First Impression: Mirabella V

Date toured: May 2008

Watch our vidcast of a ride in the crow’s nest 150 feet up the 292-foot mast on Mirabella V.

The 247-foot Mirabella V launched in 2004 as the world’s largest single-masted sailing yacht. Her mast is 292 feet tall, allowing her to tower above every other yacht she meets to this day. (By way of comparison, the masts onboard the 2006, 289-foot Maltese Falcon are about 190 feet tall.) Mirabella V’s construction remains, in many ways, groundbreaking, since she is as fast as she is tall, cruising at more than 20 knots under sail. She is, in short, impressive to see, the kind of boat that makes you crane your neck and stand agape like an Iowa farm boy outside the Empire State Building.
     I’ve been onboard the Maltese Falcon, as well as onboard other jaw-dropping  sailing yachts including the 177-foot Parsifal III (a 2005 Perini Navi) and the 183-foot Selene (a 2007 Perini Navi). Now that I was finally getting onboard Mirabella V, to tell you the truth, I was expecting her to be a lot like her competitors in the $250,000-to-$400,000-per-week charter sailboat market: contemporary, with every inch of interior design more intricate (and in the case of the Falcon, ultra-modern) than the next.
    You can imagine my pleasant surprise when I walked around Mirabella V and found a traditional, comfortable sailing yacht. Her interior actually looks refreshingly like a boat, as opposed to a modern art gallery or a land-side hotel. I saw lots of neutral tones, antique-looking dressers, and classic wall sconces. As I moved from room to room, I fully expected to come face to face with brass fixtures.
     “She’s getting older, but she’s well-maintained with a lot of space and a nice crew,” Jacqui Lockhart, the yacht’s charter manager, told me. “Some of our original clients shifted to the Maltese Falcon and Parsifal III when they were brand-new, but we’re still filling our seasons. We have contracts already for the summer of 2009, one three-week and one two-week charter.”
     As well this yacht should. She is very nicely outfitted for charter, taking 12 guests but having enough beds, Pullman berths, and sofas to sleep 17—meaning groups can spread out far beyond the six cabins typically available in this yacht’s size range. Four of the cabins have king-size beds while two have twin size beds, but even those twin cabins seemed enormous to me, certainly a space where my 6-foot-2 husband and I would be more than comfortable.
     The crew area, too, is quite large—an intentional design feature, built to keep crew comfortable. That’s important for charter, since a comfortable crew is a happy crew, one that stays around and, as Lockhart said, are simply as nice as can be to the guests.
     Mirabella V will be in the Mediterranean this summer—and she has some openings in June, when she is expected to be as far east as Croatia and is being offered at a weekly base rate of $300,000, which is $25,000 less than her typical lowest weekly base rate. She’ll be heading to the Caribbean this winter, also at a lowest weekly base rate of $325,000 (and a holiday rate of $375,000). 
    Before you call a reputable charter broker to learn more, check out the vidcast posted here on CharterWave of my ride up the crow’s nest on Mirabella V in Italy. It goes about halfway up her mast—offering a one-of-a-kind, bird’s-eye view that you simply can’t experience onboard any other yacht in the world.—Kim Kavin