A Russian ex-American billionaire’s yacht beckons in the Netherlands
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THERE ARE THE HAVES, AND THE HAVE YACHTS…
I’m back from holiday, and dreaming of the next one. Perhaps I could rent one of the behemoths that will be on show next month at Damen Yachting’s first ever superyacht private view at their yard in The Netherlands, like the show’s headliner: the truly bonkers La Datcha.
She’s bronze-colored, 77 meters long (252 feet), and boasts what the advertisements describe — I’m not making this up — as an “excellent toy collection”: two helicopters, a three-person submarine, a dive center, various snowmobiles, small boats and jetskis, plus 25 servants to keep your daiquiri topped up. Of course there’s also a jacuzzi, a gym, and the usual luxuries, and she’s apparently capable of ploughing through 16 inches of ice, should the captain decide to go somewhere cold.
Sadly, the yacht’s owner, Oleg Tinkov (who occasionally, and slightly foppishly, spells his name Tinkoff, as if he were a pre-revolutionary Russian aristocrat) will not be sailing in her.