Fifty-five thousand euros a week, in Greece, all year, for eight people on a 31-metre steel yacht with six crew. That is roughly a third of what anything else in this fleet costs, and the reason is simply that SUNCOCO was built in 1992 and has never pretended otherwise.
Lowland Yachts built her in the Netherlands, and the Dutch were making steel displacement hulls to commercial standards when the rest of the industry was learning to like fibreglass. She is 167 gross tons, cruises at eleven knots, tops out at twelve, and carries 1,560 miles of range she does not need. The draft is 2.4 metres. None of these are impressive numbers. What they add up to is a small ship that does not move at anchor and has already survived thirty-three years, which is a longer warranty than any new yacht offers.
Her profile gives the era away instantly: high bow, low white superstructure stepping back in stages, a proper foredeck, and none of the vertical glass that dates a modern yacht within a decade. She looks like a yacht from the last time yachts looked like this, and the shape has come almost all the way back around to fashionable.
Inside she is warm cherry and mahogany – panelled bulkheads, brass, cream upholstery, and a bar built into the salon. The main deck runs salon to dining in one sweep, and there is a second seating area with its own view. Four cabins sleep eight, each in the same timber with a hull window or a pair of portholes at eye level from the bed. It is a 1992 interior kept to a 1992 standard, and it is either handsome or dated depending entirely on how you feel about varnish.
The sundeck is where she earns the rate. A jacuzzi set into the teak with loungers around it, a dining table for eight under shade, and enough room that eight people are not on top of each other. On a 31-metre yacht that is genuinely rare – most of them cannot spare the deck.
Six crew for eight guests. The rate does not move between low and high season, which is unusual and refreshing: she costs the same in August as in April.
There is a case to be made for old Dutch steel that has nothing to do with nostalgia. Yards like Lowland were building to Lloyd’s and Bureau Veritas standards for owners who intended to keep a boat for twenty years, not flip it in four. The plating is heavier than it needs to be, the systems are conventional and repairable, and everything that was going to fail structurally has had three decades to do it. A 1992 hull that is still chartering in 2026 has effectively been proven; a 2024 hull has been promised.
The honest counterpoint is everything else. Eleven knots is genuinely slow, four cabins for eight is tight, and a varnished 1992 interior photographs as exactly what it is. She will not impress anyone at the dock. She will simply cost a third of the alternative and sit still while doing it.
She stays in Greece year-round rather than chasing the season across the Mediterranean, and with 2.4 metres of draft and a hull that sits still, the Cyclades are exactly her ground.
SUNCOCO is the least expensive yacht in this fleet by a wide margin, and the compromise is honest and entirely visible: she is old, she is slow, and she looks it. In return, eight people get a steel Dutch hull, a jacuzzi and six crew for the price of a large villa.
