A 2024 refit can go two ways. It can preserve a yacht, or it can reinterpret her. ISLANDER II is firmly the second. Baglietto launched her in 2002 as a 34-metre aluminium planing yacht with lines by Francesco Paszkowski, and more than two decades later the exterior still looks current: low, dark, and very fast-looking even tied up. What has changed completely is everything inside, which now reads as a modern Aegean house rather than an early-2000s motor yacht.
The main deck is the clearest expression of it. Pale oak runs across the bulkheads and deckhead, the sole is wide-plank and light, and the whole volume is open: deep tufted sofas in cream aft, low round tables in dark timber, and a dining table forward against a single large abstract canvas. There is no bulkhead between the two. Sit on the sofa and you are looking down the length of the space to the dining chairs and out through the forward glass. It makes a 33-metre yacht feel considerably larger than her measurements, and it is the reason she photographs the way she does.
She sleeps eleven in five cabins, which is unusual generosity at this length and the practical reason she charters as well as she does. The master takes the full beam, with ports on both sides at bed height, a bench seat to one side and framed work above the headboard. Two doubles and two twins fill the lower deck, each in the same pale oak with its own bathroom in cool stone and white. Every cabin is quiet in the way modern joinery makes possible and 2002 joinery generally did not.
Seven crew run her for eleven guests, led by a captain and a chef the broker names directly, which brokers do not do unless the feedback is consistent. The galley is a proper working room rather than a corridor, and there is a crew table in it.
Outside she is built around the Aegean. The flybridge carries a long banquette under the open sky with low tables in front of it and the coast running past the rail. The foredeck is given over to sun pads. Best of all is the stern: the transom folds down into a broad teak platform, and the garage behind it opens to reveal the toys stacked and ready. On a hot afternoon in the Greek islands, that platform is where the yacht actually lives.
And there are a lot of toys. An AB Jet tender, two SeaDoo Sparks, two Seabob F5S, a wakeboard, a kneeboard, water skis for adults and children, a teak Yachtbeach platform, a separate jet-ski dock and a multi-dock lounger, paddleboards, tubes and a four-seat towable sofa. Snorkelling and fishing gear are aboard.
Stabilisers work at anchor as well as underway, which on a planing hull in a Meltemi chop is not a luxury. She holds around twenty-one knots in comfort and has thirty available when the schedule slips.
She runs Greece and Turkey through the summer and stays in the region for winter. For a family or two travelling together who want the eastern Mediterranean at speed, in a yacht that feels a decade younger than she is, ISLANDER II is a well-judged charter.
