“If you find yourself alone, riding in green
fields with the sun on your face, do not be
troubled. For you are in Elysium, and
you’re already dead,” says Russell Crowe’s
Maximus in the 2000 blockbuster
Gladiator. And so ran the thinking of Ron
Gibbs when he named his Sunseeker 131
Elysium, after the Ancient Greek concept
of a heavenly paradise.
And like any decent depiction of
heaven, Elysium is heavily influenced by
the mind of its beholder. Gibbs took
Sunseeker at its word when it said its
Bespoke program offered “a clean canvas”
for yachts of more than 100ft – with the
result Elysium is comfortably the most
customized of all the 14 Sunseeker 131s
delivered to date. An experienced owner,
with four Sunseekers from 50ft to 115ft
already behind him, Gibbs was clear from
the start on the features he wanted to
personalize. “I wrote the spec beforeI ordered the boat,” he says. “That way, the
yard has everything up front and it
minimizes costly change orders.”
His list of custom features was long and
detailed, with a first draft extending to
120 pages. And it drilled down as far as
details such as not using push-in power
sockets behind the bridge console – he’s
had problems in the past with plugs
rattling loose, requiring major surgery to
access. “Why would you use a push-in
fitting on a boat that is subject to
vibration?” By the end of the build, they
were on version 11 of the document.
Many of the changes boil down to just
two things: Gibbs’s love of taking the
wheel and his preference for a big tender.
“I like driving the boat myself and I like
being in the open air. I didn’t want to be in
the same situation as with the Sunseeker
115, where you have to run between the
sundeck and the bridge.” He specced aA
personal
paradise
Carefully detailed customization transformed a Sunseeker 131
into an owner’s exclusive slice of heaven, finds Sam Fortescue
PHOTOGRAPHY Blueiprod
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