The Parade of Luxury Yachts

We’re at Latitude‘s cruising editor’s spring office aboard ‘ti Profligate at St. Barth in the Eastern Caribbean, where the busy youth sailing program starts at 7:30 a.m. every morning, where you can tell the cruise ships from the private motor yachts by the fact the cruise ships are the small ones, and where there’s a constant parade of magnificent sailing yachts, including two from Silicon Valley’s Jim Clark, the 295-ft three-masted schooner Athena and the 138-ft J Class Hanuman.

All the great new yachts come to St. Barth, so it was no surprise when the new 145-ft Hemisphere, the largest sailing catamaran in the world, dropped her hook. Thanks to her length and 54-ft beam, her footprint, even in the world of mega motoryachts, is astonishing. Yet her designers, Marc Ven Peteghem and Lauriot Prevost of VPLP in France, did a fabulous job. She’s a nice-looking yacht — big yachts sometimes aren’t — and given her towering, spreaderless carbon mast, it’s clear she capable of considerable speed.

Hemisphere was started at Derecktors in the Northeast, but after one problem or another, she was put on a barge and shipped to Pendennis in England for completion. We weren’t invited aboard, of course, so we can only judge from the photos, but she looks gorgeous. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but we’re hoping that Hemisphere, along with Richard Branson’s 105-ft sailing cat Necker Belle, also a frequent visitor to St. Barth, might encourage megayacht owners to start opting for more energy-efficient sailing cats.

If you have a spare quarter mil, you and 11 friends can enjoy a luxury week charter aboard Hemisphere. If the Caribbean isn’t your thing, she’ll be cruising the South Pacific this summer. Given her huge dark blue hulls, she won’t be hard to spot.