Range is what separates PHOTON from most of what charters at forty-three metres. She is a CRN Navetta – a proper displacement hull, drawing three and a half metres, carrying fuel for 4,600 nautical miles at twelve knots. Nothing about her is designed to sprint. Everything about her is designed to keep going, comfortably, long after a faster yacht would have to stop and refuel.
That thinking runs through the whole vessel. A 2025 refit brought her interiors and systems up to date without touching the character of them: pale bleached oak, cream upholstery, dark timber floors and a lot of glass, laid out over four decks with generous headroom and none of the compression that comes from squeezing volume into a planing hull.
The master is the clearest expression of it. Full-beam, with windows down both sides, it opens into a private study on one side and a walk-in wardrobe on the other, and finishes in a pair of marble bathrooms – his and hers, not one shared compromise. Four further cabins below take the remaining guests: three doubles and a twin with a Pullman berth, all in the same bleached oak, all with marble bathrooms of their own.
Her social spaces are unusually well separated. The main salon runs to two facing sofa groups and a formal dining table forward, seating everyone under a cascading glass chandelier. Up on the bridge deck a second lounge takes a different tone entirely – a grand piano at one end, a linear fireplace set into the joinery, and glass on three sides looking out over the foredeck. It is the room that most yachts of this size do not have room for.
Outside, she is properly equipped rather than merely decorated. A jacuzzi sits forward, set into the teak with the bow narrowing away ahead of it and nothing in the view but water. Aft on the main deck, a shaded lounge steps down to a beach club with an air-conditioned gym behind glass – two Technogym treadmills and a full weight station, not a token bicycle in a corridor. From the platform, a Yachtbeach slide drops into the water alongside a floating teak sea raft, an inflatable aquapark, two Seascooters, kayaks, SUPs and a full towable inventory. There are children’s trainer boards in the list, which tells you who she is set up for.
She works the eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic year-round, and that focus shows in her programme: Greece and the Cyclades through the season, the Croatian coast and the islands beyond it, with the range to make the long legs between them without planning the week around fuel.
Delivered in 2010 as POLARIS and renamed since, PHOTON has aged into the part of the market where a well-built displacement yacht is genuinely worth more than a newer, lighter one. Nine crew, eleven guests, stabilisers that work at anchor as well as underway, and a rate that reflects her build year rather than her 2025 condition. For a group that wants to move properly rather than quickly, she makes a straightforward case.
