Most yachts on the charter market are younger than the crew running them. Chantal was launched in 1965 to a Camper and Nicholsons design, and she has spent the six decades since being maintained rather than reinvented. A refit completed in 2020 brought her systems and her comfort up to date without touching what makes her worth chartering: a steel hull, a full-displacement shape, 3,455 nautical miles of range and a foredeck built for weather.
That combination takes her places very few yachts of this size can reach. She works Norway, and she works it properly: the fjords, the western islands, the quays at Bergen and the harbours further north, in winter as readily as in summer. A beam of six metres and a draught of 2.6 let her into inlets a modern thirty-eight-metre would not attempt, and the steel below the waterline is why nobody aboard has to think about cold water or a rising sea.
Inside, cherry panelling runs everywhere: main saloon, upper saloon, corridors, cabins. It is the real thing rather than a modern reproduction. Cabinetry with rounded corners, brass fittings, framed marine prints, half models along the sideboard. The main saloon runs the full width of the deck, a lounge at one end and a dining table at the other, wrapped in windows set low enough to watch the water from a sofa. One deck up, a smaller upper saloon with a curved forward window is the room to be in when the northern light goes long: two armchairs, two sofas, and a view straight over the bow of wherever she has anchored.
Accommodation is four cabins for eight guests. The owner runs full-beam with a private study alongside, desk and bookshelves under a window. Three further cabins sit below, panelled to the same standard, each with its own bathroom in marble and cherry and one with a full bath. The scale is generous for the year she was built and honest by any standard since.
On deck she is arranged for using the place she cruises rather than looking at it. The covered aft deck seats six around a solid teak table with the sea a metre away and the ensign overhead, and that is where most of a charter actually happens. Two tenders live forward: a seventeen-foot Comitti in varnished mahogany with an inboard diesel, and a Zodiac on an eighty-horsepower outboard for the shallow ends of fjords. Kayaks, paddleboards, water skis and fishing gear are aboard. So is clay pigeon shooting, which tells you something about how she is used.
Seven crew look after eight guests. The ratio matters more here than it would on a modern yacht, because the itinerary is not a marina circuit. It is anchorages, glacier arms, waterfalls and villages reachable only from the water, in a country where the weather sets the schedule and the crew have to be able to change the plan at breakfast.
She is not a yacht for anyone who wants the newest thing. She is a yacht for anyone who wants to be somewhere the newest thing cannot get to, aboard a boat that has been getting there since 1965.
