Terschelling – 38m Buoy Tender Expedition Yacht (1963)

Full Description

Terschelling was never meant to be a yacht, and that is exactly what makes her interesting. She was launched on 23 September 1963 by the Zaanlandse Scheepsbouw Maatschappij in Zaandam for the Royal Netherlands Navy, as pennant A948, and within the same year passed to Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch government department that looks after the country's waterways and coasts. For the next 25 years she laid and maintained the navigation buoys of the Wadden Sea and the Dutch coast, some of the shallowest and busiest water in Europe. After she was decommissioned in 1989 she crossed to Plymouth and became a dive and salvage tender. She worked on the Plymouth Breakwater Fort, served as base ship for the Resurgam and SubMap projects, supported trials of the Autosub autonomous underwater vehicle for the Southampton Oceanography Centre in 2001 and 2002, and joined the support fleet for the Mary Rose project in 2003. In 2023 her owners began a conversion, completed under class, that turned her into an Arctic expedition yacht. The old buoy deck is now a 70 square metre panorama saloon, and the working accommodation has given way to six en suite guest cabins for up to twelve guests, with four crew cabins and a guide's cabin sleeping a crew of seven. Underneath she is still a commercial ship: a 238 tonne round-bilged steel hull with an Ice Class 1 rating, which lets her work the edges of the first-year ice around Svalbard, Greenland and Arctic Norway with a margin a conventional explorer yacht does not have. A single Bolnes eight-cylinder diesel of 467hp turns a fixed three-blade propeller for a 9 knot cruise, and 50,420 litres of fuel in four tanks plus 34 tonnes of fresh water give her real long-range independence. Two generators, hydraulic cranes of 5 and 1 tonnes, twin hydraulic windlasses with 180 metres of chain each, Starlink and an Inmar tender with a 60hp outboard round out a boat built to look after herself a long way from help. She has been set up and run as a commercial expedition vessel, and the operating business may also be available with her, so she could suit a buyer looking for a ready-made charter or expedition operation as much as a private owner. Offered VAT exempt.