Take a gander at [what is not] Bill Gates's $644 million hydrogen-powered superyacht

I call it by several other names, many of them quite graphic.

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But will he still have Kermit the Frog’s voice?

We must be of different generations. I was thinking Robert Newton, to be honest.

Arrrrr, Jim lad!

Oh, no, it’s the real Gates who sounds like the musical frog - to my ear, at least.

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It’s amazing how many places ran this story, and (almost) none of them bothered to actually fact check it in any way.
Damn BBC bias towards actual truth in reporting…

*snickering tailing off to a despairing sob*

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Musical frog?

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Including the modern DynaRig computer-controlled sails.

This is the Black Pearl, designed to be able to cross the Atlantic without using any fuel. When under sail, the propeller acts as a generator to charge batteries.

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The sister ship of that one appeared off the coast outside my town a bit ago. It looks even weirder when the sails are furled - those rigid masts look like something out of sci-fi without the sails.

I’m a bit more partial to this beauty:

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Maltese Falcon, built for Tom Perkins, beat 'em to it:

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Wally does make some gorgeous boats…

I coveted the Wally 118 for a bit. Scarlett Johansen might have influenced me on that one. However, it needs 22,000l of fuel for barely 590km of range (granted, at freeway speeds), so it wasn’t going to be practical anyhow. :roll_eyes: And I’d probably earn a very dark mark in Greta Thunberg’s books. :thinking:

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No. Sails mean a hull will lean or roll.
Billionaires cannot be expected to cope with an even slightly non-level deck.
#think of the billionaires

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Well I’ve seen the first two but that third one is really right up my alley.

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Mike Vanderbilt would like a word:

Good point, but …

Which one is he?

Anyway, he seems an old timey, proper, earth’s resources plunder and pillage, inheritance billionaire, I’d guess, looking at the age of what can legitimately be called a yacht. The guy liked sailing, perhaps.

Modern software/platform monopolist cry-babies buy ‘yachts’ not to go sailing but to go luxuriating. Having ‘tilty decks’ is not luxuriating. :wink:

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Harold Stirling “Mike” Vanderbilt, son of William and Alva, avid sailor and skipper of the America’s Cup-winning Enterprise in 1930, seen above.

Yes, Wally sailboats are absolute works of art and put just about every modern naval architect to shame.

Don’t feel so bad about Gretta, wait until someone tells her about the enviromental impact of laying the fibreglass for her boat and in 2 years when she has to replace her sails. Hopefully somebody will make handbags out of them and they will stay out of landfills a bit longer. And befor someome crucifies me, I have a ton of respect for her as she is not just preaching, she is doing.

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Ah. America’s Cup. Proper sailing, not ‘yachting’. Or luxuriating - even though those old Americas Cup boats are things of luxuriant racing power! :wink:

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Endeavour [JK3], the challenger for the 1933 Cup race (Enterprise, another J, successfully defended in 1930), features a marble fireplace whose mantle height was determined by the comfort of the owner’s elbow, and a bathtub with three drains, suitable for either tack or none at all. Until the post-WWII rules revision, the 12 meter class required living accommodations for the crew. Which is to say, these are far from stripped-out racing machines. And a yacht is any vessel without a working purpose in mind for the design, so technically a windsurfer or a Sunfish is a yacht.

ETA Js, racing in Rhode Island Sound, 2018:

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