Big-ish Boats

OYE, SO MUCH going on, who has time for blogs? My dad and brother have been here since last weekend and that has taken up a lot of our time -- mostly just chatting, sitting outside, playing with the kids, walking around, and eating loads of good food (mostly prepared by Kerri!). But besides that there has been a lot going on a school (big exams coming up) and the boys and I have been sick.

But we've had a whole lot of fun this past week and it got started last Sunday when we took a ferry to a small island off Cannes called Saint Honorat. But it wasn't the island that perked our interest so much as the massive yachts we passed on the way there. They were so big my brother Jeremy decided to remember their names so we could try to dig up some information about them on google. That was so much fun we sort of spent the week 'yacht hunting' -- looking for the biggest ones we could find in the various ports around here and looking up their information. We found some doozies (including the ever-popular former yacht of Sadam Hussein) -- here are pictures of some of the ones we saw [note: we didn't always have our camera so some of these are photos from google searches]. Which one is your favorite?

Italian designer Roberto Cavalli's yacht. I saw a feature about this yacht in a magazine and always wanted to see it. It was docked in Cannes and we saw it last Wednesday when Jeremy, my dad and I went to the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival. This yacht is renowned for it's paint job. Rumor has it the paint used on the exterior cost $500 per quart. So if you own a Roberto Cavalli suit you helped him pay for about 2.5 quarts of paint for his yacht. [file photo]

The yacht that first peaked our interest during the trip to Saint Honorat. This is 'Octopus' a 400+ foot yacht owned by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. It's the 3rd largest privately owned yacht in the world (excluding heads of state). Perhaps it was off the coast of Cannes because it's being used by some Hollywood A-list types during the Festival.

This is 'Dilbar', currently harbored in Antibes and owned by Russian steel billionaire Alisher Usmanov. It's the 18th largest yacht in the world.

Also anchored in Antibes is this little boat called 'Ice', the 28th largest yeacht in the world, owned by another Russia billionaire named Suleiman Kerimov. I think the fall of communism was good for some Russians. [file photo]

Perhaps our favorite was this massive yacht behind Jeremy and my dad. We were in San Remo, Italy when we saw 'Mirabella V', the world's biggest single-mast yacht. The mast alone is 292 ft. It's a charter yacht that you can get for $400,000 per week. (Hey, if a few of us all chip in...). You can see more about this yacht here.

I'll have more updates later for family and friends, including some details of the high-stakes ping-pong games (matches?) that have taken place in the back yard. But for now, we'll leave it at that.

CJS