Kintaro is one of five Akhir 38s Cantieri di Pisa ever built, and she carries the thing that made the Akhir line worth having: a hull that will run at speed all day in a Cyclades meltemi and still look like it was drawn rather than engineered. Delivered in 2005 with a Studio Vafiadis interior, refitted in 2014 and comprehensively again in 2024, she has spent her life in Greek water under one attentive owner. It shows.
What sets her apart on the charter market is the layout. Six cabins on a thirty-eight-metre yacht is rare, and four of them are proper doubles rather than the single-berth compromises that usually fill the count. Twelve guests genuinely fit, and they fit without anyone drawing the short straw. For two families travelling together, or a group that does not want to divide into a hierarchy of cabins, that is a shorter list of options than it sounds.
The interior is warm cherry and pale leather, and it is the honest 2005 article rather than a retro-fitted look: full-height joinery, panelled deckheads, venetian blinds across the window bands and low cream sofas facing each other across the salon. Forward, the dining table seats ten in the same room, set against the panelling with the sea running past on both sides. It is a comfortable interior rather than a stark one, which suits how she is chartered.
The master sits amidships with hull windows either side and a bathroom in cream stone. The remaining cabins run below, each with its own en suite, each finished in the same cherry with mosaic and marble bathrooms. Nothing feels like an afterthought.
On deck she is set up for evenings. The aft deck takes ten around a solid table under the overhang, shaded through the afternoon and open to the water on three sides. The sundeck is the real draw: a long run of sun pads and facing banquettes, a bar, and a sixty-five-inch outdoor screen that turns the forward end into a cinema after dark. There is a photograph of it in use at dusk, screen lit, deck lighting on, the Aegean flat behind it. That is the yacht in one frame.
The stern opens into a beach club at water level with the tenders and toys stowed either side: a 5.6-metre Novurania, a smaller 3.9-metre, a two-seat Sea-Doo TRIXX, a Seabob F5S, paddleboards, a canoe, water skis, towables and fishing and snorkelling gear. Seven crew run her year-round under a permanent captain, which is unusual at this size and shows in how she presents.
She works the eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic in both seasons, from a base in Athens. That puts the Cyclades, the Saronic and the Dodecanese inside easy reach, and at twenty-four knots cruising the distance between two islands stops being a day of the charter. Fast, roomy, well kept, and genuinely able to sleep twelve. That combination is harder to find than the length suggests.
The exterior is worth a paragraph of its own. Cantieri di Pisa drew the Akhir line around a long, low sheer and a raked, glassed superstructure set well aft, and Kintaro still reads as one continuous line from stem to transom. Two decades on she has not dated, which is more than most of her contemporaries manage, and it is the reason she photographs as well underway as she does at anchor.
