Gigayachts Lean on Big Green -- Money, That Is

Yachting, the old saying goes, is like standing in a cold shower, fully clothed, while pushing hundred-dollar bills down the drain with one’s toes.

And gigayachting?

As a rule of thumb, says Power & Motoryacht magazine, yacht owners -- and by extension, gigayacht buyers -- ought to expect to shell out at least 10% of the vessel’s purchase price on routine maintenance.

That doesn’t include fuel, of course.

A boat the size of Paul Allen’s 414-foot Octopus most likely consumes about $300,000 of diesel every summer. (And that’s before fuel prices took off.)

Make three trips a year, expect to be $1 million lighter.

Routine maintenance means staying on top of things like barnacles. To rid a hull of these creatures -- what’s called a “bottom job” -- is not easy, and therefore, not cheap.

Often, it’s done by divers who scrape barnacles while the boat is still in the water. That’s because it takes time and money -- big money -- to dry dock a boat nearly as long as two football fields.

Gigayachts can, and do, scratch and suffer corrosion from salt water, just like any old canoe.

That means a top-to-bottom paint job for a 400-footer is an annual, and expensive, ritual.

Cost? About $5 million, give or take $500,000.

And just because a super, mega or giga is a seagoing vessel does not necessarily mean it can handle rough seas, especially when traveling from continent to continent in the winter.

Waves can ding, or dent, a hull on a transoceanic run.

To keep a yacht’s hull pristine, owners routinely hire companies to ship -- well, their ships. Some call this “dock-expressing” a yacht.

One company in south Florida that does this is the Dutch company Dockwise. To ship a 200-footer from Mallorca, Spain, to Fort Lauderdale, Dockwise charges $265,000, or thereabouts, says Jeff Last, a sales manager. (That includes freight costs, insurance and the cradle.)

Two things to remember about parking a gigayacht.

One: In south Florida, dock fees start at $1,000 a day.

Two: Good luck finding a suitable dock.

It has never been easy to find a slip that will accommodate a yacht longer than 200 feet -- which, perhaps, is the reason many gigayachts keep helicopters and tenders at the ready.

But now that there are more gigayachts on the seas, dock space has really become a hot commodity -- so much that investors are snapping up waterfront property in Fort Lauderdale not to build homes or condos, but for gigayacht dock space.

“As the boats get bigger, land gets more expensive,” says Kelly Drum, a real estate agent and yacht broker. “Does that make any sense?”