Istros: Keeping the Hull, Replacing Almost Everything Above It

Istros was launched in 1954 from the De Vries Lentsch yard in Amsterdam, built for the Pappadakis family and, at 42 metres, one of the largest motoryachts the Netherlands had ever produced. The Dutch press of the day marvelled at her radar and at a white telephone that could call anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world. She was still winning prizes as late as 2001. Then she faded — an earlier restoration stalled, and she ended up tied to a quay in Malta, corroding.

That is where Captain Tristan Le Brun found her in 2015. The owner he sailed for bought her, and the decision that shaped everything followed: save the classic exterior, rebuild everything else. Work began in Malta in late 2018, and it began with an act of respect for the original builders — before the old superstructure was cut away, the team made a complete 3D scan of it, so what replaced it could follow the same lines.

The superstructure had to go. Corrosion in the steel had weakened the window and door frames worst of all, and Lloyd's compliance demanded watertight doors the original teak ones could never be. De Voogt Naval Architects' answer was a new superstructure in aluminium: far lighter than steel, built from the scan as a replica of the original, raised by roughly ten centimetres with the bulwark lifted to match, so the proportions read unchanged from any distance. Underneath it, the original hull — partially riveted steel, six and a half decades old, with bends and buckles no drawing captured — was meticulously restored. The yard had eight to ten period drawings to work from, where a new build might have five thousand. As the project manager put it, there is not a straight line on her.

Then came the engines, and the real engineering problem. The original Crossley pair weighed 38 tonnes by Feadship's account — fifteen percent of the yacht's entire displacement. The fuel-efficient Caterpillar C18s that replaced them weigh about two tonnes each with their gearboxes. Removing that much low-down weight from a narrow 1954 hull does not make the boat simply lighter; it makes her tender, and the team answered with lead ballast and the lighter aluminium top hamper until the sums closed. The rebuilt Istros is lighter than she was in 1954, and more stable.

The same thinking ran through her systems. In place of a conventional generator set she carries what Feadship records as the first Lloyd's-approved microturbine generator installed on a superyacht — a Capstone unit spinning in near-silence alongside a 600-volt battery bank, its clean exhaust still leaving by the original funnel. She was converted to Lloyd's Register and commercial standards of 2020, with moved bulkheads, a steel deck beneath the teak, and modern fire insulation. Inside, Van Geest Design gave her a pale Scandinavian interior built for family charter. One survival tells the whole story: the original teak steering wheel was kept in the new paperless wheelhouse, and the yard refused to leave it as decoration — they rigged it to the modern steering, and it works.

She was completed in 2020. No price for the rebuild has been disclosed, and the honest measure of the job is not a figure anyway. It is that from the water she is unmistakably the yacht launched in 1954 — same hull, same lines — while almost everything that makes her move, float upright and pass a modern survey dates from the last few years.

Photographs: Feadship · Feadship · Feadship