SUMMER SUNSET

SUMMER SUNSET is a 28-metre Tarrab motor yacht that has spent her working life in the one place she was built for, and it shows in the way she is fitted out. Argentine-built in 2002 to a Jacqueline Lewis interior, she came out of a comprehensive 2025 refit that reached the machinery, the systems and the soft goods alike, and she now charters a season that runs from Seattle north through the San Juan Islands, into British Columbia and on to Southeast Alaska.

Her layout is unusual for the size. Where most 28-metre motor yachts merge the salon and the dining table into a single volume, SUMMER SUNSET keeps them apart: the main salon is a full-width room lit on three sides, finished in pale bird’s-eye maple over a bleached oak sole, with a full-size grand piano standing aft on the starboard side. One step forward and through a bulkhead is a separate formal dining room, set around a round pedestal table under a skylit deckhead. Forward again is a galley built for a working chef rather than for photographs, stone counters, a wall oven and microwave stack, a dishwasher and a peninsula that opens onto the deckhouse window.

Eight guests sleep in four cabins on the lower deck. The primary suite takes the full beam amidships with a king berth athwartships, hull ports on both sides and burl-inlaid joinery down the length of both bulkheads; its ensuite holds the jetted soaking tub behind a diamond-etched glass screen. A double guest stateroom sits forward against a mirrored bulkhead, and two twin cabins complete the accommodation, each arranged with a main berth outboard and a single against the inboard side. Every cabin has its own head.

Outside, the sheltered aft deck is the yacht’s dining room in good weather: a varnished oval table, a settee outboard, teak underfoot and a solid overhang rather than a canvas awning, which is what keeps it usable through a Pacific Northwest evening. Above the pilothouse, the sundeck opens into a symmetrical lounge with facing tan-leather banquettes and twin low tables, the best seat aboard for a passage through the islands. The upper helm sits forward of it, open to the weather, with a single leather chair and a full instrument panel.

She runs on twin Caterpillar 3412E diesels of 1,400 horsepower each, cruising at 18 knots and topping out at 21, with Naiad stabilisers to take the roll out of an exposed crossing. Practical extras matter more than usual on this coast, and she carries them: Starlink for the stretches with no cell coverage, a 300-bottle wine cellar, an inflatable swim platform, four stand-up paddleboards, two kayaks, electric bikes for the villages ashore, and fishing and snorkelling gear.

A crew of three runs her, and the food is a stated part of the offer rather than an afterthought, menus built around locally sourced salmon, Dungeness crab, halibut, shellfish and seasonal produce, planned around the itinerary rather than a fixed rotation. For a group of eight who want the Inside Passage without giving up a proper dining room, a piano and a bathtub, she is a rare piece of kit.