ELENA V is a Codecasa, and that tells you most of what you need to know before you step aboard. The Viareggio yard has been building steel yachts since 1825, and it has never been much interested in fashion. She launched in 2004 at 49.91 metres, 613 gross tons of steel and aluminium, and two decades later she reads as a yacht that was built to a standard rather than to a trend. Nothing about her is trying to be the newest thing in the anchorage.
Twelve crew look after twelve guests. That ratio is the single most useful number on her spec sheet. It is what a 60-metre usually carries, and on a yacht of this size it means the service is close, quiet and unhurried rather than stretched thin across too many jobs. Six cabins sleep the twelve, and nobody is sharing a bathroom.
Her interior is warm cherry and burl, mirror-polished, with the kind of joinery that only makes sense when a yard has a century of cabinetmakers behind it. The main salon runs wide with deep sofas and a bar to one side. Forward of it, a formal dining room seats the full complement under a coffered ceiling. It is a classic Italian interior, unapologetically so, and it has aged considerably better than the minimalism of the same decade. The cabins follow the same logic – matched timber, generous beds, en-suites in marble, and none of the compromises that show up when a designer has run out of room.
She has a gym. Not a pair of dumbbells wedged into a lobby – a dedicated room with a treadmill, a bike and a full cable machine, which on a 50-metre is genuinely uncommon. Yachts this size almost always trade that space for another cabin or more tankage. ELENA V kept it, and anyone who has tried to hold a routine on charter will understand why that matters.
Up top, the sundeck runs long and open, with a bar and stools at one end and loungers and sunpads spread along it. The upper deck aft is laid for dining outdoors, shaded, with the sea a few steps away. On the foredeck there is a circular banquette wrapped around a table – a slightly old-fashioned idea, and the best seat on the yacht when the sun goes down. Her aft deck opens to the water, and the tender garage empties onto a swim platform that becomes the centre of the day at anchor. Aerial shots of her show the toys spread across the water around her like a small regatta.
Underneath the joinery she is a proper displacement steel hull. Twelve knots cruising, sixteen flat out, and 5,000 nautical miles of range – enough to cross an ocean without arranging anything. In practice that range means she is not tied to the marina circuit. She can sit at anchor for as long as the guests want to, and she rides a swell the way steel does.
She charters the Mediterranean from EUR 195,000 per week. For a 50-metre Codecasa with twelve crew, a gym and this much steel underneath her, that number rewards a second look.
Codecasa hulls hold their character. ELENA V is a good example of why the yard has customers who come back.
