Touring the SY Perseus
$25 - $50m of luxury Yacht

I knew I’d get wet during my tour of the SY Perseus. After all, I had to wade into the lagoon just to reach the tender where the superyacht’s captain, Aaron Abramowitz, waited to transport CITV’s Jeane Matenga and me through the reef break to the vessel.
What I hadn’t planned on doing was going for a swim. With my clothes on. Carrying my camera.
But that’s what nearly happened as I was stepping onto the Perseus. When the tender suddenly drifted away from under my back foot, I had to hastily lunge forward to avoid an unscheduled immersion in the deep blue sea.
It goes without saying that the rest of our exclusive tour of the Perseus was a little bit more graceful.
At 50 metres in length, the vessel can best be described as huge. It takes Abramowitz and a crew of eight – including three stewardesses and a classically-trained chef – to sail and maintain the yacht on her current round-the-world tour.
Abramowitz is understandably prudent when asked to name his boss.
“The owner is Irish,” he says. “Other than that, I can’t really divulge too much information.”
Later, he mentions how the owner flies his own planes. The only other clue in plain sight is a framed fish fossil signed by Jimmy Buffet. Is there a musical connection here? Do any members of U2 have their pilot’s licence?
Abramowitz is equally circumspect when it comes to confirming the rumour that the vessel is worth a cool $40 million US.
“To give you a rough idea, you could be looking at anywhere from $25 million to $50 million,” he says. “It really depends on the owner and what they want to put into their vessel.”
The anonymous Irishman is the ship’s second owner since she was built by Perini Navi and launched in 2001 in Viareggio, Italy. Abramowitz, a 36-year-old American, joined the Perseus in January 2009.
“I grew up around boats,” he says of his childhood on the waters off Long Island, N.Y. “My family always had fishing boats or speed boats. When I was about seven or eight years old, I got into sailing, funnily enough through the Boy Scouts. That’s where I fell in love with sailboats.”
The Perseus is considered a motor sailer because it contains auxiliary engines as well as sails.
“She’s not a planing hull like some of your maxis or race boats,” Abramowitz says. “She’s a steel hull up to the first-deck level and then the rest of it is all alloy. We have alloy masts, with a 52-metre main mast.”
It’s that main mast, and its tendency to interfere with air traffic, that has mandated the Perseus anchor outside the reef at various locations around the island.
As Abramowitz and his crew await the arrival of the ship’s owner before departing for Aitutaki and then on to Mangaia for the solar eclipse, they are doing their best to play tourist while still keeping the vessel ship-shape. And, believe me, that’s a lot of vessel to keep clean.
“The boatswain is the individual on this boat who pretty much runs the maintenance of the deck,” Abramowitz says. “He will start on a Monday and, by Friday, he will have worked his way all the way to the back of the boat, hopefully get his weekend off, and then start all over again.
“These vessels are very, very expensive assets to own and to maintain. It can get away from you very quickly, so it’s a constant task keeping these things looking pretty.”
I eye the bow and ask how many guests – having chartered the ship for in excess of $170,000 US a week – ask to stand out there and scream “I’m the king of the world!” into the void.
“Quite a few,” says Abramowitz. “Usually after five or six drinks.”
With no alcohol forthcoming, I rightly assume I won’t be doing my best Jack Dawson imitation today.
Maybe I’ve been spoiled by those repeated viewings of Titanic but, considering how much a vessel like this is worth, I was expecting a bit more, well, opulence. Sure, there’s lots of chrome and teak, but even a slave wage like me knows those features come standard.
I wanted gold fixtures and jewel-encrusted chandeliers and Cordovan leather. Instead, we stand on a fly-bridge littered with misshapen lumps, protective coverings rendering the lounges indistinguishable from the Jacuzzi.
The downstairs areas, as well, turn out to be more workmanlike than wondrous, although, I’m sure, things get a bit fancier when the owner or guests are onboard. I catch a glimpse of the piano in the main salon and idly wonder if it is ever played in this age of iPods and MTV.
What the Perseus lacks in surface wealth, it makes up for in toys. Below decks, there are surfboards, fishing rods, a wakeboard, scuba tanks and snorkelling gear.
The ship itself is fully automated.
“You can pretty much sail the entire boat via joysticks,” Abramowitz says. “The entire boat and its systems are monitored through a computer system. You name it, we can look at it and operate it at the click of a mouse button.”
With the owner picking and choosing where along the route he will join the tour, for the most part it’s just the nine crewmembers onboard, day after day, league after league. I ask Abramowitz how that’s worked out so far.
“I use the analogy of a family,” he says. “And, like any other family, not everybody gets along on any given day. But the crew are all professionals. They understand the fact that not everybody has to be best friends, but you do have to be responsible and you do have to work with people.”
Abramowitz ticks off some of the ports of call on the world tour – Costa Rica, Mexico, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, China, Japan – and notes how experiencing these places makes up for all the hard work and long hours.
“I don’t know of any other industry in the world where you can get aboard some mode of transportation at someone else’s expense and see all these wonderful places,” he says. “I think that’s why what we do is so foreign to most people and they’re so intrigued by this lifestyle. It’s because the normal day-to-day routine for people is 180 degrees from what we do.”
Our tour complete, it’s time to return to dry land. I can’t leave, however, without asking the most important question of the day: might the yacht’s unnamed owner be interested in adopting me?
Abramowitz laughs: “He has a fairly sizable family but I’ll mention it to him in case he’s looking for an older child who’s already out of the house.”

By John Ireland

Herald Issue 463 10 June
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