Clase Azul

A gulet is a working boat by descent. The type comes from the Turkish coast, built in wood for carrying cargo and fish, and most of the gulets a charter guest will ever see are twenty-five or thirty metres of pleasant, unremarkable timber.

Clase Azul is forty-eight point two.

That single figure moves her into a category the type was never drawn for. At this length a wooden hull stops being a rustic alternative to a white fibreglass yacht and becomes something with no obvious competitor: twelve guests across six cabins, a crew of nine, and a standard of finish that has very little to do with the boats the design descends from.

Nine crew for twelve guests is close to three to four. On a vessel this size that ratio is the difference between a boat that is sailed and a boat that is run — meals that arrive when people are hungry rather than when the galley is ready, cabins turned round while everyone is ashore, and a deck that never looks as though anyone has had to work on it.

The aft deck is the room she was built around. On most yachts of this length the stern is divided between a dining area, a sunbathing area and a tender operation, each smaller than it wants to be. Here it is one enormous shaded space, and the shade matters as much as the size: in the Dodecanese in August, a covered deck is the difference between using the boat between noon and five and hiding below.

Her draught is shallow, which is the second reason she belongs where she is. The Lycian coast and the Greek islands opposite are full of bays that a deep-keeled yacht of forty-eight metres simply cannot enter — it anchors outside and sends a tender in. Clase Azul goes in.

She was delivered in 2022, which matters more on a wooden vessel than on a fibreglass one: this is a hull built recently, to modern standards, in a material that rewards being new. She works the Eastern Mediterranean. She suits a group that has chartered before and is bored of the choice between a modern motor yacht and a modern sailing yacht. She is neither, and nothing else in this collection feels remotely like her.