SUPERYACHTBARBARA, but it is exactly what the crew had to do
when a clownfish disappeared from the yacht’s aquarium. The story has a
happy ending, in real life as well as on screen.
The product of an experienced designer-builder-owner team, 290ft
Barbara is a traveling beach house with roots in the natural world of the
Asia Pacific region.
As of November 2017, nine months after delivery, the yacht had already
sailed from Alblasserdam in the Netherlands, where Oceanco built her,
to Turkey, Greece, Venice, Antibes, Golfe-Juan, Sardinia, the Amalfi
Coast, Corsica and then Dubai.
Docked across from Queen Elizabeth 2 at Port Rashid in the UAE when
I catch up with her, Barbara is easy to spot with her dark hull and shapely
superstructure. It’s a little tricky to make out how many decks she has from
a distance, and there does not appear to be a straight line on her.
“I think that’s the appealing thing, it really is quite unique,” says Sam
Sorgiovanni, the yacht’s designer. “The client’s brief was to create a
timeless design, something that was like nothing else, and I think we’ve
achieved that. It’s got a very organic feel to it where everything is
interrelated. There are no hard edges; even the chamfer, if you like, is
concave, so it creates a shadow effect. There are many subtle things like
that.” The Australian designer’s fondness for nature and the owner’s
choices are intimately woven into the original styling.
As I get closer, I spot a group of people in matching gray shirts hunched
over the side of the concrete dock a few yards from the yacht, which
arrived just a few hours before. It turns out to be the deck crew and the
yacht’s captain seeking a freshwater source. The haze that hangs over the
Emirate contains fine sand that eventually falls down onto houses, cars
and, yes, boats. To prevent damage to the lustrous paint, the crew has to
wash the yacht every day, the captain tells me.
As I look more closely at the yacht’s finish, I realize that not all that
sparkles under the sun is the result of high quality paint over a perfectly
fared hull and superstructure. “Where it’s black on the superstructure, it
is actually glass,” Sorgiovanni told me a couple of weeks before my visit.
“I did not want to mix paint and glass, so we made sure they actually used
glass. In fact, even the corners are glass, so it’s very clean and pure and flat;
you can never get paint to look like glass because it’s never that perfect.”
I now see what he means; large areas of glazing balance the superstructure’s
white painted aluminum surfaces.
Once on board, I follow Captain Neal Roche to the bridge. The cool and
quiet atmosphere is a delightful reprieve from the harsh sun and heat that
radiates from the concrete dock of the commercial port. Roche takes me
on a virtual walkthrough, talking me through a chart he keeps in the
wheelhouse so I can get my bearings.Barbarahas an unusual and
interesting layout the owner devised with Azure Yacht Design and Naval
FINDING NEMO MAY
NOT BE PART OF THE ONBOARD MOVIECOLLECTION OFThe client’s brief
to designer Sam
Sorgiovanni was to
create a timeless
design, something
that had never been
seen before. The
whole yacht is very
organic, with fluid
shapes, oval
portholes and
curves, a departure
from many of
today’s designs