With great power comes great responsibility, and with great wealth come great ships. ‘Koru,’ named after the Māori word for ‘new beginnings,’ started its voyages with a bang and is now setting new standards in the yachting world, taking its name quite seriously. It is the world’s largest sailing ship, valued at $500 million and owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, and is indeed treated like royalty. This 416-foot yacht made waves as soon as the Oceanco schooner arrived in the US. So enormous that it’s nearly twice the length of an Airbus A380, the yacht could not fit next to other superyachts at the Port of Everglades in Florida.
The half-a-billion-dollar boat had to be docked next to gigantic oil tankers at the South Florida seaport. A special spot for a special ship is not where the royal treatment ended. As ‘Koru’ rests and revives in its special spot after a trans-Atlantic journey, it is being guarded round the clock by the sheriff’s boat. It is not the $75 million ‘Abeona’ shadowing this goliath, but the police safeguarding Bezos’s floating masterpiece like a national treasure.
This precautionary step, taken to guard a massive asset belonging to the world’s third richest man, worth $169.3 billion, seems justified. With talks of the superyacht’s carbon footprint circulating, it wouldn’t be surprising if eco-activists targeted the enormous boat to make a point. The 416-foot ‘Koru’ emits an astounding 1,500 times more greenhouse gases than an average person.
Being the largest schooner on the planet, this luxury vessel is responsible for more than 7,150 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually. This situation recalls the incident involving Walmart heiress Nancy Walton’s $300 million ‘Kaos Yacht‘ in Barcelona, where eco-activists from Futuro Vegetal vandalized the 360-foot yacht by hurling red and black paint all over it.
With the constant patrolling by the sheriff’s boat, it’s clear that precaution is always better than cure. A cure—in this context, a repaint—for this giant 3,300 GT vessel won’t come cheap. Bezos’s magnificent superyacht is now safely nestled next to the 748-foot Singaporean oil tanker ‘Hafnia Kallang’ and the 600-foot-long oil tanker ‘Sti Texas City.’
