Sold the Yacht, kept the Sub

by Sunday Times/Sail-World Cruising on 3 Aug 2009 Tom Perkins, American venture capitalist and owner of the world's biggest sailing yacht the Maltese Falcon, has sold the yacht, but kept the submarine that it carried on board.

Recently Perkins had switched much of his interest to the personal submarine designed by Graham Hawkes, a London-born engineer now working in the San Francisco Bay area.

He helped develop the £1.5m two-man Deep Flight Super Falcon sub which has wings and resembles Stingray from the children’s puppet series.

The submarine has been carried aboard the Maltese Falcon but sources said this weekend that it was Perkins’s intention to retain the sub after the sale of the yacht.

Not that the yacht was so easy to sell - it sold only after a little price trimming to $60 million (from $90 million), and a year of patiently waiting.

The 289ft boat — an elegant “hybrid” that can run on giant sails or engines — is believed to have fetched about £60m after being on the market for more than a year. The yacht, named after the Dashiell Hammett crime novel and its Humphrey Bogart film version, has three carbon-fibre masts carrying 15 sails. Its appearance is based on a traditional, square-rigged sailing ship.

No deckhands are needed to clamber up the rigging and unfurl the sails, however. Instead, the Maltese Falcon’s DynaRig system can be sailed by one man from a computerised control console on the bridge that moves the yards and sails according to the wind and current. Perkins wrote some of the software himself. The sails billow out from storage positions inside the masts up to a height of 20 storeys. They can unfurl in six minutes into a total area of 25,791 sq ft, equivalent to half the pitch at Wembley.

Perkins, 75, is one of the technology pioneers credited with founding Silicon Valley and his venture capital firm helped finance the set-up of Google.

Perkins, who spends about two months a year at Plumpton Place, his Elizabethan mansion in East Sussex, which once belonged to Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist, declined to say who had bought the yacht which has six guest cabins, eight crew cabins, a gym and a sculpture of a vintage Bugatti racing car.

Of the sale, he said: “It has taken a while. It is not the best time in the world to sell it. I can’t tell you anything at all about the buyer. There is confidentiality.”

Perkins had the boat built as his personal vision of the perfect yacht. It is based on an aborted 1960s concept to relaunch clippers as fast merchant ships such as the 19th-century Cutty Sark, which sits at Greenwich on the River Thames in London.

The yacht, which can cross the Atlantic in 10 days, has already logged more than 60,000 miles. Perkins may even have broken even after letting the boat for more than £300,000 a week. It is currently on charter in the Balearic islands.

David Pelly of Boat International magazine, a superyacht specialist, said: “It’s really a remarkable boat. It is based on the design of a German who wanted to have a modern square rig for merchant ships. Perkins wanted to try it out and had it built.

“It has a fabulous art deco interior. But Perkins is a restless man and always wants to try something new.”