Care Bear – Ocean Voyager 95 Steel Expedition Yacht (2013)

Full Description

Care Bear is about as far from a conventional 95-footer as you can get. She's a US-built steel Ocean Voyager 95 on a commercial hull, fitted out for long range, hard work and self-sufficiency rather than yacht-style finish, and her current owner runs her without any crew. As Chagos, she was customised as a fishing mothership carrying three custom flats boats, the shallow-draught skiffs used to stalk fish in very thin water. She crossed from Fort Lauderdale to West Africa on her own bottom and anchored off river mouths as a floating base for guides, guests and charter clients chasing record-class tarpon. Today her name reflects her work as a humanitarian relief vessel. Just before her current owner bought her in 2021, she finished a year-long refit at Fairhaven Shipyard in Massachusetts. Her owner has invoices for over $800,000 of work, including rebuilt stabilising fins, new Garmin navigation, a new fuel polisher, a new day tank and water tanks, an all-chain anchor conversion and her battleship-grey paint. She's built like a working ship, with 5/16in steel plate on the hull and decks, four watertight bulkheads and seven dogged watertight doors. Twin 350hp Cummins NT855s turn big 40in propellers through 3:1 gearboxes, a 5,000 lb Palfinger knuckle crane serves the working deck, and 6,000 US gallons of fuel, a 2,200-gallon-a-day watermaker, two 30kW generators and 2,000W of solar let her stay out for long periods. Her layout reflects her working life: three guest cabins, three heads, a laundry and two crew cabins, with the captain's cabin aft of the pilothouse, while the former master cabin is used for storage. Her owner expects the next owner to improve the interior, and putting back the owner's space that the cargo conversion took away is the obvious place to start. She's lying in Grenada and is due to cruise back to the US in January.