Bezos’ Billion-Dollar Beast: Koru Cruises the Caribbean
Jeff Bezos' colossal sailing yacht, Koru, made a grand entrance in the Caribbean last December. This $500 million behemoth, the "world's tallest sailing ship," cruised from the US Virgin Islands to St. Barth's, turning heads wherever it went.
There was eye-candy at the dock, in anchorages and plying Caribbean waters from the U.S. and British Virgin Islands to Antigua & Barbuda and St. Barth’s in December. That’s when Koru, US billionaire Jeff Bezos’s 415-foot ‘world’s tallest sailing ship’ (three masts measure 230-feet-plus) took her maiden voyage to these tropical waters. Built for a little over $1 million per foot, with a price tag pegged at $500 million, Koru was handed over to the Amazon executive by Netherlands-based Oceanco in April. After a maiden voyage to Gibraltar and summer in the Med, Koru sailed across the Atlantic arriving in Port Everglades in late November. Its size relegated it parked next to a couple of oil tankers. By the first week in December, Koru had sailed 1,100 nm south to St. Thomas, where it docked next to fellow billionaire David Geffen’s 453-foot Lurssen, Rising Sun. It certainly reinforced Yacht Haven Grande’s nickname as a Billionaire’s Yacht Haven. Sightings continued as Koru cruised and briefly anchored off St. John, then motored through the BVI’s Sir Francis Drake Channel where she was spotted on the docks of the Antigua Yacht Club Marina in Falmouth Harbor the week before Christmas. Koru’s ‘tender,’ the 246-foot Abeona, complete with helipad, was docked there too. Of course, by New Year’s, Koru, with Bezos and his family and friends were anchored off St. Barth’s in a sea of other billionaires and multi-millionaires and their by comparison smaller yachts. With Bezos now making his home in the Eastern U.S., a short hop to the Caribbean, we may see him and Koru coming to an island near you this season.
Carol Bareuther has written for ALL AT SEA since 2004.
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