Length is the number people quote. On NOVELA it is the wrong one. She measures 30.6 metres, which places her among a large and crowded field, and she carries a 7.2-metre beam, which does not. That single figure is the whole argument for her: roughly a metre wider than the yachts she is shopped against, and every centimetre of it spent on rooms rather than on profile.
CBI Navi built her in 2000 to a Luca Dini design, and in 2019 she was taken apart and rebuilt under the Serbian designer Sasa Milosavljevic. The refit is the reason she reads as a much newer boat than her build year suggests, and it is also why the volume finally tells. Interiors from 2000 tended to divide space into small formal rooms. The 2019 work opened them up, kept the burled timber and the curved cabinetry that give her character, and let light run the length of each deck.
Three separate interior spaces is the practical result, and on a 30-metre yacht that is genuinely unusual. The main saloon runs across the full beam with a curved settee and a bar at its aft end. The dining room is a room, not a corner of the saloon, seating eight under its own ceiling. Above them the sky lounge is a third space entirely, low and soft in browns and creams, with sliding doors onto a shaded deck. Guests can be in three places at once without anyone feeling moved along.
Below, eight guests occupy four cabins. The master takes the full beam, with the bed on a raised plinth, a curved granite vanity running along one side and a walk-in wardrobe beyond. A double, a second double and a twin complete the accommodation, all with en suites.
She is not fast, and she is not trying to be: fifteen knots at the top, twelve and a half in normal use. This is a Croatian and Adriatic boat, based there summer and winter, and the coast she works rewards a displacement pace. The Kornati archipelago is not a passage to be got through. It is the point of the week.
Where NOVELA does move quickly is on the water beside her. Her toy list is disproportionate to her size and has clearly been assembled by someone who uses it: two 325hp jet skis new for 2025, a Zapata flyboard and hoverboard, two Awake electric jetboards, a Fliteboard, two Seabobs, four monoskis, two wakeboards, two kneeboards, paddleboards and a three-person towable sofa, tendered by a 7.8-metre Bird Eagle with 300 horsepower. Very few 30-metre yachts carry that range.
The last thing is the hardest to photograph. Her crew of five has been aboard for years, and the guest feedback that follows her names them individually and comes from people on their third, fourth and fifth charter. A yacht this size lives or dies on whether five people can run a full week without visible effort. Hers can, and the repeat bookings are the evidence.
NOVELA is not the newest yacht in her bracket, and she does not pretend to be. What she offers is space that boats a size up would be pleased with, three genuine living rooms, a serious water-toy operation and a crew people come back for. In the Adriatic, at seventy-six thousand a week, that is a considered piece of value.
