As I walk the superyacht docks on a Saturday night at the Cannes Yachting Festival, the parties are in full swing. DJ booths thump bass-heavy dance music and women in sequined sarongs dance provocatively upon bouncing passerelles. As I take in the spectacle, my eyes track toward the stillness of the inner harbor, where Lady Lene bobs placidly and with quiet dignity in the relative darkness.
Lady Lene is from this glamorous world but not in it. Her steadfast lines by Guido de Groot Design betray her Dutch pedigree, and her not insubstantial 112ft length and 268 gross tons have all but a few boats at the show beat. But she isn’t typical of the ephemeral and earthly delights of the megayacht class. Instead, this is a yacht chiefly concerned with another sort of ephemerality: that of life’s fleeting moments.
“In the yachting industry, a lot of times we are selling the image of the sexy girls and the champagne,” Barin Cárdenas, founder of Miami’s YachtCreators and the owner’s representative, says. “But the reality is that many of these yachts are for families that span multiple generations, and the oldest members of is, I think, one of the best examples of what smart and dedicated design can do on a boat when you’re dealing with guests of differing physical abilities.”
