Jeff Bezos’ Divisive 417-Foot Megayacht Made A Stealthy Entry Into A Dutch Port
This million-dollar megayacht owned by Jeff Bezos has caused quite a stir, but he has now quietly disappeared. According to […]
Victoria Liotta
This million-dollar megayacht owned by Jeff Bezos has caused quite a stir, but he has now quietly disappeared. According to Marine Industry News, the $485 million boat was hauled away from Oceanco’s Alblasserdam shipyard on Tuesday morning, its route to a port in Rotterdam. The months-long “Bridgegate” scandal seems to have ended quite anticlimactically. In case you haven’t heard, Amazon’s founder caused a stir in February of this year when Oceanco sought the demolition of Rotterdam’s historic Koningshaven Bridge so that the company’s maritime giant could pass. The Y271, measuring in at 417 feet long, was taller than the 144-year-old bridge’s 131-foot clearance, and that was before the three masts, each measuring 229 feet, were wholly raised. The problem was solved by briefly taking De Hef’s core apart. Let’s say that opinion was divided among Rotterdam citizens. Thousands of locals have vowed to egg the billionaire’s schooner as a form of protest. Oceanco dropped its proposal to demolish the bridge after public backlash. Amazingly, Y271 was still able to get away.
At 3 a.m. on August 2, local yachting aficionado Hanco Bol saw the boat stealthily leave, and he recorded the three-hour excursion and uploaded it to YouTube. Bol theorised that to conceal the launch and transportation, Oceanco probably used a different path. At 6 a.m., the boat allegedly landed at the Port of Rotterdam after averaging 8 knots of pace. As Bol describes it, the escape was smooth and unobtrusive.
The YouTube video’s description states, “we’ve never seen a conveyance travelling so fast.” Oceanco has remained mum on the Giga yacht, ignoring a request for comment from Robb Report. With its completion, Y271 will be the largest sailing yacht in the world and the largest superyacht ever built in Holland. This may be the most divisive as well.
Weeks after Rotterdam citizens threatened to shower the luxury vessel with eggs if the city followed through with plans to remove an iconic bridge to make room for the $500 million ship, Jeff Bezos’ unfinished super yacht was carried away from a Dutch construction yard before dawn on Tuesday.
According to the German-language publication Der Spiegel, the Y721, a 417-foot-long, three-masted yacht, was moved from the Oceanco shipyard in Alblasserdam to the Greenport yard in Rotterdam, situated just 24 miles away.
We’d never seen a conveyance travelling so quickly before,” Bol writes. Despite Bol’s claim that the usual trip time for the ship via the Noord canal is almost twice as long, the journey took less than three hours. Given the extensive media coverage, he thinks the yacht’s builder, Oceanco, deliberately selected a low-key moment to make the transfer.
Outraged about the proposed demolition of the “De Hef” bridge (also known as Koningshaven), residents of Rotterdam had vowed to egg the boat if it set sail. According to Bol, the yacht’s itinerary was planned so that it would neither pass through the heart of Rotterdam nor pass beneath “De Hef,” even though doing so would have been more expedient.