First photos of the world’s largest boat (owned by Jeff Bezos)

The world’s largest sailing boat for the world’s second richest man is taking shape. We told you about the 127-metre yacht that Oceanco was building for Jeff Bezos: now we have the construction images of the boat commissioned by the CEO and main shareholder of Amazon, “stolen” as soon as the hull left the Dutch shipyard in Zwijndrecht.

The secrest of Jeff Bezos’ mega yacht

The yacht, for now known by her technical name of Y721, should already be delivered in 2022: once she touches the water, she will be the longest sailing yacht in the world. This record currently belongs to Sea Cloud, which is “only” 109.5 metres long (launched in 1931 under the name Hussar II). A record destined to be short-lived!

Bezos’s megayacht is also a record for Dutch company Oceanco, which specializes in building “giants of the sea” (one of the latest being the stunning 106.7-metre Black Pearl). It has never built such a large yacht before, and it is also the largest recreational yacht built in Holland.

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Classic lines and “double bow”

But let’s see the boat in detail, in its sparkling black colour, made of steel and carbon. What’s striking are the crazy sweeps of the stern and bow and the classic lines, at a time when design is increasingly moving towards vertical fore and aft.

The solution with a sort of “double bow” is strange. Mind you, this is a very different kind of double bow from the one seen on some ships and even on a 12-metre motorboat – the Canelli 39 Revolutio -, i.e. a double offset bow lying on the same axis to reduce friction and resistance to motion when the craft is travelling at low speeds and coming out of the water in a planing attitude. In the case of Bezos’ boat, the choice seems to be dictated by the desire to have a large “dolphin boat” integrated into the hull.

Three masts and Dyna Rig

We also know that the boat will have three masts, with a Dyna Rig system. The Dyna Rig was invented by Wilhelm Prölss in the 1960s. The DynaRig, which was successfully fitted to Black Pearl, works with independent rotating masts with self-supporting sail rig.

Each mast supports six spars which, unlike a conventional mast, have a preset curvature of 12%. The fifteen square sails are positioned between the spars in such a way that when they are hoisted there are no gaps between the masts, so they act as a single wing.

The sails are furled and stored in the mast, and can be hoisted in six minutes by powerful electric motors. The sails are adjusted by turning the masts. As there is no rigging, the masts and spars can be rotated to allow the boat to sail upwind. The first boat to install the Dyna Rig System was the 2006 Maltese Falcon built by the Italian boatyard Perini Navi.

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30 knots under sail and 3,000 tonnes

The boat’s maximum speed under sail will be over 30 knots and under engine only 18 knots, weighing over 3,000 tonnes. There will be only 6, or at most 7, cabins, with a master suite in the bow, equivalent to a flat of at least 250 square metres. The sail area is equally monstrous, estimated at 3,500 square metres.

How do we know the boat belongs to Jeff Bezos?

A curiosity arises. Given the privacy surrounding these mega projects, how do we know that the boat is really Jeff Bezos’? In the book ‘Amazon Unbound – Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire’ by Brad Stone, the superyacht is described as ‘one of the most beautiful boats in existence’, with ‘several decks’ and ‘three huge masts’.

According to the book, a tender is also under construction. A tender that, we anticipated, will be 30 metres long and where the helicopter that cannot land on the “mother” boat can land, because the masts leave no room for a helipad.

It is also rumoured that Jeff Bezos’s ($177 billion fortune) superbank is the brainchild of the Amazion CEO’s girlfriend, 51-year-old Lauren Sanchez (TV anchor and entrepreneur), after a sailing holiday in Spain with fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg.