Boat International US Edition — December 2017

Stalcawastheprecious,private80ftyachtthatPrincessGrace

ofMonacobuiltandusedasasanctuary.Clare Mahontalks

tohercurrentowners,whothinkshe’severybitasspecial

Opposite page: a young Prince Albert at the helm of the family yacht in Monaco in the late 1970s

Saving

Grace

hat would you do to get

away from it all if you were

not only Hollywood’s

highest-wattage star but

Europe’s most glamorous

princess as well? If

everywhere you went you were followed by

court protocol and a slew of unruly paparazzi,

how and where could you get some time alone

with your family? For Princess Grace of

Monaco those questions seem to have been

very pertinent. “I have many duties and

obligations of state along with my husband,”

she told an American newspaper in 1971, “but

my family comes first.”

In the early 1970s she and her husband, Prince

Rainier III, commissioned the Dutch shipyard

Visch Holland to custom build them an 80ft

yacht. The couple had already owned a yacht

together, the 145ftDeo Juvante II, a wedding gift

from Aristotle Onassis that they used for their

honeymoon and later sold.

But now they were looking for something

different. While other royal families were

cruising the seas in luxurious behemoths, with

ranks of crew and extra cabins to fill with guests,

turning heads everywhere they went,Stalca

seemed like a conscious decision to pare down

and hide in plain sight. An 80ft yacht was by no

means small by the day’s standards, but it would

have been too small for guests and would not

have required many crew. Most of all, it would

not have attracted unwanted attention.

Stalca, the Principality of Monaco’s royal

yacht, was much like a place where Grace Kelly

might have enjoyed a family vacation as a child

growing up in Philadelphia – a lodge in the

Adirondacks or a cabin in the Maine woods

perhaps. With four guest cabins – a master, a

VIP and two double bunk cabins – she had room

for family, albeit a royal family, and little else;

crew quarters could sleep two, everything and

everyone else would have to stay ashore. Even

the yacht’s name includes family and nothing

else – it’s an acronym of the names Stephanie,

Albert and Caroline.

Maybe the reason that there are so few

photographs ofStalcatoday is because the

PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES

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