La Datcha: Fitting Two Helicopters and a Submersible Into an Expedition Platform

Expedition yachting starts as a storage problem. A helicopter is useless if it cannot be kept out of the weather, serviced and launched in the places the yacht exists to reach. A submersible is dead weight if there is nowhere sane to keep it. La Datcha, the first SeaXplorer 77 from Damen Yachting, was drawn to solve those problems first — and the solving is the design.

She was delivered in November 2020, just over three years after contract signing and in the middle of a pandemic, with Fraser's project-management team riding the build alongside Damen and the owner's team. Fraser's delivery report is blunt about the difficulty: storing and launching twin helicopters and a submarine inside a 77-metre platform demanded solutions the team ranked among the most complex it had handled.

The arrangement that came out of it is layered. A certified primary helideck works the flying; a second standby deck backs it up; and a below-deck hangar swallows both helicopters whole, so aircraft live indoors in polar weather instead of lashed to an exposed deck. Below that, a three-person submersible handles the vertical exploration, supported by a full dive centre with decompression chambers — the unglamorous room that makes recreational diving at expedition distances a managed risk rather than a hope.

Then there is endurance. La Datcha is Ice Class 1C engineered and built to IMO Polar Code standards, with the fuel, provisions and storage to stay autonomous for forty days between port calls. Forty days is the number that changes the map: it is the difference between visiting the edge of the ice and working there. Her toy store reads like an expedition manifest — snowmobiles for the white end of the world, multiple tenders for the rest, and one tender converted into a certified lifeboat, custom-designed to match the mother ship at the request of the owner and drawn by her exterior designers, Azure Naval Architects.

None of this came at the interior's expense, which is the second half of the trick. The accommodation, designed by Vasiliy Shprits, sleeps twelve guests in six cabins, and the wellness deck carries a spa with a Turkish hammam, a jacuzzi, an ice fountain and a massage room. The sequence is the philosophy: fly out over the ice in the morning, dive under it after lunch, and thaw out in the hammam — all of it staged from one hull that never has to go home early.

Photographs: Fraser · Boat International · Damen