Sail with New Freebooters

The past decade has seen a big increase in the number of very large yachts, with firms such as Perini Navi specialising in designing and building them.

One of the reasons for this is the advent of technological advances that make them easily handled by a very small number of people (Perini claim that one person can sail their yachts unaided, except, perhaps, at the beginning and end of a voyage).

Wikipedia has a definition of a luxury yacht, which leads to a number of definitions of modern superyachts. However, the majority of the article is dedicated to motor yachts, which do not interest me very much.

The article also lists yachts such as the J Class racers as luxury yachts. In their day, they were just yachts - only rich people went yachting, although working boats often took part in races against one another.

The superyachts that interest me are large sailing vessels that push the technology envelope a bit. Because their owners or their charter customers are likely to want such things, they tend to be equipped with equipment that is usually associated with luxury hotels and villas - all marks of fashion-driven conspicuous consumption - but these details don’t interest me.

So what do I mean when I use the term Superyacht? I mean anything from Blue Leopard -designed by Laurent Giles in 1963 and refitted in 2004 -  to Maltese Falcon, built as a proof-of-concept for the Dynarig sail system a few years ago and now successfully operating all over the world. I’ll be looking at a few of these boats in future posts.