Ireland’s absurd tax give-away
THE HAVES, AND THE HAVE YACHTS
If you’re waiting for your superyacht to be delivered, then I’ve got some bad news. Because of the global supply chain issues, as well as the general Covid difficulties, a lot of orders have been unavoidably delayed, so there’s a strong chance you won’t be out on the water for a while yet. You have my sympathies. But look on the bright side, you can at least take some comfort from the fact that lots of other high-net-worth people right now are in the same, well, boat.
- “Delayed projects are nothing new – each year the GOB includes boats whose deliveries have slipped beyond our year-end, but the sheer number this year is significant, and double that of an average year. Covid-19, clearly, has played havoc with superyacht delivery schedules around the world.” That’s the top line from the Global Order Book (GOB), from Boat International.
But that’s not to say there aren’t some bright spots in this gloomy picture. Most notable is the strong growth in the number of new superyachts longer than a 100 meters. For the record, 100 meters is really big: that’s longer than the Statue of Liberty is tall, and many of these boats are bigger still. Biggest of all is the REV Ocean, which will be when completed – at 182.9 meters long – not only the longest yacht ever built, but also bigger than all but the very largest naval destroyers.
If you want an idea of what such a vast vessel might be like inside, here are some facts about the Azzam, the yacht it will displace at the top of the list, which is quite something. The interior of the Azzam features an amount of mother of pearl equivalent to the entire world’s annual production, although my personal favorite snippet about it is how hard the designers worked to ensure the chandelier in the main salon didn’t tinkle in rough seas.
- “It was difficult to know in advance how this would behave, but it was tested in every possible way with sophisticated software and set up challenging targets and it was not a problem,” says Mario Pedol, founder of Nauta Design, which helped design the boat.
Every possible way? The mind boggles.