MBY gets on board the Sunseeker 155 Yacht for the first time
The Sunseeker 155 Yacht is not a boat that can be described appropriately in a couple of hundred words on a page of the internet.
It’s been roughly 11 years in the planning, two years in the building and the facts and figures on something this large take a good few days to digest in themselves.
In the flesh she is quite simply (and somewhat obviously) enormous. Sunseeker builds a 40 Metre and a 130 Sport Yacht but this is a whole different ball game. Yet, somehow, she is still a Sunseeker. It’s true that our first viewing takes place outside the sheds of Poole’s most famous employer but even in the Cote d’Azur you would know were she’d come from.
She also has an ice blue hull, which is something we hadn’t picked up on from the launch pictures. It looks great up close and will look even better with the azure of the Med below it and the midday sun above it.
We get on board on the day of her first basin test where she is taken out to do slow manoeuvring and, rather charmingly, have her compass swung. The boat is a bustling hive of fluorescent jackets and hard hats as carpet is laid, furniture built and electronics installed.
They are all working around each other to get the 155 ticking and the amount of skill, knowledge and sheer hard work it takes to get a machine like this afloat starts to make your head hurt if you think about it for too long.
We enter from the stern into the “beach club”, where sliding doors conceal a waterside bar area.
Then it’s forward into the engineroom where a pair of 3,000hp MTUs that would dwarf a family hatchback sit above shafts wider than your average telephone pole.
The interior is still being finished so it’s hard to get a handle on how everything fits together but the spaces themselves are amazing. Especially the master suite, with its own private folding balcony.
The unfinished interior makes it hard to give a definitive verdict on quality but what does stand out is the level of detailing and how hard the designers have worked to make every single partition, cupboard door and bulkhead interesting and far more than just a structural entity or convenience.
Panels of twinkling crushed glass line the corridors, treated metal adorns cabinet tops and cupboard doors and even the uplighters and table lamps are gorgeous enough to be pieces of art in themselves.
She has space for ten guests across five staterooms and ten crew members are treated to comfortable quarters on the lower deck. The skipper has their own quarters just aft of the bridge.
Yet despite all of this accommodation, a commercial-grade galley, space for a 7m tender plus two jet-skis and a loaded displacement of near enough 350 tonnes she will still crack 22 knots. Amazingly, the semi-displacement, round bilge hull can handle up to 28 knots. At that speed you might need your own fuel tanker, though.
From a 17ft sportsboat in the garden shed to a 155ft behemoth that is capable of taking you around the world, Sunseeker has come a long way and it doesn’t plan on stopping here.
I could write for hours but check out the May 2014 issue of Motor Boat & Yachting for the magazine report.
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