JeMaSa began life in 1973 as a survey ship for the Australian Navy, built at HMA Naval Dockyard to spend decades charting reefs nobody else wanted to go near. That hull is why she exists in her current form. It was stripped back to bare steel, brought up to class and flag, and rebuilt around it as a 52-metre expedition yacht – a process that finished with an extensive refit on Australia’s Gold Coast, completed in 2025.
Buying a naval hull rather than commissioning a new one buys two things that money cannot easily replicate: 7,000 nautical miles of range, and a boat designed to be a long way from help. Misha Merzliakov handled the interior and exterior design, with naval architecture by Periscope’s Shaun Phelps, and the result reads as a working ship that has been finished beautifully rather than a superyacht wearing a workboat costume. The plumb bow, the tall wheelhouse and the stacked deckhouse are all original naval logic. The pale oak, the linen and the full-height glazing are not.
Her deck programme is unusually complete for the size. A jacuzzi sits forward on the sundeck with cushions to either side. Aft on the same level, a cedar barrel tub stands at the rail. Between them, an alfresco dining table sits under a shade sail with a full projection screen rising behind it, so dinner runs straight into a film with the reef in the background. Aft again there is a bar and a long U-shaped sofa, a striped sunpad running the length of the glazing, and a golf tee laid out on the transom to drive balls into open water. On the top deck, a helideck carries her helicopter.
Inside, the main saloon is bright and calm – light oak, cream sofas, a curved staircase and a band of windows running the full beam. One deck up, a sky lounge in charcoal and blue-grey looks out over the aft deck through windows on two sides. A second, quieter lounge sits lower down with its own screen. There is a gym opening directly onto the side deck, and a treatment room with a massage bed set under the window line, which for an expedition yacht in the middle of the Pacific is a real luxury rather than a listed one.
Twelve guests sleep in seven cabins – a master, doubles, convertibles and a twin with portholes on the lower deck – all in the same pale oak with wide window bands or bronze ports. Sixteen crew run her, and the ratio matters on a boat whose itineraries put her days away from a marina.
She cruises Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and Australasia: Fiji, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, the Australian coast. These are the grounds her hull was built for and the reason a fifty-year-old survey ship is now one of the more interesting charter yachts in the Pacific. She goes where the fleet cannot, and she does it with a helicopter on the roof and a cinema on the aft deck.
