SEMELA

About M/Y SEMELA

Slow Water, Wide Windows

SEMELA is a navetta, which is to say she is built around a different idea of speed. Twenty-three metres of Absolute, delivered new in 2024 and still without a mark on her, she cruises at twelve knots with the windows wide and a Seakeeper holding her flat. The main deck is almost entirely glass; the flybridge carries its own galley and a table for eight. Nothing about her rushes, which is exactly the point.

Twin Volvo Penta IPS 1350 pods drive her at a cruising twelve knots for three hundred and eighty-six litres an hour, and will push her to twenty when the day calls for it. Four thousand litres of fuel give a thousand-mile range, more than a charter week in the western Mediterranean will ever ask. What the pods really buy is quiet: no shaft line, no vibration through the hull, and a Seakeeper 18 gyro that takes the roll out of an exposed anchorage. A 1.40-metre draft is shallow for a boat of this volume, which puts the shelter behind Sainte-Marguerite and the sandy edge of Pampelonne within easy reach. The main deck saloon is the argument for the whole type. Glass runs almost unbroken from the cockpit to the galley bulkhead, so the sea is present from every seat, and the dining table sits in the light rather than in a corner of it. Forward, the bow transforms: a sunbed by day, a lounge by evening, with its own table set into the teak. Aft, the platform gives the crew their own route to the service areas, which means the guest spaces stay guest spaces from morning to night. The flybridge is where the boat is actually lived in. It carries an outdoor galley, a wet bar and a table for eight under a hard top, high enough and open enough to make lunch there a better proposition than lunch below. Below, four cabins sleep eight, a master, a VIP, a double and a twin, each with its own bathroom, and a crew of three works the boat without ever appearing to. Air conditioning and Wi-Fi run throughout, and up to eighteen guests can be received alongside for an evening at the quay. Rated for the western Mediterranean and carrying a thousand miles of range, she is not bounded by the stretch between Cannes and Monaco. A week aboard tends to work west: Cannes and the Lerins, the Esterel, the Gulf of Saint-Tropez and Pampelonne, with Porquerolles a comfortable day beyond. Eastward, Villefranche, Cap Ferrat and Monaco are equally natural. Opera Prestige arranges the berths, the provisioning, the transfers and the tables ashore, from Cannes to Portofino.