Sixteen guests. Seven cabins. Forty metres. No other yacht in this fleet comes close to that density, and it is the reason DONNA DEL MARE exists.
The conventional 40-metre sleeps ten, occasionally twelve. She sleeps sixteen, and she does it without stacking people into bunk rooms – seven proper cabins, each panelled in the same dark mahogany, each with its own bathroom. For a family group that would otherwise need two yachts, or a charter that has to work for three generations at once, that arithmetic is the entire decision. Everything else about her follows from it.
Aegean Yacht built her in steel in 2006, and she is unmistakably a ship rather than a yacht. Deep blue hull, high bulwarks, a superstructure that looks like it belongs on something commercial, and a profile that would not have looked out of place fifty years ago. She cruises at 10 knots and tops out at 12. Nobody charters her to go fast. The 3.4-metre draft is the deepest in this batch, which tells you she was drawn for stability rather than for creeping into shallow bays.
Inside she is unapologetically traditional: mahogany everywhere, brass fittings, panelled bulkheads, and a formal dining room that seats sixteen at one table. Wine is racked the length of the lobby between the salon and the dining room, in plain sight rather than behind glass, and there is a lot of it – which tells you where the owner’s priorities sat. The salon is deep and low-lit and feels like the lounge of a small hotel.
Her sundeck carries a large jacuzzi with a bimini over it and loungers wrapped around, and it lights up in colour after dark. The aft decks seat everybody twice over, and there is a lot of teak – the beam and the volume mean the deck spaces are broad in a way modern 40-metre yachts cannot match.
Eight crew for sixteen guests. She flies the Croatian flag and her photography is Dubrovnik and the Dalmatian islands, though Fraser lists her cruising ground as the Mediterranean and Greece.
Aegean Yacht builds at Bodrum, and the Turkish yards occupy a particular niche that is worth understanding before judging her. They do not compete with Feadship or Benetti and have never tried. What they do is build large, heavy, conventionally engineered steel hulls at a fraction of northern European cost, and fit them out by hand in timber. The result trades novelty and resale for volume and price, and it is why a 40-metre from Bodrum sleeps sixteen where a 40-metre from Viareggio sleeps ten.
The honest counterpoint is that the density has a cost you feel. Sixteen people on a 278-ton hull is a busy boat, seven bathrooms means seven sets of plumbing on a yacht built in 2006, and 10 knots means the Adriatic is her whole world. None of that is hidden. It is simply the deal she offers, and for the right group it is a good one.
Weekly rates start at 110,000 euros, which works out at under 7,000 per guest – by some distance the lowest per-head figure in this fleet.
DONNA DEL MARE is not for a couple, and she is not modern. She is for sixteen people who want to be on the same boat, in the Adriatic, at a price that makes the maths work. On that brief she has almost no competition.
