s tenure, before taking on her current name, Arctic Light. She was drawn in 1970 by William Garden, one of the most significant naval architects the Pacific Northwest has ever produced, and built by Bent Jespersen, working alongside Dave and Kathy Thomas, at Philbrook’s Boatyard in Sidney, British Columbia.

I have written about a Garden design before, a 1952 Fellows & Stewart trawler called JoAhna K, and if you read that piece you will already know why his name carries weight in the explorer yacht community (both owners and enthusiasts).

Garden designed more than 1,000 vessels spanning 60 incredible years, and an estimated 6,000 of them were actually built. His 36-foot Willard Vega effectively created the modern heavy-displacement trawler yacht category. His 42-foot Wanderer tri-cabin motoryacht was copied so widely by Taiwanese builders in the 1970s that it defined an entire era of production cruising boats. Mystic Seaport holds 675 of his designs in their permanent collection. In 2006, Canada made him a Member of the Order of Canada for his contribution to naval architecture and marine engineering.

Arctic Light is described, in the Classic Yacht Register’s own words, as “one of the most iconic of the yachts designed by William Garden” and a representation of “the finest of Pacific Northwest boat design and craftsmanship.” That is how the classic yacht world itself talks about her.

She is built the way boats from that yard and that era were meant to be built: red cedar and Douglas fir carvel planking over steam-bent white oak frames, on a 7.5-inch by 14-inch by 56-foot Douglas fir keel. A gum wood stem, raked, with a canoe stern. Deck beams of yellow cedar. Decks of vertical-grain Douglas fir over two layers of plywood and epoxy. This is not a boat that was built quickly, or cheaply, or to a production template. It was built by a small yard, to one man’s drawings, for a specific working purpose on a specific stretch of coastline.

None of those material choices were accidental. Douglas fir was the backbone timber of Pacific Northwest boatbuilding for good reason: straight grained and strong for its weight, and growing right on the doorstep of yards like Philbrook’s. It is why Garden specified it for the keel and the decking, the places that need to carry load without adding unnecessary weight aloft.

White oak went into the frames because it bends beautifully under steam and holds its shape once it cools, exactly what a hull full of curves needs. Red cedar did the planking work because it resists rot and marine borers naturally, stays light, and has been the timber of choice on this coast for boats and canoes alike for longer than anyone has kept records. Put together, it is a hull built from what the coastline itself provided, chosen because it worked, not because it was cheap or fashionable.

That combination of timbers was about to earn its keep. Her working life began at Hakai Pass…

The Lodge at the End of the World

If you have never heard of Hakai Pass, you are not alone, and that is rather the point. It sits on the remote central coast of British Columbia, inside the Hakai Lúxvbálís Conservancy, reachable only by boat or floatplane, and it has been quietly famous among serious salmon and halibut anglers for decades as some of the best fishing water on the entire Pacific coast.

For many years, Nisku, as she was then known, worked those waters under Dwain Howard, supporting the construction and operation of what became the premier fishing lodge at Hakai Pass. This was not decorative work. A remote lodge on an unreachable stretch of coastline needs a genuinely capable vessel to keep it running: moving people, moving supplies, moving equipment, in conditions that do not care whether you are in a hurry. That is exactly the kind of work a William Garden North Sea Trawler Yacht was drawn to do, and exactly the kind of work she did.

A boat that has spent years earning its keep on a coastline like that has nothing left to prove about seaworthiness. The only remaining question is what happened to her afterwards.

From Working Boat to Expedition Life

What happened afterwards is that she found her way to two people who understood exactly what they were looking at.

Her current owners are, in their own words, an expedition ship captain and a documentary filmmaker. That is not a casual pairing of professions. One of them has spent a working life at sea, likely on vessels considerably larger and more demanding than Arctic Light, and understands precisely what a boat needs to be reliable somewhere remote. The other has spent a working life capturing places most people never see, and understands precisely what it takes logistically to get a crew and equipment there and back safely.

Between them, they have kept Arctic Light not as a museum piece but as a genuinely operated vessel. All mechanical, structural, household, navigation and safety systems have, per the owners’ own account, been modernised, upgraded, or determined to be satisfactory. This is a boat being used the way she was designed to be used: on the coastal waters of the Salish and Haida Nations, up through British Columbia and into Alaska. George’s own words in the Off Center Harbor video confirm it directly. Southeast Alaska and back.

On camera, Patrice talks about the salon as “really one of the most important spaces on the vessel, because this is where we do a lot of our socialising,” and points out the galley: “We’ve got a really good gas stove because I love to cook, and this was a really nice feature in stainless steel to match the fridge.” George talks about the foredeck as one of the features that drew him to the boat in the first place, a place “to experience whatever region we’re in, wildlife encounters, bird encounters, your environment.” Patrice again: “This is a great place to hang out, especially on the sunny days, because you just have this great vista where you can stand out and see all the nature, wildlife. It’s awesome.”

George sums up what the boat actually is for them in a single line: “This boat is really a vehicle for the natural world.”

That is not language written by a copywriter trying to sell a boat. That is two people who live aboard her, describing what she means to them.

What She Is, In Numbers

Set the story aside for a moment, because the specification stands on its own.

Arctic Light measures 58 feet on deck, with a 16.5-foot beam and a 7.5-foot draft, displacing 120,000 lbs. She is powered by a single Caterpillar D-333 diesel, with approximately 2,000 hours on a rebuild. She carries 2,000 gallons of fuel and 600 gallons of water, and cruises at 8 knots burning approximately 3 gallons per hour. Work that through and her theoretical range comes out at roughly 5,300 nautical miles on a single tank. Real-world range always sits below the theoretical figure once current, weather and a sensible reserve are factored in, so I would plan around 3,200 to 3,700 nautical miles for actual passage planning. Either way, that is Pacific Northwest to Southeast Alaska and back with plenty in reserve, exactly the route George confirmed in the video above, and enough to make a good many other passages realistic too.

She is fitted with Naiad 254 active roll stabilisation, two Northern Lights generators (an 8kW and an 18kW unit), and an Accusteer/Comnav autopilot. She is a U.S.C.G. documented vessel, imported into Canada, and currently berthed at Van Isle Marina on Vancouver Island, in Sidney, British Columbia, not far from the yard where she was built more than half a century ago.

A single main engine on a vessel like this is worth pausing on, because, as always, it is a genuine point of discussion, and I will come back to it in detail in The Wardroom below, alongside what a Caterpillar D-333 actually means for parts availability, serviceability, and passage planning in 2026.

The Part That Makes This Different

Here is where this story departs from most of what I write.

I went looking for a brokerage listing for Arctic Light. There is not one. Not on YachtWorld, not on boats.com, not on BoatTrader, not through Camper & Nicholsons or Northrop & Johnson, not even through Van Isle Marina’s own current inventory, where she is berthed. She is simply not there.

What that tells me is that this is being handled quietly, off-market, direct between owner and buyer, or through a channel that has not yet reached the major portals. It happens more often than you would think with vessels of genuine pedigree. The right buyer for a boat like this is not scrolling YachtWorld on a Tuesday evening. They are the kind of person who already knows what a William Garden North Sea Trawler Yacht is, and who hears about a good one through exactly the kind of network this story is part of.

There is no asking price attached to Arctic Light, at least not one I can find anywhere public. She is, as far as I can tell, offered at POA. I am not going to invent a number to fill that gap, and I would encourage you to treat anyone who does with some suspicion.

What I can tell you, in The Wardroom, is what a boat like this is actually worth working out for yourself: what a single Caterpillar D-333 means for reliability and running costs against the twin-engine alternatives more common in this size range, what a 1970 timber hull of this specification should cost to maintain on the BC coast, what buying a boat with no listed price actually looks like in practice, and how her Hakai Pass working history should factor into any serious survey.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The single-engine question: what a lone Caterpillar D-333 means for redundancy, serviceability and parts availability compared with the twin-engine layout more typical of vessels this size, and what I would want confirmed before any offer

- The timber hull reality: what 56 years of red cedar, Douglas fir and white oak actually costs to maintain on the British Columbia coast, and the survey questions that matter most given her working history

- Buying a boat with no price: how a genuine POA sale actually works in practice, why the current market makes a fixed asking price genuinely difficult to justify, and how to approach an off-market vessel like this without a broker in the middle

- My honest assessment of what Arctic Light is actually worth: a realistic value range based on comparable William Garden trawlers, her Hakai Pass provenance, and the condition her current owners describe

The Wardroom

The Single-Engine Question

A lot of buyers see a single main engine on a 58-foot expedition boat and instinctively read it as a compromise. On Arctic Light, I would argue the opposite.

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I get contacted by designers and builders fairly often once a video goes out, usually a friendly note or a correction on some detail. This time was a bit different. A man called Jos van den Enden got in touch and told me he designed this exact boat.

He runs Azza Yachting BV, a Dutch maritime design and development business with an impressive track record. He says this particular trawler was his own special design, built at a shipyard he ran himself and created to see how much extra usable living space he could design into a hull of this size, and that only three of them were ever built, this being the enlarged version.

She’s a genuinely good looking trawler-style motor yacht in her own right, which is exactly why that email pulled me back to her for a second, much deeper pass.

I don’t live in the US or Australia myself (I live in London), but a huge number of you do, and after nearly every trawler video I get asked the same question: could I actually bring one of these home? So alongside the designer’s story and every technical system aboard, this piece includes real numbers on what it would cost to ship her to either country.

If you have not seen the full boat tour video yet, then I have added it below.

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The Boat Herself

This is the Ebyca Trawler 1300, currently named ‘Plan B’, built in 2011, lying in Drimmelen with Sterkenburg Yacht Brokers (link below). At 13.00 metres long with a 4.10 metre beam and a genuinely shallow 1.05 metre draught, she is the smallest boat I filmed on that trip, and in some ways the most quietly clever.

She is a multi-chine steel trawler, which in plain English means her hull is built from several flat panels welded together at angles, rather than one continuously curved shape.

Dutch trawler-style yards have leaned on this hull form for decades, and it earns its place on genuine seakeeping merit rather than just tradition. The flat panels give her strong initial stability, so she sits steady and doesn’t roll around alarmingly at rest, at anchor, or alongside, which matters enormously if you’re aboard her for anything longer than a weekend.

The hard chines also act a bit like built-in spray rails, helping to knock down and deflect spray forward rather than letting it climb the topsides in a head sea. And because the hull is built from flat panels rather than continuously curved plate, she is a genuinely straightforward hull to survey and maintain over her life.

What amazed me stepping aboard was how much boat she gives you for 13 metres.

A spacious saloon, a genuinely lovely owner’s cabin, a second guest cabin with bunk beds for five berths across two cabins in total, and a second helm station out on the aft deck with an open cockpit, the kind of set-up that lets you handle her from outside when you are coming alongside rather than craning your neck out of a window.

The interior throughout is finished in teak, which gives her a warmth that a lot of modern production boats simply don’t have.

On deck and at the helm, she carries a genuinely sensible navigation and safety package for a boat this size: Simrad log and depth gauge, an AP24 autopilot, VHF, a compass, plus a Raymarine GPS and plotter.

Manoeuvring is handled by electric bow and stern thrusters, both operable by wireless remote control, and the anchor comes up on an electric winch.

Below decks she carries 1,100 litres of fuel, 900 litres of fresh water, and a single WC and shower. A cockpit cover is fitted for the aft deck, and the comfort list runs to a stereo, TV, cooker, oven, microwave, freezer, a fully fitted galley and dinette, a pressurised water system with warm water on demand, and a swimming platform with ladder.

Her underwater hull was treated again this spring, in 2026, which tells you the current owner is keeping her ready to go rather than letting maintenance slide while she sits on the market.

Displacement sits at 17,000kg, headroom at 195cm, and she draws just 1.05 metres, shallow enough for canals and drying creeks that would ground plenty of bigger boats outright.

And here is the thing Jos van den Enden wanted me to understand: this is not a standard production hull. It is a special design, and there are only three of them in the entire world.

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This deep dive article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- Every technical system aboard: the VW diesel, ZF and Python drivetrain, Victron electrical system, and Webasto heating, verified against manufacturer specifications

- Her genuine liveaboard credentials: what actually makes a 13-metre trawler workable as a full-time home

- What Jos van den Enden is doing now: his current shipyards, his son’s involvement, and the design lineage this hull sits inside

- What it would actually cost to ship her to the US or Australia: real transport methods, real freight quotes, and the import duty nobody mentions until you are already committed

- The real annual cost of owning her: fuel, berthing, insurance, and engine maintenance on a single VW diesel

- My honest assessment of €269,000: what she is actually worth against the wider Dutch trawler market

Every System Aboard, Checked Against the Manufacturer

A genuine deep dive means going beyond the spec sheet, so every system below has been checked against the manufacturer’s own current specifications.

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You have (probably) thought about it. Everyone who has ever stood on a pontoon at dusk, looked at a boat with the lights on inside and someone moving about in the galley, has thought about it. Sell the house. Clear the mortgage. Buy the boat. And then just, well, go.

Then the sensible part of your brain interrupts, and the sensible part of your brain does not have any numbers to work with, only fear and perhaps a bit of anxiety. It says things like “you’d never afford it” and “insurance must be a fortune” and “what happens when it gets cold.” None of those objections are wrong exactly. They are just vague. And vague fear is exactly the kind of fear that stops people doing something that might actually be within reach.

So the aim of this article is to replace the vague fear with real numbers.

I have spent years covering over 500 explorer yachts, including the Nordhavns and Berings and steel trawler conversions that people genuinely take offshore and live aboard for years at a time, not weekend cruisers that get called “liveaboards” by people who spend four nights a year on them. This piece is not about one boat. It is about the actual cost of this actual life, whichever of those three routes you take into it.

Here is the surprising part, the bit that changed how I personally think about the whole dream. Selling a mortgaged house does not just fund the boat. It stops a huge, ongoing bill. Mortgage or rent, council tax (or overseas equivalents), buildings insurance, gas and electric, the commute, the constant slow drip of home maintenance. Add all of that up in a typical UK or US city and you are often looking at somewhere between $1,600 and $4,300 (roughly £1,200 to £3,240 / €1,410 to €3,800) a month simply evaporating, whether you are aboard a boat or not. Most people budget the boat life against zero. They should be budgeting it against what they currently pay to live on land, because that number is really doing a lot more work than people give it credit for.

Right, the numbers.

At the accessible end, a well-maintained Nordhavn 40 or 43 on the used market runs $350,000 to $500,000. Step up to something like a Bering 65, built specifically for long-range expedition liveaboard use, and used examples (where you can find them, they are not common on the brokerage market yet) start closer to $600,000 to $800,000. Or go the value route: a converted Dutch or Belgian steel trawler, the kind of ex-working vessel that many yards in the Netherlands turn into serious long-range cruisers, and you are looking at €200,000 to €400,000 for something genuinely capable, not a weekend project boat with a paint job.

Three very different price points. Three very different running costs, too, and this is where most people’s mental model falls apart, because bigger and newer does not always mean proportionally more expensive to live on.

A comfortable, marina-based Nordhavn 43 liveaboard, someone anchoring out for part of the year rather than paying for a berth every single night, runs somewhere around $24,000 to $33,000 a year in running costs. A Bering 65, being actively cruised for 4 to 6 months of the year with a larger genset, bigger insurance premium, and a watermaker running constantly, lands between $39,000 and $57,000 a year. A converted steel trawler, owner doing their own maintenance, running 800-plus hours a year rather than sitting in a marina, comes in at €19,000 to €30,000 a year, and that is with the owner putting in real DIY hours to keep the number down.

Set any of those figures against what a mortgaged house in a city like London, San Francisco or Sydney actually costs to run each year, and the boat life stops looking like an indulgence and starts looking like ‘doable’ arithmetic.

Now for the number that surprised me most, and I think it will surprise you too. Insurance on a boat costs somewhere between 6 and 9x what you would pay to insure a house of the same value. A £350,000 house (roughly $464,000 / €408,000) might cost £800 to £1,200 a year to insure. The same value in a liveaboard boat costs £5,000 to £7,500 (roughly $6,600 to $9,950 / €5,830 to €8,750). And no, that is not a typo, and not everyone selling you the dream tends to mention it upfront.

There is a lot more to work out before you make this decision seriously.

What a marina berth actually costs depending on where in the world you keep the boat, and it varies by as much as 300% between locations. What heating costs in a genuinely cold winter, which is the single most underestimated line item in every liveaboard budget I have researched.

What an annual maintenance sinking fund honestly looks like, the real figure, not the hopeful one most first-time buyers write down before they own the boat. And what you stop paying for on land the moment you sell up, set against everything above, so you can see the real net picture rather than just one half of it.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The full berthing comparison across the marinas people actually use: Mediterranean, US East Coast, Pacific Northwest, and what the same 45 to 50-foot explorer costs to keep in each one, month by month

- The maintenance sinking fund maths that catches some first-time owners out: what haul-out, antifouling, engine and generator servicing, and watermaker upkeep actually cost across a Nordhavn, a Bering, and a converted steel trawler, with the honest figure, not the hopeful one

- The fuel, heating and systems running costs nobody quotes you upfront: including the winter heating bill that regularly runs higher than people’s entire fuel budget for the year

- My honest assessment of who this life genuinely makes financial sense for, and who should think again: the full net comparison against what you currently pay to live on land, and the specific circumstances where selling up and buying the boat is the better financial decision, not just the more romantic one

Some of these numbers will surprise you. One of them changed how I think about the whole dream. Paid subscribers also get The Wardroom, my private community where serious buyers and owners talk through exactly these decisions, anonymously if they prefer. If this kind of honest, numbers-first writing is useful to you, becoming a paid subscriber is what funds the filming trips and yard visits that make it possible. Come and see the real picture.

The Wardroom is Yacht Buoy’s members area. For just GBP 75 a year (that works out at roughly GBP 6.25 a month if you would rather pay monthly, or around USD 8.34 / EUR 7.31 a month), you get the full ownership picture behind every boat and every life decision I cover here, not just the brochure version.

What Living Aboard an Explorer Yacht Actually Costs: The Full Numbers…

I want to work through this in full, vessel by vessel, cost by cost, because the honest answer depends enormously on which route into this amazing ‘seafaring life’ you take, and where in the world you plan to keep the boat.

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Tomorrow morning I am heading to the Netherlands from London on day trip.

I have arranged access to film four boats in a single day, all sitting with the same broker, ranging from a bridge-hopping steel vlet you could genuinely live aboard on a modest budget, right up to a serious ocean-capable motor yacht I have been wanting to get aboard for months. It is a genuine mixed bag, and I think there is something in this lineup for almost everyone reading this.

Here are the first two, including full specs and asking prices.

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Boat One: A Dutch Motor Yacht, EUR 565,000

Let us start with the boat I suspect a lot of you already know the shape of, even if you have never heard the builder’s name. This yard is one of those Dutch builders whose motor yachts you have probably seen a hundred times on a marina walk without clocking who actually built them. She was built in 2007, and at 16.10 metres with a 4.60 metre beam, she sits in that sweet spot of being genuinely capable without needing a professional crew to run her.

She is steel-hulled with teak decks, twin diesels producing 180hp each, and those engines have logged 2,200 hours, which is comfortable, well-used territory. Stabilisers are fitted, which matters more than people think on a boat this size when you are crossing open water rather than pottering the canals, and she has hydraulic bow and stern thrusters. That matters more than it sounds. Electric thrusters are fine for the odd nudge in and out of a marina berth, but they overheat and need to rest between uses. Hydraulic thrusters are cooled by the fluid running through them, so you can lean on them continuously in a genuinely difficult docking situation, a tight lock, or a strong crosswind, without worrying about them cutting out on you halfway through.

Two cabins sleep four, and the interior has had a full refresh, a restyled salon, new electrics, and high-end 2-volt gel batteries. At EUR 565,000, she sits at a genuinely accessible price point for a 16-metre steel motor yacht from a recognised Dutch builder. I am looking forward to seeing whether she runs as well as the spec sheet suggests.

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Boat Two: A Traditional Dutch Vlet, EUR 149,500

This is the one I am most curious about, and probably the most interesting boat on the trip for anyone dreaming about getting onto the water without remortgaging the house.

Built in 1991, she is a traditional round-bilged steel vlet, 13.60 metres long with a 4.00 metre beam. The detail that actually matters here is her air draft of around 2.85 metres. That is low enough to get her under a huge number of Dutch and other European bridges without being worried if your radar arch is going to get damaged, which opens up a genuinely wide cruising area across the inland waterways, somewhere a taller boat simply cannot follow.

A single diesel at 113hp drives her, which is entirely typical for a vlet of this displacement, and she carries double glazing, central heating, and a washer-dryer, so she is genuinely set up for extended time aboard rather than just weekend trips. Two cabins sleep four, with a separate owner’s cabin forward. At EUR 149,500, this is about as accessible an entry point into serious Dutch steel cruising as you will find anywhere on the market right now.

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The other two boats I am filming tomorrow are a different proposition entirely. One of them is asking EUR 569,000 and the other EUR 269,000, and both of them deserve a much longer conversation than I can have with you here in the free section. Exactly where I am going, who the broker is, and my full first impressions of both vessels are below, for paid subscribers only.

By the way, it is thanks to my premium subscribers here on my Substack that I can make trips like this one at all. Of course, brokers and builders sometimes offer to cover my travel (not on this occasion). But I think my readers and audience appreciate the totally independent perspective that comes from me paying my own way, filming what I actually find, and telling you the truth about it afterwards.

This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- Exactly where I am going and who I am filming with: the broker, the location, and why this yard is worth knowing about

- *Boat Three, the single-owner steel kotter*: full specification and my honest first impressions of a serious 18-metre steel motor yacht from a single owner since new

- *Boat Four, the modern steel trawler*: full specification on this 2011-built steel trawler, and what her recent underwater hull treatment tells you about how she has been looked after

- My honest assessment of all four asking prices: how they compare against each other and against the wider Dutch brokerage market right now

The Wardroom is Yacht Buoy’s members area. For just GBP 75 a year (that works out at roughly GBP 6.25 a month if you would rather pay monthly, or around USD 8.34 / EUR 7.31 a month), you get the full ownership picture behind every boat I cover, not just the brochure version. If you are serious about this world, it earns its keep on the first article.

Where I Am Going, and Who I Am Filming With

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I have covered a lot of expedition yachts over the years, but every so often one crosses my desk that makes me stop and put the kettle on before I even open the brochure. Ugly Betty is one of those.

Some people might say that she is not pretty in the conventional sense. But what they do not realise, is that she was never meant to be. Ugly Betty is an FPB 78, one of only three ever built, designed by Steve Dashew, the man who spent decades as one of the world’s most respected offshore sailors before deciding the future of serious ocean passage-making was not under sail at all. She is the last of her line. When Dashew retired, the FPB programme closed with her, and nobody will ever build another.

She has just come to market with Fraser Yachts for USD $4,950,000, and if that number makes you wince, stay with me. By the end of this piece you will understand exactly what that figure buys, and why a Dashew-designed FPB commands a premium price that a superficially similar-sized motor yacht simply cannot ask for.

Who is Steve Dashew, and why does his name carry this much weight in the passage-making world? Before the FPB series, Dashew and his wife Linda spent a lifetime designing and sailing serious offshore sailing yachts, culminating in Beowulf, an 80-foot explorer they sailed extensively before selling her.

What came next was, by their own account, a genuine rethink…Before we continue, lets have a look around Ugly Betty

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Having logged tens of thousands of nautical miles at sea, the Dashews concluded that a purpose-built motor yacht, engineered with the same rigour as a serious ocean-going sailboat but without a rig to manage, could deliver comparable range, comparable seakeeping and vastly more comfort and simplicity for a couple cruising the highest latitudes on earth. They called it the “un-sailboat.” The first hull, FPB 83 Wind Horse, launched in 2005 and became their home for 7 years and over 60,000 nautical miles. Everything that followed, including the boat you are reading about now, traces its DNA directly back to that one prototype.

The FPB family eventually grew to 18 hulls in total: 11 of the smaller FPB 64, 2 of the FPB 70, 3 of the FPB 78, one FPB 83 (the Wind Horse prototype) and one FPB 97, the largest and fastest of the fleet.

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Every single one was built by Circa Marine in Whangarei, New Zealand, a family-run yard with more than 40 years in aluminium fabrication and marine engineering, and the only builder ever licensed to construct an FPB. When Steve and Linda Dashew retired, the programme closed with them. There will be no more...which is a real shame, especially as the explorer yacht might has become incredibly popular.

More and more people, want a vessel that has long range, has the ability to take on gnarly weather and has the safety and redundancy needed for remote and autonomous passagemaking.

The FPB 78 sits near the top of that family tree, one step below the flagship FPB 97. Three hulls were built: Cochise, which the Dashews kept as their own final FPB; Grey Wolf II, an MCA Category 0 certified vessel that has cruised the Pacific, Antarctic, Norway and the Northwest Passage; and Ugly Betty, the boat in front of us today, the last FPB 78 ever built and, by any measure, one of the most well-travelled.

Originally launched as Iron Lady II, she changed hands in 2022 and was renamed Ugly Betty by her current owners, Bruce and Nora, who had spent years offshore aboard high-performance Gunboat catamarans before deciding, in their words, to go over to the dark side. Since then, Ugly Betty has been about as far from a marina ornament as a yacht can get.

She has cruised Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, the Northwest Passage, Antarctica, Alaska, Patagonia and the Pacific. The official Scott Polar Research Institute transit database, which tracks every documented Northwest Passage crossing on record, confirms her passage in 2023. That is not a marketing aspiration. That is an entry in the same register that tracks polar transits going back to Amundsen.

So what is she actually like as an engineering proposition, and why does a boat that looks, frankly, a bit like a workboat cost the same as a much flashier 30-metre flybridge cruiser?

Start with the hull. Ugly Betty is built from bare, unpainted aluminium, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an unfinished one. A bare hull means any corrosion, any crevicing, any impact damage becomes visible the moment it happens, to the owner and to a surveyor, rather than hiding under gel coat or topside paint until it becomes a genuine structural problem.

Aluminium of this quality is also lighter than steel for equivalent strength, and Dashew’s approach was never to chase the weight saving for its own sake. It was to spend that saved weight on reinforcement exactly where an ocean would eventually test it.

The proportions matter too. At 25.4 metres on the waterline and just 6.1 metres of beam, the FPB 78 is a genuinely narrow hull for her length, narrower than almost anything else in her size class. That is not an accident and it is not an efficiency compromise. A narrower hull sits lower, rolls less violently, and behaves very differently in the short, steep seas that build in high latitudes compared with the long rolling swells of the tropics.

The FPB 78’s range of positive stability runs to 140 degrees, roughly double what a typical motor yacht of this size can claim, which means she can heel further, recover from a genuinely severe knockdown, and come back upright rather than staying over. That number is the entire engineering argument for the shape of this boat, and it is worth sitting with for a moment if you have only ever thought about stability in terms of how steady a boat feels tied up in the marina.

Propulsion is twin John Deere 6068 diesels, rated at 230 horsepower each in their standard continuous specification. That is a modest number by the standards of a modern flybridge motor yacht of this length, and again, that is the point rather than an oversight.

Two smaller engines mean that losing one still leaves you with meaningful forward progress rather than a dead boat, they run at a more efficient partial load at the FPB’s genuine cruising speed of around 10.5 knots, and they are mechanically straightforward diesels that a competent marine engineer almost anywhere in the world will recognise and be able to service. None of that is glamorous. All of it matters enormously if you are somewhere between Nuuk and the top of Baffin Island and something needs fixing.

The range on offer, per Berthon’s official class figures for the FPB 78 series, is 6,500 nautical miles at 10 knots, dropping to 4,500 nautical miles if you push the cruise up to 11 knots. That is the kind of number that lets an owner genuinely plan an ocean crossing or a full Northwest Passage season without spending every waking hour thinking about the next fuel dock.

Inside, Ugly Betty accommodates six guests across three staterooms, each with its own en-suite, plus separate crew quarters for two. She carries dual redundant navigation systems, Starlink and Iridium satellite connectivity, a double-bottom hull, five watertight doors, and a comprehensive inventory of spares and tools built up specifically for extended, self-sufficient passages. This is not a yacht that was dressed up for a boat show. Every part of the specification reads like it was chosen by someone who has actually needed it.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- What ownership of a boat like this actually costs: the real annual maintenance reserve for a bare aluminium hull with genuine high-latitude mileage on her, and what a competent survey needs to check first

- The build year discrepancy nobody else is reporting: two independent sources say 2015, two say 2017, and I explain what that actually tells you about how this vessel was built and delivered

- The engine spec almost every other write-up on this boat has got wrong: what she is really powered by, and why it matters more than you would think

- My honest assessment of the $4,950,000 asking price: how it stacks up against comparable explorer yachts, and who this boat is genuinely right for

The engine spec almost everyone else has wrong…

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Some of you will have seen my tour of Sherakhan already. I filmed it 2 years ago, a full 30-minute walkthrough of her, and it remains one of my favourite videos I’ve made. But roughly 70,000 of you have joined my YouTube channel since then, and I would guess most of you haven’t seen it. So, I wanted to give you the background on this boat, because her story deserves more than a quick caption (if you have not seen it yet, then you can watch my latest video HERE).

I’ve known her captain, Kevin, for a while now, which is a nice thing about doing this job long enough. He had me, my wife and our two kids on board for an afternoon last year, Jack was 7 at the time, Freya was 4.

We weren’t paying charter guests, obviously, just a family being shown around, but the level of care we got was something else entirely. I still think about it now. Jack and Freya spent most of the afternoon tearing round the decks with the captain’s own son, three kids running wild on a 70-metre yacht like it was the best playground on earth, while I sat down to lunch with Kevin and my wife, Nicola, on the aft deck, a full sit-down meal cooked by the onboard chef, the sun out, nowhere else either of us needed to be.

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In four decades of being on and around boats, that afternoon still stands out as one of the best of the lot. If that’s the welcome a family gets for a few hours with no money changing hands, I can completely understand why one set of charter guests booked a week and ended up staying for seven.

Here’s the dream first, because that’s usually where I start. You step aboard a 70-metre motor yacht with a genuine 20m saloon, double height, a glass-bottomed spa pool set into the ceiling above you, two sweeping staircases either side leading up to a minstrel’s gallery with a bar and a dancefloor.

You climb up on to a circular observation lounge built around the funnel, 20 metres above the water, and watch the world go paston all sides. You have a library stocked with first editions. You have a Balinese-style spa with a sauna and a masseuse. Nineteen crew are looking after 26 of you, and somewhere in your head you are trying to work out how a boat can feel this much like a genuine traditional steel motor yacht and this comfortable at the same time.

That tension is exactly the point. Sherakhan looks like she has always been a yacht. She has not. For 45 years she was something else entirely.

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From Training Ship to Superyacht

She was built and launched in 1966 by A. Vuyk & Zonen, a Rotterdam-area shipyard at Capelle aan den IJssel that had been building solid, unglamorous working vessels since 1872. Her name was Prinses Margriet, and her job was training cadets for the Dutch merchant navy, operated out of Terschelling by the Willem Barentsz Maritime Institute. For four and a half decades she took young Dutch sailors out into the North Sea and the Atlantic and taught them their seafaring trade on a genuinely tough working hull.

That hull is the whole story. When Jan Verkerk, the Dutch businessman who would go on to buy her, had her surveyed in July 2002, the plating came back at 30mm thick. For context, a modern superyacht hull typically runs around 8mm. After 45 years of hard commercial service in the North Sea, Prinses Margriet’s steel had corroded by only a single millimetre. That is an extraordinary result for a working hull of that age, and it is precisely why Verkerk saw potential where most people would have seen a retired training vessel heading for scrap.

Verkerk knew what he was looking at. He had already converted M/Y Jaguar into an early charter success in the 1990s, and he would go on to do the same, more dramatically, with a former Soviet icebreaker that became the 77-metre Legend (sold to Eric and Wendy Schmidt in 2020). Prinses Margriet became his next project, and arguably his signature one.

The conversion took 3 years, from 2002 to 2005, working with naval architects KMC and KHMB Enkhuizen and interior designer Claudia Rijntjes. The scale of what they did is worth spelling out. The original steel superstructure, roughly 200 tonnes of it, came off entirely. In its place went 60 tonnes of aluminium, reshaped to echo the lines of a 1936 classic motor yacht rather than the boxy, top-heavy profile of a 1960s training ship. Verkerk himself talked about wanting to avoid the “clumpy” look that so many vessel conversions end up with. The steel hull below the waterline, that 3cm of proven plate, stayed exactly as it was.

The propulsion tells you something about Verkerk’s philosophy too. Rather than fitting twin engines for redundancy, as some modern explorer yachts do, he kept her on a single engine, a Caterpillar 3512B DI-TA producing 1,380hp, giving her a cruising speed of 11 knots and a range of around 3,500 nautical miles. Four decades of Dutch cadets had trained on single-engine operation. Verkerk’s reasoning was that if it had worked for the navy for that long, it did not need changing for a charter yacht either.

She relaunched, and took her first charter guests, on 23 June 2005. And the name that went on her stern was Sherakhan, after Shere Khan, the tiger from The Jungle Book. Verkerk’s daughter had been watching the Disney film on repeat during the conversion, and the name stuck. It is a heartwarming story for a boat that now has a tiger painting hanging in her main salon and a library named after her.

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What She Is Today

Sherakhan has had two significant refits since her 2005 relaunch. The first, completed at Icon Yachts in December 2017, changed her look considerably: the hull went from navy blue to brilliant white, and the interior moved from the darker, heavier classic palette of her early years to a lighter, more contemporary white scheme. Verkerk worked closely with his long-serving hotel manager, Manon de Wit, on that project, and by all accounts it worked. Her first charter clients after the refit extended their week to seven.

The second refit, in 2022, added a fitness gym and expanded the Balinese-themed spa with a second jacuzzi, a dedicated massage room, and sauna upgrades. Between the two, she has moved from “impressive classic conversion” to “genuine wellness-focused expedition yacht” without losing the character that made her interesting in the first place.

She now sleeps up to 26 guests across 13 cabins, including a 50 square metre master suite forward with its own study, and carries a crew of 19. At 1,945 gross tons and 69.65 metres, she is a genuinely large vessel, and her cruising résumé reflects it: Mediterranean summers, Caribbean and Central American winters, and expeditions to the Antarctic in December and January, which is not a sentence you can write about most charter yachts of any size.

If Sherakhan sounds like the right boat for your group, get in touch with me directly and I will handle the introduction from there. CLICK HERE to make an enquiry.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The full weekly cost of chartering Sherakhan: the base rate, APA, and gratuity expectations, broken down to a real total

- Jan Verkerk’s conversion philosophy across his fleet: what Sherakhan and Legend actually have in common, and why he keeps choosing overlooked, oversized hulls

- The steel hull at 60 years old: what that original 3cm plate means for her long-term future, and how a vessel like this ages compared to modern explorer builds

- My honest assessment of the price: how $595,000 a week actually compares against the rest of the expedition charter fleet

The Real Cost of a Week Aboard

The headline rate for Sherakhan is $595,000 per week (some brokers quote the equivalent figure in euros, depending on which agency you book through). That is the base MYBA charter fee. It is not the number you actually pay.

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Most of what I write on here is about buying boats. Brokerage deep dives, ownership realities, the true cost of running a 35-metre steel hull through a Norwegian winter. That is the world most of you are in, or heading toward. But not everyone wants to own a yacht, and to be honest, not everyone should….

Ownership is a commitment that goes well beyond the purchase price.

It demands lots of time, attention, and a particular kind of patience that not every lifestyle can absorb. Charter is a different proposition entirely. You choose when, where, and for how long. You step aboard with your group, the crew handles everything, and when the week is done you walk off without a marina bill, a survey anxiety, or a winter storage problem. For people who love the sea but live busy lives, charter is not a compromise. It is often the preferred choice.

I have started writing about charter yachts because the same detailed approach I apply to brokerage listings applies here. What does it actually cost? What does the rate include, and what does it not? Is this vessel as good as it looks? My regular readers know I will not give you a brochure. So when a boat pops up on my radar screen, to to speak, that I think is worth your attention, I am going to say so.

Over The Rainbow of London is definately worth your attention.

There is a particular feeling you get when you step aboard a genuinely old wooden boat. Not the false nostalgia of a modern replica with teak trim glued over a GRP hull. The real thing. The kind of boat where the grain of the Honduras mahogany has darkened with decades of care, where the proportions of every doorframe and handrail speak a design language that simply does not exist anymore. That is what you are stepping into when you board M/Y ‘Over The Rainbow of London’.

She was built in 1930 by Dickie & Sons at their yard in Bangor, North Wales. The yard had moved there from Tarbert in Scotland just a few years earlier, and by the time they laid this keel they had a solid reputation for quality wooden construction that commercial and private clients trusted completely. At 35 metres and 136 gross tonnes, she was a serious piece of work: teak hull over oak frames, a beam of 6 metres, and a draft of 3.2 metres that speaks to the seakeeping priorities of the era rather than the shallow-anchorage convenience of the modern Med circuit.

She was launched as ‘Janetha IV’, built for a Glasgow owner who cruised the Scottish coast through the 1930s. Then the Royal Navy came for her.

From Welsh Shipyard to Royal Navy Patrol Vessel

I spent years in the Royal Navy, aboard HMS Sheffield and HMS Invincible among others, and there is something that resonates personally about a boat with wartime service. When the requisitions came at the outbreak of the Second World War, Janetha IV was taken into service and commissioned as HMS Corax. She became a coastal patrol vessel, her dining saloon converted into an officers’ mess.

The detail that stops me every time I read it? The original Honduras mahogany panels in that mess still carry dart scars from the wartime officers’ recreation. They are still there. Nobody has varnished over them, sanded them smooth, or decided they did not belong. They remain as evidence that this boat was alive through something significant, and whoever has cared for her since had the wisdom to let the history speak.

The Royal Navy strengthened her for wartime service. 71 ribs were reinforced on either side of the hull. That structural work, laid down in a Welsh shipyard and reinforced under Admiralty direction more than 80 years ago, is still the skeleton she sails on today.

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The Mediterranean Years: From Floating Casino to Folon’s Canvas

After the war, ‘Over The Rainbow’ crossed the Atlantic (she was ‘Lady Jeanetta’ by then) and cruised the American coast before returning to the Mediterranean. There, in the years when Greece had strict laws against gambling ashore, she became a floating casino serving the Athens community. Renamed ‘Ismini III’, she spent decades largely off the public record, changing hands several times.

Her rediscovery came in the 1990s, when an English enthusiast brought her to the Côte d’Azur and introduced her to the charter market as a classic vessel. What happened next is, I think, what makes ‘Over The Rainbow’ genuinely extraordinary....

Jean-Michel Folon fell in love with her.

Folon was a Belgian artist of the first rank. Born in Brussels in 1934, his whimsical, humanistic work appeared in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, in the pages of The New Yorker, on the walls of the London Underground at Waterloo station, and in permanent collections across Europe. He designed sets for opera at Venice, Geneva, and Rome. He illustrated Kafka, Camus, and Ray Bradbury. He received the Legion of Honour from the French President. When he died in Monaco in 2005, his foundation in La Hulpe, Belgium, housed in a Solvay castle, held one of the most significant private art collections in Europe.

He is the only artist I have come across who chose a 1930 Welsh-built motor yacht as a design project.

Folon did not modernise her. He did the opposite. He worked to preserve every element of her historical character: the proportions, the original fittings, the authenticity of the wooden interior, while bringing his particular artistic sensibility to bear on how it all sat together. The result was not a restoration in the conventional sense. It was more like a careful act of intimate curation, by someone who understood both what she had been and what she could be.

When the current owners acquired her in 2017 and carried out a significant refit in 2018 and 2019, they were working from a foundation that Folon had already given enormous thought. The Hemingway library came with the boat: a substantial collection of Ernest Hemingway’s literature that forms part of the onboard character in a way that is hard to explain but immediately felt when you are sitting in the saloon in a Corsican anchorage with nothing particular to do...

What She Offers as a Yacht Charter

Over The Rainbow takes 11 guests across four cabins: a master suite, a VIP stateroom, two double cabins, plus convertible berths and a Pullman. Five crew. Her deck spaces are generous and well-suited to groups who want to use them. She was built in an era when outdoor living aboard a motor yacht was taken seriously, and that layout has survived intact.

Her cruising speed is 10 knots. This is not a vessel for covering ground quickly, and that is entirely the point. The Mediterranean at 10 knots is a different experience from the Mediterranean at 25. You anchor somewhere beautiful. You use the Seabobs, the kayaks, the paddleboards, the Waverunner, the fishing equipment. The crew provision you well. In the evenings you are in a port that does not look like a car park for GRP. At 10 knots, the Med gives you itself rather than rushing past the window.

Her at-anchor and underway stabilisers mean the experience at rest is comfortable even in a moderate chop, and the air conditioning and Wi-Fi are entirely modern. She does not ask you to rough it. She asks you to slow down.

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The charter rate is €65,000 per week, year-round, no seasonal premium. That figure is the same in July on the French Riviera as it is in February off Montenegro. The + expenses means an Advance Provisioning Allowance on top, which covers fuel, provisioning, port fees, and consumables. I go through the full cost breakdown in the premium section below, so you can see exactly what a week aboard actually costs once everything is accounted for.

She operates throughout the Mediterranean: Croatia, France, Greece, Monaco, and Montenegro are all on the itinerary. The hot spots her crew know well include the Amalfi Coast, Corsica, the French Riviera, the Ligurian Riviera, Sardinia, and the Balearics. Of course, at 10 knots, you are not covering the whole list in a week. You are choosing one stretch of coastline and experiencing it fully.

If Over The Rainbow sounds like the right boat for your group, you can enquire about availability directly. I work with the vessel’s charter agency as a referral partner, and if you book through me I receive a commission at no cost to you. I want to be upfront about that. The link to enquire is below.

Enquire about chartering

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This article continues below in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The true total cost of a week aboard: the full APA breakdown, gratuity expectations, provisioning, port fees, and what a week actually costs once every line item is added up

- What €65,000/week actually buys you: how she compares to a modern 35m charter yacht at the same or higher rate, and what you gain and lose

- The wood hull question: what a 96-year-old wooden boat in charter service really means for the experience, and what the owner faces to keep her in this condition

- My honest assessment of the value: is €65,000/week the right price, or is there a better use of that budget elsewhere in the Mediterranean classic fleet?

The True Total Cost of a Week Aboard

The €65,000/week base charter fee is where the headline rate ends and the arithmetic begins. For a crewed Mediterranean charter of this category, the industry standard is to add an Advance Provisioning Allowance (APA) on top of the headline rate. This is not a hidden extra. It is a well-established mechanism that covers the variable running costs of the charter: fuel, provisions, port fees, and consumables. You pay it upfront and receive a reconciliation at the end; anything unspent comes back to you.

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I want to start with a number, because it matters more than any specification this trawler style motor yacht carries...

23,000 incredible hours…..

That is how long it took William Trenholm and his crew to build Sayonara. If you spread that over a standard 40-hour working week, that is 11 years of full-time labour. A decade of evenings, weekends, decisions about frames and futtocks and fasteners, conversation about ballast placement, chats with the designer, revisions, setbacks, and ultimately a vessel that has been sitting in a boathouse in Sidney, British Columbia, since the day she was launched in 1980.

Trenholm was already a man who knew what he wanted. He had built two previous William Garden designs before commissioning Sayonara. He was a well-known figure in Victoria’s yachting and fishing community. When he went to Garden and asked for something heavy, something deep, something patterned after the West Coast commercial halibut schooners that had worked these waters for generations, Garden understood exactly what he was being asked for.

This was not a man who wanted a floating caravan. He wanted a full-specification working cruiser built to commercial standards, in the tradition of vessels that made their living in some of the most difficult waters on the stunning Pacific coast.

She is now listed by Van Isle Marina in Sidney, British Columbia, at $550,000 Canadian dollars. That is approximately $403,000 US dollars at the current exchange rate.

This is the story of how she got there, and what any serious buyer needs to understand before they go and look at her.

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William Garden

If you read my JoAhna K article from a few weeks ago, the one about the William Garden escape pod listed at $169,000, you will already know the name. But Sayonara is a different proposition. JoAhna K was a relatively modest 47-footer. Sayonara is 59 feet, built to a heavier specification, with a heavier engine and a longer, more ambitious cruising brief.

William Garden was born in Calgary in 1918, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and taught himself naval architecture through a combination of apprenticeships and sheer output. By the age of 24, he had already designed 51 vessels, mostly working craft: halibut boats, seiners, trollers, sardine boats. He served in the Second World War at the Adak Ship Repair Base in Alaska, which he later described as the only posting in the army where he was employed doing what he liked.

After the war he moved to Victoria, established a design office on a private island near Sidney, and spent the next four decades producing custom designs for clients who wanted vessels of genuine quality. He designed more than 1,000 vessels across his career, in wood, fibreglass, steel, and aluminium, up to 231 feet in length. He was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 2006 for his contribution to naval architecture and marine engineering.

In 2012, Passage Maker magazine described him as “among the first to design comfortable, always-in-style, trawler-type boats for family cruising.” What that summary misses is the seriousness behind the approach. Garden’s designs were not lifestyle products. They were working cruising machines, built to the standard of the commercial fishing vessels he had spent decades studying, and adapted for private owners who understood the difference between a boat designed to impress and a boat designed to endure.

He died in April 2011, aged 92. Sayonara was featured in his 1977 book ‘Yacht Designs’, under the description “Bill Trenholme’s Boat.” She was in a boathouse at that point, 44 years ago, and she is in a boathouse now.

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The Halibut Schooner Tradition

When Trenholm asked Garden for a vessel patterned after the West Coast halibut schooners, he was invoking a specific tradition with specific design implications.

The halibut schooner emerged in the Pacific Northwest in the 1890s as the dominant commercial halibut fishing vessel. These were serious offshore working boats, built to spend extended periods in the North Pacific, capable of reaching the Bering Sea grounds and returning with a hold full of fish. They were deep-drafted, heavy, and stable, with high freeboard for seaworthiness and a wheelhouse positioned aft so the captain could observe the fishing operation forward. They were designed to work in conditions that would make most recreational vessels turn back.

The tradition Garden drew on had been refined over half a century of genuine commercial use. These vessels earned their design features the hard way. The heavy displacement, the deep draft, the substantial structural scantlings, the slow-turning diesel: all of it was proven in conditions that punished shortcuts.

Sayonara is not a halibut schooner. She is a private cruising vessel. But she was designed to carry the structural and engineering DNA of that tradition into a cruising context, and that is precisely what makes her interesting to examine.

She is built with fir planking on white oak frames spaced at 10-inch centres, with 1.75-inch planking on 2x4 frames. The stem, sternpost, keel shoe, ring timbers, engine beds, and cap rails are all gumwood. Approximately 10 tons of gumwood are used in the vessel’s structure. She is ballasted with lead ballast bar. The hull form is round-bilge displacement, as it would be.

This is serious construction. Not yacht construction in the recreational sense. Commercial-grade construction applied to a pleasure vessel. The materials and methods are those of a builder who intended the vessel to last not a lifetime but several lifetimes.

The Gardner 8L3

The engine is the heart of this vessel, and any serious buyer needs to understand what they are dealing with before they start thinking about the price.

The Gardner 8L3 is an 8-cylinder inline diesel, first produced in 1932, displacing 24.1 litres with a bore and stroke of 139.7mm by 196.85mm. In Sayonara’s marine application it produces 152 horsepower at 900 RPM. That figure, 900 RPM, is the key to everything about this engine. It turns slowly, it works gently, and it is extraordinarily economical.

At Sayonara’s cruise speed of 8.6 to 9 knots, the Gardner burns 4.5 gallons of diesel per hour. On her 2,200-gallon tanks, that gives her a theoretical range of roughly 4,200 to 4,400 nautical miles. To put that in context: from Sidney, British Columbia, she could reach Hawaii with fuel to spare. She could cruise the Alaska Inside Passage for weeks without touching a fuel dock. On a single tank, she could reach Mexico and still have diesel remaining.

Modern trawlers of equivalent size with modern high-performance diesels typically burn 2 to 4 times as much. The Gardner’s specific fuel consumption of 0.328 pounds per brake horsepower per hour is exceptional by any era’s standards. It is a number that would be respectable in a modern engine, and it was achieved in 1932.

The engine community around the Gardner 8L3 is one of the most devoted in the marine world. Owners speak about it the way other people speak about classic motorcycles or particular vintage aircraft: with genuine reverence for what the engineers got right. Gardner Marine continues to provide sales, service, and spare parts to this day. The engine was designed from the outset to be rebuilt rather than replaced. Cast iron block, common marine fasteners, straightforward architecture. A well-maintained 8L3 can accumulate 30,000 hours or more before a major rebuild becomes necessary. The engine in Sayonara has the hours that belong on a vessel that has been kept, not worked.

Sayonara’s 8L3 drives a four-blade 54-by-44-inch bronze propeller through a Twin Disc 514 gearbox with an Omega drive system at 2.92:1 reduction. The steering is a three-station hydraulic system with Wagner T-10 ram, rebuilt in 2023.

The Boathouse

I want to dwell on this for a moment, because it is genuinely significant.

Sayonara has been housed in a boathouse since the day she was launched in 1980. She has never been moored in open water as her permanent berth. She has cruised the West Coast of Vancouver Island every year, including at least one voyage to Alaska, but she has always come home to a roof.

For a wooden vessel, this matters more than any other single factor in her history. The principal enemy of wooden boats is the wet-dry cycle: planks swelling when the vessel is in the water, shrinking when she is out, opening and closing seams repeatedly until the caulking fails, water finds its way into the structure, and rot begins its work. A vessel that lives on an open mooring is fighting this cycle continuously. A vessel in a boathouse is not.

Sayonara’s planking has been continuously wetted when she is cruising and fully protected when she is not. She has never dried out in the sun on an outdoor hardstanding with cracking paint and opening seams. The hull has been preserved in the condition most consistent with longevity: consistently used, consistently sheltered.

The current owner, an architect by profession, which explains some things about the quality of the interior refurbishment, undertook extensive interior work over recent years. This included new teak and holly cabin soles throughout the wheelhouse, galley, salon, and aft cabin, Quartz stone countertops in the wheelhouse and galley, a completely renovated aft head with new electric head, washing machine, and full shower, new Garmin electronics suite replacing the old instrumentation, and a rebuilt hydraulic steering system.

All of this interior work is described as new and unused. The vessel is being sold because of a recent change in the owner’s plans. The forward cabin and forward head, which were next in the renovation sequence, remain in their original condition. The owner, as an architect, has offered to assist the new owner with this remaining project if they wish.

The renovation is not complete. But what has been done is done to a high standard, and what remains to be done is well understood.

What She Carries

The accommodation runs to three separate cabin areas: a focsle forward with four berths, a middle cabin with two berths and a two-piece head, and the aft cabin with two queen berths and a three-piece head. On a 59-footer with 16 feet of beam, these are real spaces, not cramped compromises.

The galley runs a Dickinson diesel range, which both heats the main deck level and provides domestic hot water, alongside a custom stainless steel refrigerator with a separate freezer aft of the main salon. The salon features a horseshoe settee around a large teak table that seats six, with a lift mechanism allowing it to serve as a coffee table at anchor.

Electrical systems are somewhat complex: 32-volt, 24-volt, and 12-volt DC systems alongside 110-volt AC, with the principal system running on 32 volts. The battery bank uses eight four-volt lead-acid mining-type batteries in series, providing 650 amp-hours. A Kohler 12.5kW diesel generator provides shore-equivalent AC power. The principal alternator is a 32-volt 80-amp Dickinson unit driven by the engine.

Stability at anchor and in a beam sea is provided by a paravane system: two delta-shaped fish deployed from welded alloy tubing booms extending outboard. This is the stabilisation method of choice on serious ocean-going fishing vessels of this tradition, and it suits Sayonara’s character precisely. There are no electronics to fail, no hydraulics to service, no power requirement. The fish go over the side, the booms are lowered, and the roll dampening begins. At anchor in a swell, the improvement in comfort is immediate and significant.

The anchor system is a Harrison and Robbins hydraulic winch with 110 feet of 5/8-inch chain and 600 feet of 1-inch nylon rode, and a 350-pound Forfjord anchor. The dinghy is a 12-foot RIB with a 20-horsepower Yamaha outboard, launched and recovered by a hydraulic winch and boom system.

Safety systems include a Halon fire suppression system in the engine room, four 10-pound and two 3-pound ABC extinguishers, EPIRB, all Canadian Coast Guard prescribed safety gear, and high-water alarms. There is a built-in vacuum system with two outlets.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section below, I cover:

- The wood hull question: what a pre-purchase survey on a 46-year-old wooden vessel actually involves, what the surveyor will focus on, and what buyers should budget for the process itself, before any remediation

- Annual maintenance costs in honest numbers: what owning a wooden trawler of this size and age actually costs per year, compared to a GRP or steel vessel of equivalent displacement

- The forward cabin and what it will take: realistic budget for completing the renovation that the current owner did not finish, and the trades you will need access to in the Sidney area

- My honest assessment of $550,000 CAD: how this price sits against the current wood trawler market in North America, what the Gardner engine and Garden pedigree add to the valuation, and what a realistic all-in acquisition budget looks like once survey, the remaining renovation, and ongoing ownership are factored in

The Wood Hull Question

Let me be direct with you about this, because it is the question that will define whether Sayonara is the right vessel for a particular buyer.

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The Rijnlandvlet 1300 OC Hybrid arrived at De Valk’s covered sales marina in Loosdrecht in 2024, having been used for precisely one sea trial and one photoshoot. She has never turned a passage mile in anger. She is, by any reasonable definition, brand new, asking €595,000 VAT paid.

What makes her interesting is not her price, though the price is interesting. It is what sits beneath her steel deck: a full hybrid diesel-electric drivetrain, a 48-volt lithium battery bank with 37.2 kilowatt-hours of stored energy, and a Belmarine EM 220 electric motor on the same shaft as her Vetus Deutz diesel. She can ghost through a canal city making no more noise than a rowing boat. She can then fire up the diesel and cover 1,085 nautical miles before the fuel runs out. That is an unusual combination in a 13.5-metre boat at any price.

Check out the boat tour video that I filmed on board this intriguing boat, and then come back to this article.

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The Vessel

The Rijnlandvlet 1300 OC Hybrid is 13.50 metres on the waterline, 4.25 metres wide, and draws just 1.20 metres. She displaces 18 tonnes. Her hull is round-bilged steel, built in 20 strakes, finished in blue. The superstructure, deck, and cockpit are also steel; this is not a vessel that reverts to aluminium or GRP above the waterline, with teak laid over the deck and superstructure. The mast lowers hydraulically, which matters in the Netherlands, where bridges arrive at a rate that would exhaust the patience of anyone with a fixed rig.

She is CE Category C. That rating covers inshore and sheltered coastal waters in conditions up to Force 6, enough for the North Sea coast hugged close, the Mediterranean in summer, and every canal, river, and lake in Western Europe. She is not an ocean crosser. She is, instead, a vessel built for the world where most European owners actually use their boats: the extraordinary inland waterway network that connects the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, and beyond.

- Asking price: €595,000 VAT paid

- Lying: Loosdrecht, Netherlands

- Broker: De Valk Loosdrecht

Range: Diesel, Maximum Speed, and Electric Only

The range question is one of the most important things a buyer asks about any motor yacht, and on this one it comes in three separate answers because she has three distinct modes of propulsion.

At cruising speed of 7 knots, with the Vetus Deutz diesel running, she burns approximately 8 to 10 litres per hour. On a 1,400-litre tank, that works out to roughly 155 hours of endurance and a passage range of approximately 1,085 nautical miles. That is Rotterdam to Gibraltar without a fuel stop if the conditions allow, or a summer of continuous cruising on the French canals without ever thinking about the gauge.

At maximum speed (10 knots), the engine works harder, consuming around 18 to 20 litres per hour. Range drops to approximately 740 nautical miles, still a very respectable figure for a vessel of this type.

In pure electric mode, the picture is different in character.

The Belmarine EM 220 draws from the 48-volt, 775-amp-hour battery bank, which holds approximately 37.2 kilowatt-hours of energy. At 4 to 5 knots, a displacement hull of this size needs only around 3 to 4 kilowatts at the prop shaft. That gives between 8 and 10 hours of electric-only running, and a range of approximately 40 to 45 nautical miles in complete silence. For a day’s passage through the Amsterdam canals, where zero-emission zones are already becoming the norm, that is more than enough. You leave the marina on batteries, transit the city, pick up the diesel when you reach open water, and arrive without having contributed a gram of exhaust to the canal air.

The Builder and Designer

She comes from Scheepswerf de Volharding, a Dutch shipyard that has been building steel vessels continuously since around 1900. The yard introduced the Rijnlandvlet type in 1987, and the hull form has changed very little since. That is not conservatism for its own sake. The yard’s position is that a round-bilged, moderate-displacement hull optimised for 5 to 8 knots in sheltered water does not need reinventing; it needs refining. Their signature construction method, chain-welding applied to both sides of every seam below the waterline, has been unchanged since day one. A Rijnlandvlet built to this standard is expected to give 30 to 40 years of hard service before requiring any structural attention.

The designer is Dick Regtvoort, and his role is unusual: he is the in-house designer and director of both the shipyard and Rijnland Yachts, meaning the design, the construction standards, and the decision about what gets built next are all one person’s responsibility. That kind of continuity is rare in modern boatbuilding. His philosophy comes down to one principle: fitness for purpose in the European inland waterway environment. Shallow draft. Low air draft. Round-bilged for sea-kindliness. Interiors that prioritise habitable volume over aesthetic drama. The 1300 OC Hybrid is where that philosophy meets a 2024 drivetrain.

In the Wardroom below, I go into considerably more depth on both: the full history of the yard from its commercial origins through to the leisure transition, and the specific construction techniques that define why a Rijnlandvlet holds its value the way it does.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The builder in detail: Scheepswerf de Volharding’s full history from 1900 to today, their distinctive construction methods, and what their reputation actually means for a buyer evaluating this vessel

- Dick Regtvoort and the Rijnlandvlet type: the design philosophy behind the 1300 OC, and why this hull form has remained essentially unchanged since 1987

- The hybrid drive explained: how the Belmarine EM 220 integrates with the ZF 68 gearbox and what it means in practice for maintenance, fuel savings, and operation

- Shipping costs: what it would realistically cost to get her to the US East Coast, the US West Coast, and Australia, and why CE Category C makes this a more nuanced conversation than it first appears

- My honest assessment of the €595,000 asking price: how she compares to non-hybrid Rijnlandvletten, to German and Belgian alternatives, and whether the premium for the hybrid package is justified

The Wardroom

The Builder: Scheepswerf de Volharding..

Scheepswerf de Volharding has been building steel vessels in the Netherlands since around 1900. The yard traces its current character to the 1920s, when Auke van der Werff, one of five brothers from Warga, purchased an existing timber shipbuilding facility and converted it to steel construction. The name, which translates roughly as “shipyard of perseverance,” has proved apt. The yard has been continuous for over a century.

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I have been looking at this vessel for a little while, trying to decide whether she belongs in the category of boats you admire from a distance, or the category of boats you actually buy and live on. The more I look at her, the more I think she belongs firmly in the second category. Not because she is finished. Many people would sayshe is not. But because the bones are remarkable, and the potential is the kind that serious liveaboard buyers spend years searching for.

I should point one thing out. My 6 years at sea, was spent on frigates and aircraft carriers. So, when it comes to interiors, my own definition of “luxury” will be very different to most of yours!

This is a 1954 American steel tug built by the Matton Shipyard out of Cohoes, New York. She is 70.92 feet long, 19.5 feet of beam, and she weighs 125,663 pounds in dry condition. She has been converted to a liveaboard and is now sitting in Wareham, Massachusetts, listed by LC8 Marine at $599,000.

I want to talk about what makes her interesting. Because the headline numbers hide quite a story.

The Yard That Built Her

Matton is not a name you will find in your traditional yacht broker catalogues. It belongs to a different tradition entirely, and that is part of what makes this vessel worth showcasing to you, my subscribers.

The Matton Shipyard operated for 84 years, from 1899 until its closure in 1983. John E. Matton established the yard at Waterford on the Champlain Canal, and in 1916 the operation relocated to Van Schaick Island in Cohoes, where it remained until the end. At peak production, the yard built over 340 vessels: commercial tugs, barges, specialised working craft. During the Second World War it produced five submarine chasers and four Army tugs under military contract. The Cohoes site was eventually listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

This vessel was built in 1954, which places her in the mature era of Matton production. The yard by that point had been building steel tugs for 35 years, and the quality of their work was well established in the American harbour tug and river towing trade. These were not luxury motor yachts to be operated in fair weather conditions. They were tools, designed to work hard in conditions that would destroy lighter construction. That ethos is baked into every plate of steel in this vessel’s hull.

She is a round-bilge displacement design in steel, with dimensions that reflect her commercial origins: 9.67 feet of maximum draft, a beam of 19.5 feet, and a dry weight that puts her firmly in the heavy displacement category. She sat and worked American waterways for decades before someone recognised what a converted tug could offer and began the process of turning her into a home.

The Repower

The engine is the first thing any serious buyer will want to understand, and here the news is excellent.

In 2011, she received a complete engine replacement. The original propulsion was removed and a Caterpillar C-18 diesel was installed in its place. The C-18 is an 18.1-litre inline-six producing 600 horsepower at 1,800 RPM in this application. Caterpillar have built marine C-18s to IMO II and EPA Tier 3 standards, and this is a well-regarded engine in commercial marine applications. It drives a four-blade bronze propeller via direct drive.

The engine now shows 667 hours. On a 2011 conversion, that is a very low figure. She has barely been run in. The C-18’s first scheduled service falls at 250 hours, which means this engine has completed two full service cycles and is now roughly 167 hours into its third. At 667 hours in 15 years of ownership, she has barely been worked. At a cruising speed of 9 knots, the C-18 in this application burns approximately 10 to 12 gallons per hour. At 9 knots and a conservative 11 gallons per hour, you are looking at around 0.82 nautical miles per gallon. That number becomes very significant when you understand what she is carrying in her tanks. And this what, in part, really blew me away.

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The Tanks

Here is where this vessel stops being merely interesting and becomes genuinely remarkable.

She carries four fuel tanks with a combined capacity of 20,000 gallons. And no, that is not an additional ‘0’ at the end that has been put there by mistake.

Most production trawler yachts in the 60- to 70-foot range carry between 2,000 and 5,000 gallons of fuel. A Nordhavn 62, which is one of the most respected long-range production trawlers ever built, carries 2,652 gallons in her standard configuration. A Kadey-Krogen 52 carries 1,400 gallons. This Matton tug carries 20,000 gallons, which is between 7 and 14 times the fuel capacity of her notional competitors!

At 11 gallons per hour and 9 knots, she has a theoretical range of approximately 17,145 nautical miles. Accounting for sea state, weather, manoeuvring fuel, and a sensible 10% reserve, a practical ocean-passage range in the region of 12,000 to 15,000 nautical miles is realistic. For context, the Atlantic Ocean from New York to the Azores is approximately 1,880 nautical miles. The Atlantic crossing from the Canaries to the Caribbean is around 2,700 nautical miles. She could do either of those passages and barely dip below half-full.

She also carries 1,000 gallons of fresh water and a 300-gallon holding tank.

This is ocean-crossing fuel capacity at a price point well below what purpose-built bluewater trawlers command.

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Where Could She Go on One Tank?

This is the question that makes those numbers real. She is sitting right now in Wareham, Massachusetts. On a single load of 20,000 gallons, with no refuelling stop, here is what becomes possible.

Head east and the North Atlantic opens up immediately. Wareham to the Azores is approximately 1,950 nautical miles. She covers that in around 9 days and arrives with close to 18,000 gallons still in her tanks. From Wareham to mainland Portugal is around 3,000 miles. She does that non-stop and still has fuel to spare for a circumnavigation of the Iberian coast. Bermuda is 650 miles away. She could make three return passages to Bermuda before she needed to refuel.

Head south and the Caribbean is around 1,800 miles from New England to the Virgins, depending on route. She gets there with 80% of her fuel still aboard. From there, the entire Caribbean arc lies within easy reach without touching a fuel dock.

Head north and Newfoundland is 900 miles. Iceland is around 2,500 miles from Massachusetts. Greenland not much further. The Great Circle route through the high North Atlantic becomes accessible to a vessel carrying this kind of range.

If you took the southern blue-water route via the Canaries and the trade winds, that passage is approximately 2,700 nautical miles. She completes it in around 12.5 days at 9 knots, and arrives in the Caribbean with over 17,000 gallons remaining. She has barely even started.

Purpose-built bluewater trawlers take this passage carrying 3,000 to 5,000 gallons and arrive having consumed most of what they set out with. The calculations are not remotely comparable.

This is not a coastal cruiser with offshore pretensions. It is a genuine ocean-crossing vessel that happens to have been built in 1954 for entirely different purposes. The commercial harbour tug was designed to be self-sufficient for extended periods in demanding conditions. Those design priorities translate directly into ocean passage-making credentials that most pleasure craft cannot approach.

So where does a 12,000 to 15,000 nautical mile practical range actually place you on a globe?

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The furthest east she could reach from Wareham on one tank takes her well into the Indian Ocean. The route east runs from Massachusetts across the Atlantic (3,000 miles to Lisbon), through the Strait of Gibraltar, the length of the Mediterranean (roughly 2,000 miles to Port Said), through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and into the Arabian Sea. By the time she clears Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea, she has covered approximately 8,000 miles. She still has over 4,000 miles of range remaining. That puts Mumbai, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and the southwestern tip of India all within reach on a single load of fuel. She leaves Wareham and arrives in the Indian Ocean without stopping at a fuel dock. Bonkers.

The furthest west she could reach from Wareham on one tank takes her deep into the Pacific. Head southwest from New England, through the Caribbean, transit the Panama Canal, and turn west into the Pacific. From Wareham to the Panama Canal entrance is approximately 2,200 miles. Through the Canal and into the Pacific, she has well over 10,000 miles of range remaining. That is enough to reach Hawaii (4,700 miles from Panama) and continue to the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, or the northern Philippines. On a single tank, she crosses two oceans.

These are not theoretical abstractions. They are the direct consequence of 20,000 gallons of diesel and a fuel-efficient Cat C-18 at displacement speeds. Most vessels in this price bracket cannot cross the Atlantic non-stop, let alone plan itineraries that span multiple ocean basins without a refuelling strategy!

There is one further dimension to all of this that rarely gets discussed, and it matters enormously for anyone planning to cruise seriously off the beaten track. Fuel quality and fuel availability vary enormously around the world. In remote parts of the Pacific, Southeast Asia, the high latitudes, and much of the developing world, finding diesel is not always straightforward. When you do find it, the quality is not always what you would want going into a modern engine. With 20,000 gallons aboard, you can afford to be selective. You fill up where the fuel is good, in a port where you trust the source. You do not need to take on questionable fuel in a remote harbour because you have run short. You do not need to divert to a commercial bunkering port that adds 300 miles to your passage because it is the only one with sufficient stock. The fuel capacity is not just about range. It is about independence. It puts the owner in control of where, when, and from whom they buy fuel, and that is a meaningful operational advantage in the parts of the world that make a voyage like this worth doing in the first place.

The Liveaboard Systems

The interior is..., shall we say, ‘honest’. I want to be clear about that before listing what is aboard, because the photographs do not hide it: this is a functional working space that has been fitted for habitation rather than a yacht interior finished to pleasure-craft standards. White painted walls, practical cabinetry, a working galley. It reminds me, in some respects, of the MMS 55 Trawler, another vessel with serious credentials beneath a utilitarian skin.

What is aboard?

Air conditioning and heating are both fitted. There is a washing machine, oven, microwave, refrigerator, and deep freezer. Hot water. Electric and manual bilge pumps. An air compressor. She has a marine head, an electric head, and a chemical head. That level of sanitation redundancy is something you would struggle to find on most production yachts. Air conditioning throughout. A battery charger and inverter.

The electronics fit is comprehensive: radar, AIS, autopilot, GPS, chartplotter, VHF, depth sounder, log and speedometer, radar detector, compass, navigation centre, repeaters, cockpit speakers, and two flat-screen televisions. Shore power inlet and a generator are both fitted.

The listing states two guest cabins. On a vessel of this beam that is likely to mean berths for four guests in dedicated sleeping accommodation, with the owner’s quarters separate. That is a reasonable complement for a liveaboard couple with room for occasional guests, and the combination of systems (the washing machine, the deep freezer, the air conditioning, the 1,000-gallon fresh water tank) all point toward a vessel that was converted with genuine long-term habitation in mind rather than occasional weekend occupation.

The profile is everything you would want from a classic American harbour tug: the rounded wheelhouse, the workboat sheer, the winch on the foredeck, the towing bollards on the aft deck, the unmistakeable silhouette that draws eyes in any anchorage. She has solar panels on the cabin roof. The significant rubbing strakes on her hull. She looks exactly like what she is: a piece of American maritime history that has been given a second purpose.

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In the premium section, I cover:

- The interior reality: what the current fit-out actually delivers as a liveaboard, and where it falls short of a comfortable long-term home

- Refit costs and where to do the work: three yards near Wareham that handle this kind of commercial-to-liveaboard conversion, with realistic budget ranges from cosmetic to comprehensive

- The draft question: what 9 feet of draft means in practice for East Coast cruising, which harbours and rivers are accessible and which are not

- Stabilisers: what the listing does not mention, what it means for ocean passages, and what it would cost to fix

- Steel hull maintenance across different cruising environments: what 70 years of steel really demands, from the tropics to the Arctic, and how salinity variation changes the maintenance picture

- My honest read on the market: how $599,000 positions this vessel against comparable converted tugs and production trawlers, and what the total investment picture looks like once the refit is factored in

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The Interior: What You Are Actually Buying

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A broker from De Valk (Palma) got in touch recently to flag this one, and I am glad they did. The Peer Gynt 36m Explorer is not a name that comes up every day. Peer Gynt Yachts is a small Turkish shipyard based in Antalya, not a household name in the way that Heesen or Feadship are, but when I looked more closely at this build, I found something worth writing about. The naval architecture is by Van Oossanen, one of the most respected firms in the business, and the engineering choices on this vessel are genuinely interesting. She is asking €8,900,000 VAT paid, she is lying in Palma, and she is listed with De Valk.

First, let me tell you what I found.

A Name Worth Knowing: Van Oossanen

Before we get into the vessel herself, I want to say a word about the people who designed her. Van Oossanen Naval Architects, formally Van Oossanen & Associates, is a Dutch naval architecture and hydrodynamic research firm based in Wageningen, the Netherlands. They are not a household name among recreational boaters, but in the commercial and expedition yacht world, they are very well regarded. Their work spans everything from offshore racing yachts to research vessels to high-performance powerboats, and they have a particular reputation for understanding how hulls move through water at displacement and semi-displacement speeds.

They are also the firm behind the Hull Vane, a patented underwater appendage fitted to the stern of displacement vessels to reduce wave-making resistance and fuel consumption. The principle is elegant: at displacement speeds, a significant portion of a vessel's engine power is wasted not on moving through the water, but on dragging a wave along with her. The bow pushes water aside and creates a wave pattern that runs down the hull; if nothing intercepts it, that wave crashes off the stern and all the energy that created it is simply lost. The Hull Vane sits submerged just aft of the transom, angled to intercept that departing wave and convert its energy into forward thrust. It is essentially recovering power that would otherwise be thrown away.

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The practical results are well documented by Van Oossanen. On a typical displacement hull at cruising speed, the Hull Vane reduces fuel consumption by 10% to 20%, and on some vessels approaching 25%. It also suppresses the stern wave, which means less pitching in following seas and a drier, more comfortable motion at sea. On a vessel like this one, designed to run long ocean passages at 10 knots, both effects matter considerably. A 15% fuel saving over a 6,200-nautical-mile range passage is not a marginal gain. It is several thousand euros per crossing and, cumulatively, a meaningful reduction in the cost of actually using the vessel.

The bulb bow works in complement. Where the Hull Vane recovers energy at the stern, the bulbous bow creates a secondary wave at the bow that is precisely out of phase with the primary bow wave, causing the two to partially cancel each other out. Less wave energy generated at the bow means less resistance, and less resistance means the same speed for less fuel, or more speed for the same fuel. The two technologies address the problem from opposite ends of the vessel, and on a hull designed with both in mind from the outset, they reinforce one another rather than simply being additive.

The vane itself looks a little like a small underwater wing sitting at the transom, and at displacement speeds, it makes a measurable difference. This explorer carries both features, which is an unusual and considered combination for a yacht of this size. It reflects a genuine design intent to maximise range and efficiency

That alone tells you something about how this vessel was conceived.

The Build: Turkey, 2012

Peer Gynt Yachts built her at their Antalya shipyard in 2012, delivering her to a German owner. She measures 36 metres LOA on a beam of 8.4 metres, with a draught of 2.85 metres. Displacement is 350 tonnes and gross tonnage is 341, which is substantial for her waterline length, which is what you want in a bluewater, long range explorer yacht. Her hull is steel. Her superstructure is composite with carbon fibre reinforcement, which keeps weight atop to a minimum and stiffens the structure without the maintenance burden of an all-steel house.

She was repainted in winter 2018/19 with AWL Grip, so her exterior finish is now around 7 years old. That is worth noting for a survey, but AWL Grip is a durable two-part polyurethane coating. It holds up well in the harsh (by UK standards) Mediterranean climate and does not demand the same maintenance cycle as a softer topside paint.

The fuel tankage is significant: 56,400 litres, fitted with an Alfa Laval MIB 303 fuel cleaning system. That is a proper offshore fuel capacity, not a coastal cruising number. With twin Yanmar 6AYM-WET diesels running at 10 knots cruise, the spec sheet quotes a range of 6,200 nautical miles. At 90 litres per hour combined fuel burn at cruise, the maths tracks closely enough to take seriously.

Freshwater runs to 10,000 litres, served by two Idromar watermakers at 130 litres per hour each. Wastewater is handled by a Selmar Blue Sea 3500 treatment system, not just a holding tank, but a proper treatment plant, which matters if you are running in environmentally sensitive waters. Blackwater compliance is something buyers in the expedition market increasingly need to think about.

Six Cabins, Twelve Berths

Accommodation is arranged across six cabins for twelve guests, with a separate forward crew area. The owners cabin is a suite on the bridge deck with a double bed, seating area, private bathroom with bathtub and shower, and a walk-in closet. That is a substantial owners stateroom on a 36-metre. The VIP cabin is on the main deck with a seating area and desk.

The galley runs Miele appliances and includes a 4 square metre cold room, the kind of specification you expect on a vessel where the crew is genuinely expected to provision and cater for extended offshore passages, not just weekend jollys along the coast. The air conditioning is a Marine Air 3 Chiller system, and a Bluesound multi-room audio system covers the salon, owners cabin, and sun deck.

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The Bridge: Commercial-Grade Navigation

The navigation suite is worth a specific mention, because it is not a recreational spec. She runs a Wärtsilä NR4000 radar system with dual JRC 10-inch antennas, an Anschutz ST22 gyrocompass, a Saab R6 AIS transceiver, an ECDIS chart system, and three Wärtsilä RS8 navigation computers with Duramon 26-inch displays. The ship’s main server is a Linux-based 64-bit Xeon machine with 24 cores and 8 terabytes of storage. That is a commercial specification, not a consumer electronics install.

The bowthruster is a TRAC 24-inch unit, with a 20-inch sternthruster aft. Shore power connects at 50kW three-phase. Generators run to two Kohler 80kW units plus a 35kW Kohler third unit, giving three generators in total, which gives you genuine redundancy at sea and the capacity to run all hotel loads without touching the main engines.

The anchor system comprises dual 350kg stainless steel bow anchors on 250 metres and 200 metres of 19mm studlink chain respectively, with a 300kg stern anchor linked to the bow chain runs. That is an expedition-grade ground tackle arrangement.

The fire suppression is FM200 throughout, with the engine room covered with RINA-approved components, smoke detectors in every compartment, approximately 50 detectors in total across the vessel.

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In the premium section, I cover:

- Running costs: what a 350-tonne, 36-metre steel explorer actually costs to operate annually: crew, fuel, insurance, maintenance, and yard periods

- The Yanmar 6AYM-WET engines: service intervals, parts availability, and what twin-screw redundancy means operationally at this displacement

- Charter considerations: whether the commercial-grade fit-out makes her viable as a charter vessel, and what MCA certification would realistically involve

- The builder and resale question: Peer Gynt Yachts is not a Feadship; what does that mean for long-term value, parts support, and the secondary market?

- My honest assessment of the €8.9M asking price: what the comparable market looks like for 36-metre steel explorer yachts with Van Oossanen naval architecture and a Hull Vane at this price point

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Running Costs

A 350-tonne, 36-metre steel explorer is not a vessel you run without a professional crew. At this size and displacement, you are looking at a minimum of a captain and two crew as a baseline for passage-making and maintenance. In the Mediterranean, a five-person crew (captain, mate, engineer, chef, stewardess) is more typical for charter operation and comfortable for extended private use.

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The Dream…

You have probably had the thought. Maybe it came on a grey, wet and cold Tuesday morning in November, stuck in traffic, phone buzzing, inbox full, rain on the windscreen. Or maybe it came while watching a YouTube video of someone motoring up the Norwegian fjords in a trawler at 6 knots, coffee in hand, nowhere to be.

The thought goes something like this: what if I just sold everything and went? Not a sailing holiday. Not a two-week charter. Gone. And I mean, really gone. House sold, mortgage cleared, the whole lot converted into a vessel that could actually take you somewhere and keep you safe while it does.

And if you are going to do that seriously, not just daydream about it, you want a boat that is built for the life. Something that will not let you down in the North Atlantic at three in the morning. Something with a proven reputation you can trust, built by people who actually understand bluewater passage-making.

Which is how most people who search Google for “Nordhavn liveaboard costs” end up here.

They know the name already. They have seen the range, from the 40 all the way up to the 120. They have read about the crossings: the Pacific Circuit, the Northwest Passage, the rally boats that circumnavigated without needing assistance from search and rescue. They understand, at some level, that Nordhavn is not a lifestyle brand. It is something closer to a philosophy.

What they might not know yet is the number. What does it actually cost to buy into this life? Not the brochure version. The honest version. That is what this article is for.

What Nordhavn Is, and Why It Actually Matters

Pacific Asian Enterprises was not always a household name in the trawler world. Jim Leishman and Dan Streech met in 1973 while working at a yacht brokerage in Dana Point, California. When that dealership closed, they founded Pacific Asian Enterprises in 1974 alongside a third partner, Joe Meglen. The pivot to power came slowly.

Jim’s younger brother Jeff joined as naval architect and, in the mid-1980s, designed a full-displacement motoryacht for his naval architecture thesis. That design would eventually become the Nordhavn 46. The concept was straightforward: if you built a displacement hull that was heavy, efficient, and well engineered, you could carry enough fuel to cross any ocean at modest speed. The prevailing wisdom said it could not be done in a motor yacht. The Leishman brothers thought otherwise.

In the early 1990s, a Nordhavn 46 named Salvation II set off to cross the Atlantic. She made it. Then another boat followed. Then another. The annual Pacific Nordhavn Rally, the Atlantic Circuit, the Northwest Passage: each one adding to a record that no external or outsourced marketing department could have envisioned. The boats simply kept going...and going.

Today, PAE offers models ranging from the 40 to the 120. The design work happens in California. Most of the construction is in Taiwan by South Coast Marine, the same yard that built the original hulls. Over 400 Nordhavns have been delivered since 1989. The community that has grown up around them is one of the most useful support networks a first-time passage-maker could hope to find.

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The Entry-Level Question

The entry-level Nordhavn is the Nordhavn 40, with the 43 close behind. On the current used market, a well-maintained Nordhavn 43 from the 2000s, with moderate engine hours and recent upgrades, is asking somewhere around $350,000 to $500,000 USD. A realistic planning figure for someone doing their first serious search is around $400,000 for a solid, survey-ready example.

That is the number you are starting from. It is not small. But it is also not the full picture, and the gap between what a Nordhavn 40 or 43 costs to buy and what it costs to actually live aboard one is where most first-time buyers get their first big nautical surprise.

What the Asking Price Includes and What It Does Not

A used Nordhavn at current market pricing typically includes the vessel (obviously), her electronics (usually partially updated), her tender and outboard if still aboard, and whatever cruising equipment the previous owner installed.

It does not include the cost of getting her from wherever she is to wherever you want to start your cruising life. It does not include the survey. It does not always include the broker’s commission. It does not include the first haul-out and antifouling on your watch. And it almost certainly does not include the list of items the survey will turn up that need attention before a lender or insurer will touch her.

None of that is the broker’s fault. It is simply the reality of buying a boat that has been lived on by someone else for 20 years. Every item on that list is knowable in advance, if you know what to look for.

Before you make an offer on a Nordhavn, or any other explorer yacht, there are three questions worth asking yourself honestly.

First: can you afford not just the purchase price but roughly 10 to 15% on top of it for the survey, the pre-purchase work, and the first year’s unexpected discoveries? Because that money will be needed.

Second: where are you planning to base the vessel? A liveaboard berth in Seattle costs a different number from one in Florida, which costs a different number again from one in the Mediterranean. Where you keep her is one of the biggest variables in your annual budget.

Third: how often do you plan to move her? A liveaboard who sits on a marina berth and covers 60 hours a year has a completely different cost structure from someone who spends 6 months actively passage-making. The Nordhavn is built for the second life, but both are possible, and the numbers look very different.

The Community Nobody Tells You About

One thing that does not appear in any running cost breakdown is the Nordhavn community, and it is worth knowing about before you decide.

The Nordhavn Owners Group (NOG@groups.io) is one of the most active owner networks in offshore power cruising. Owners share technical knowledge, passage notes, anchorage recommendations, and repair solutions across hundreds of boats and thousands of ocean miles. When something breaks at anchor in the Azores at midnight, there is usually someone in that group who has been through the same thing on the same vessel and can talk you through it before you call a yard.

PAE also organises support: sales representatives can connect prospective buyers with current owners for candid conversations about cost and lifestyle. The operator’s manuals on post-2000 boats are comprehensive. Spare parts availability is good globally for the Asian-built components.

For a first-time passage-maker, this matters alongside the price and the specs. You are not just buying a boat. You are buying into a tight and close-nit community that has collectively logged more ocean miles than most professional delivery fleets.

Is It Right for You? A Preliminary Thought...

I want to be honest with you here, because that is what this publication and newsletter is for.

A Nordhavn is not the right answer for everyone who asks the question. If your dream is fast Mediterranean island-hopping for six months of the year, moored stern-to in small harbours and eating local seafood in village restaurants, there are vessels that will suit that life better and cost less to run. The Nordhavn is not optimised for shallow-draft coastal pottering. She is built to go offshore, in weather, for a long time. She is heavy, she moves relatively slowly, and her fuel burn at passage speed is a real number that has to live in your monthly budget.

If your dream is genuinely bluewater, the Northwest Passage, the Pacific Circuit, the Atlantic crossing, or simply the freedom to point the bow at a horizon and know the vessel can handle what comes, then the Nordhavn 40 is one of the most honest answers the market offers at the entry-level price point. Not the cheapest. Some might say, not the prettiest, although I would have to disagree.The most honest.

In the premium section below, I have broken down what living aboard one actually costs, year by year, line by line. I have covered what the survey will find, what the finance options look like, and what most buyers discover in the first twelve months that the listing did not tell them. I have also given you my honest verdict on who this life genuinely suits and who, despite the dream, might find a different vessel or a different life makes more sense.

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This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”

In the premium section, I cover:

- The full annual running cost breakdown: marina and mooring fees by region, insurance, haul-out and antifouling, engine and generator servicing, watermaker maintenance, fuel, and communications. Specific numbers for a Nordhavn 40 or 43, not ranges so wide they are meaningless.

- Survey intelligence: what experienced surveyors find most often on entry-level Nordhavns, what those findings typically cost to address, and what lenders and insurers require before they will touch a vessel of this age and construction

- The first-year reality: what most buyers discover in year one that the listing did not mention, with typical costs and how to budget for them before you make an offer

- Finance options: what a marine mortgage on a Nordhavn actually looks like, what deposit is required, which lenders understand this type of vessel, and whether the numbers make sense versus a cash purchase

- My honest verdict: who the liveaboard Nordhavn life genuinely suits, who it does not, and what I would tell a close friend sitting at their kitchen table right now with the fantasy in their head

Paid subscribers also get access to The Wardroom, where explorer yacht enthusiasts, serious buyers and current liveaboards discuss these vessels and this life with me privately, anonymously if they wish. It is also worth saying: the research and independence behind articles like this one, the access, the analysis, the willingness to say what others will not, is only possible because of the support of paid subscribers. If you are serious about this life, everything you need to make a confident decision is below.

What Living Aboard a Nordhavn Actually Costs: The Real Numbers

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