Seventeen crew for twelve guests. That ratio – more than one and a third staff per person – is the number that explains NOMAD, and it is not a figure any modern 70-metre would quote.
Oceanfast built her in Australia in 2003, 69.5 metres of aluminium, 1,260 gross tons, with 8,500 nautical miles of range. She was drawn in an era when a large yacht was expected to be a private ship: crewed properly, provisioned for months, and capable of leaving without a plan for coming back. Thirteen knots cruising, sixteen at the top. She is not quick and was never meant to be.
The range is the giveaway. Eight and a half thousand miles is Fremantle to the Mediterranean without stopping – which is, in fact, roughly what she was built to do. Almost nothing at her length carries that today, because the market decided owners would rather have another deck than another ocean. She has both.
Inside she is deeply, unfashionably traditional: dark polished mahogany on every bulkhead, coffered ceilings, brass, marble bathrooms, oil paintings in gilt frames, and a formal dining room seating twelve under a chandelier. It is a 2003 interior maintained to a 2003 standard rather than dragged forward, and it will either read to you as a period piece or as the last of a school that nobody builds anymore. There is a proper study with a desk. There is a bar with a bottle cabinet. Nothing is minimal.
What she has that newer yachts mostly do not: a genuine cinema – tiered, upholstered, curtained, a real room rather than a screen in the skylounge. A swimming pool on deck, not a jacuzzi pretending. A full bar on its own deck. A gym set up in the open with a view. Six cabins sleep twelve, each panelled in the same mahogany.
Her deck spaces are enormous because 1,260 tons on 69.5 metres is a lot of ship: multiple shaded terraces, a bar, dining for twelve outdoors, and enough separation that seventeen crew can work without ever crossing a guest.
Oceanfast is the part of her story worth knowing. The yard sat in Fremantle, on the wrong side of the planet from every yacht market that mattered, and built aluminium hulls to a commercial standard because that is what Australian yards knew how to do. It no longer exists in the form that made her. That matters twice over: it is why she is engineered like a workboat underneath the mahogany, and it is why there will not be another one.
The honest counterpoint is her age. A 2003 interior is a 2003 interior, and no amount of polish makes gilt frames and coffered ceilings read as current. Seventeen crew is also a running cost that shows up in the APA rather than the weekly rate. She is not a bargain. She is a specific thing, well kept, and either exactly what you want or entirely not.
She cruises the Mediterranean from April at 380,000 euros, rising to 420,000, and stays available through the winter.
NOMAD is a period yacht in the honest sense – built for a way of chartering that assumed staff, distance and time. If you want 2025 design she is emphatically the wrong boat. If you want a small ship with a cinema, a pool and seventeen people looking after twelve, nothing built this decade competes.
