Life Cycle Support Hero. Photo credit Oceanco Yacht.
By Biz Carson and Devon Pendleton
(Bloomberg) –Jeff Bezos should have his new superyacht in time for the summer.
The 417-foot (127-meter) Koru left a shipyard in the Netherlands last week and anchored Wednesday off the coast of Spain near Mallorca, where it’s undergoing tests.
The Koru’s excursion is part of the sea trials where an owner puts the boat through its paces to make sure everything is working properly, according to a person familiar with its travels, who requested anonymity discussing private matters. It could return to the shipyard for final tweaks before being delivered.
The three-masted superyacht is estimated to have cost the Amazon.com Inc. founder more than $500 million. Bezos, 59, is the world’s third-richest person with a fortune of $126.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Previously known as Y721, the ship is now registered as Koru and is flying under a Cayman Islands flag. It’s the largest sailing yacht afloat, according to Boat International, and one of the biggest to be built by Alblasserdam, Netherlands-based Oceanco.
An Amazon spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The superyacht’s size has caused a number of headaches for Bezos and its builders. The height of its masts was originally going to force the city of Rotterdam to dismantle a historic steel bridge, De Hef, for the boat to be able to make it to the ocean.
City officials initially agreed to temporarily take apart the bridge’s central section, but Oceanco ended up retracting the request amid public outcry. The shipbuilder eventually towed the vessel out to sea without its masts.
The size of the sails also meant that the yacht couldn’t have a helipad on board. Instead, Bezos and his helicopter pilot partner Lauren Sanchez will rely on a support boat, which is currently crossing the Atlantic with a destination of Gibraltar, according to vessel-tracking data.
© 2023 Bloomberg L.P.
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