On Watch | A $50 million sailboat cruises into Elliott Bay
Jun 24 2011 in Boats, On Watch by Marty McOmber
Ethereal, owned by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, stopped in Seattle for a week before heading to Alaska.
Sometime today, the sailing vessel Ethereal is scheduled to slip her temporary moorage at Elliott Bay Marina and point her bow toward Alaska.
Typically, a boat heading off for an early summer cruise along the wild coast of British Columbia and points north would elicit little fanfare. But you’d be hard-pressed not to notice this boat.
Ethereal is among the world’s largest private sailing yachts – a 190-foot, ketch-rigged behemoth with a main mast that towers some 180 feet off the water. She has a beam of more than 37 feet. A fleet of water toys. And a crew of 12.
During the past few week, Ethereal has become a temporary landmark on the north end of Elliott Bay. You can’t miss her as you pull into the marina. But only up close can you really appreciate the sheer scale of the vessel.
Ethereal would fit right in to the megayacht playgrounds of the Mediterranean and Caribbean, where the vessel has spent much of her life to date.
But not so much here in the more laidback Pacific Northwest, where our millionaires and billionaires wear fleece and conspicuous displays of wealth are both rare and suspect.
Deborah and I were curious about our new neighbor, so we wandered over a few nights ago for a closer look. We were fortunate enough to meet and chat with a couple of crew members who were standing dockside enjoying the fading light of a dramatic sunset.
Naturally, we asked about who the owner was, but they politely declined to say and the conversation quickly moved on to other topics.
Later, a Google search quickly turned up the information we sought, including a story about the boat in Fortune Magazine and the vessel’s page on Charterworld.com.
According to Fortune, the $50 million boat was designed and built for Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in 2006. Joy was apparently a newcomer to sailing when he commissioned the boat — he hadn’t even owned a dinghy before, the magazine noted.
Designed by naval architect Ron Holland and built in the Netherlands, the vessel is reportedly one of the greenest afloat, or at least, as environmentally sustainable as a megayacht can be.
At close to 200 feet, Ethereal's mast is hard to miss.
Moving by wind power, of course, is a big advantage to that end. But the vessel also employs state-of-the-art power systems and was designed to use as few resources as possible, while still being luxurious enough for people who can spend $50 million on a yacht.
The crew members we talked to were absolutely smitten with the Northwest. Not only for the natural beauty but with the down-to-earth people they had met during their stay in the area.
We listened intently as they discussed the megayacht circuit, where multi-million-dollar vessels travel from cruising hotspot to cruising hotspot and 200-foot yachts are not out of the ordinary. And if the charter page for Ethereal is any indication, the boat spends time in some beautiful places: Tuscany, St. Tropez, Sicily, Sardinia, Portofino, Nice, Naples and Capri, Monaco, Corsica, Cannes and Antibes, just to name a few.
Not on the list yet were the San Juan Islands, Desolation Sound or Juneau.
Interestingly, while the Northwest has a strong reputation for building megayachts, thanks to manufacturers such as Seattle’s Delta Marine and others, we aren’t really known as a destination for those kind of vessels. An industry group was launched in 2008 to change regulations to make it easier for these large vessels to spend time (and money) in our neck of the woods. (The group has since disbanded and joined forces with the Northwest Marine Trade Association).
As we walked away from Ethereal and back toward our comparatively modest boat, I wondered what it would be like if more and more of these gigantic yachts started spending time in our waters.
Would the world’s wealthiest people really forsake the warmth and glamor of the French Rivera or the turquoise water and sandy beaches of the Caribbean for the frigid and damp beauty of the Pacific Northwest? Will Friday Harbor become the next Hvar?
Or will our remote location and reputation for rain (usually undeserved) keep the throngs of megayachts at bay, leaving us to gawk at the occasional vessel whose owner is more interested in the promise of seeing natural beauty than the importance of being seen?
Put another way, is Ethereal the vanguard of a fleet of megayachts — or simply a fleeting vision that belongs to another world entirely?
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