Adventure is a 2004 Feadship that has been kept the way Feadships tend to be kept, and she demonstrates something the market often gets wrong: a 52-metre yacht from a great yard, two decades on, is a better charter than a new yacht of the same length from a lesser one. The proportions are still right. The build quality is not in question. And the interior, by Terence Disdale, was never fashionable enough to date.
Disdale worked in pale sycamore, coffered timber ceilings and cream upholstery, then let colour arrive in controlled bursts — a green baize games table in the corner of the main saloon, chairs in red and navy and olive around the oval dining table, ikat and fish-print cushions on a blue banquette in the piano lounge. That last room is worth dwelling on: a small space given over to an upright piano and nothing else. Yachts that keep a room for one purpose are almost always nicer to live aboard than yachts where everything folds away into something else.
The main saloon is built for a fortnight rather than a photograph. Cream sofas face each other across a patterned rug, books and blue glass fill the shelves, and the games table sits where the light falls. Forward, the dining room takes a circular light well and a full-height window down one side, so the room turns blue as the evening comes on and the deck dining table shows through the glass beyond.
On deck she is properly equipped for the way people actually charter. A jacuzzi sits in the top deck teak with striped sunpads curving around it and a bar to one side. At dusk the crew rig a full-size cinema screen across the aft deck, drop the umbrellas and turn the sunpads into seating — consistently the most requested evening of the week. There is a beach club and a gym below, an extended swim platform, and a toy inventory that runs from jet skis to seabobs.
Twelve guests sleep in six cabins: a full-width master with a navy headboard between carved lattice screens, two doubles and two twins, each with its own bathroom, plus a convertible. Twelve crew run her — one to one with the guests, which on a 52-metre yacht buys a genuinely different standard of service.
She works the western and eastern Mediterranean through the summer and crosses to the Caribbean for the winter, with 6,334 miles of range at 12 knots to make the passage unremarkable. At EUR 250,000 a week she sits below where a new-build 52-metre would be priced, and the difference buys a Feadship hull, a Disdale interior and a crew of twelve. For a family charter that is a straightforward calculation.
What stays with people is the ease of her. The decks connect sensibly, the shade is where it should be, and the crew have run the same boat long enough to know how a week aboard actually unfolds — when to rig the screen, when to put the tender in, when to leave the party alone. Newer yachts arrive with longer specification sheets. Very few arrive with this much resolved.
She is registered in Valletta and carries the name across her transom above the extended swim platform, which is the first thing guests see coming back from the tender and, after a week, the thing they remember.
