“This is about positioning Cape Town where it belongs — on the global superyacht circuit,” said V&A Waterfront CEO Graham Wood. I find this a strange sentence to read. I had no idea that Cape Town, as if by divine right, belonged on the superyacht circuit. Is it really as self-evident as that?
The press release that included this declaration of intent was issued by the V&A Waterfront, that glitzy septic tank for the swirling wash of capital that tourists excrete into our grateful economy. I couldn’t actually find the press release online, so I’m quoting from the B2B publication Marina World, which proudly claims to have seen it in the wild.
The V&A is investing R230m in building a superyacht marina in its working harbour and is targeting October 2026 for completion. The Quay 7 marina will be in front of the new Cape Town EDITION hotel, a hotel so luxurious they don’t deign to use lowercase letters in case that sends the wrong message to the lower classes. The basin will face the Atlantic Ocean, with views across the City Bowl and what press releases are legally required to call the “iconic” Table Mountain.
“The Quay 7 superyacht marina will have eight berths, including six stern-in and two beam-on spaces for vessels up to 90m in length. Floating jetties will provide electricity, water and Wi-Fi,” writes Marina World.
Lest you think that this is only going to be a sort of floating red carpet for the stupidly rich, who will be welcomed in a 113.71m² concierge lounge, we are also told it is a dual-purpose marina. It’ll host superyachts during peak seasons, while the rest of the time it’ll be supporting our local catamaran industry. The V&A was at pains to stress that the project is not just about luxury. “This isn’t only a leisure marina; it’s economic infrastructure. It creates sustained demand for fuel suppliers, provisioning companies, marine engineers, crew training facilities and logistics operators.”
Sure. But it’s mostly about leisure and luxury, let’s face it. The EDITION hotel the marina will abut is part of a chain with a polished line in assimilation for profit. “Located in gateway cities throughout the world, these are hotels where you’ll find guests rubbing elbows with locals because there’s no better place to be in the moment. Hotels that feel different because they make you feel something. Hotels that don’t act like hotels. Our desire is to infuse emotion into a check-in/check-out world by bringing each location to life in an intimate, seductive environment.”
One can instinctively see how the superyacht aristocracy will fit right in. Though, given that the cost for one Friday night’s stay at, for example, the Madrid EDITION starts at around R7,000, and the Miami hotel at about R24,000, I’m not sure how many locals are going to be milling around joshing the oligarchs about tax evasion, data centres in space, and the like.
The superyacht circuit is a seasonal migration pattern of luxury yachts that follow an annual route. They spend the northern summer in the Mediterranean and the winter in the Caribbean or Bahamas. The vessels move between key locations based on weather and social calendars and function as floating hotels. Most owners don’t actually sail in their yachts; they fly in their private jets to whatever glamorous location the yachts are moored at.
But what is a superyacht? There’s no official definition, but Wikipedia suggests the term is regularly used to describe professionally crewed motor or sailing yachts, ranging from 40m to 180m in length. Some 30m ones also qualify. According to a report by Dream Yacht, who claim to be the world’s largest yacht management and boat rental company, the global yacht market is valued at roughly $26bn as of 2023–2024, with forecasts pointing to annual growth of around 6%–8% through the late 2020s. The global yacht charter market alone was worth about $8.3bn in 2024.
As of mid‑2024, there were around 5,900 superyachts of more than 30m in operation worldwide, with over 600 additional yachts in build. By mid‑2025, the operating fleet passed 6,100 units.
From the United States of Avarice we have the tax-dodging, planet-killing likes of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns Koru, a 127m sailing yacht worth over $500m
The Mediterranean remains the world’s charter hub. In 2025, 96% of summer charters took place there, and over 70% of the global charter fleet is positioned in the Med during peak season. At this point, Capetonians will pause to thank their deity of choice that we’re on the Atlantic Ocean, with an average water temperature of 10º-14º, rather than the more tourist-friendly 19º-20º of, say, Ibiza in Spain. You think we’ve got an accommodation problem in Cape Town? Imagine what it would be like if we had months with a water temperature high of 26º.
In an article about the 2023 Monaco yacht show, which calls itself “the ultimate gathering of maritime luxury” and takes place in a tax haven where two in three residents are millionaires, the Guardian points out that “the true cost of such luxury is paid for, in part, by the rest of society. The top 10% of earners in the EU emit 24.5 times as much planet-heating CO₂ through their transport as the bottom 10% do, according to new data from the International Energy Agency.
The article goes on: “A superyacht is the most polluting single object a person can own. There are no reliable estimates of how much carbon the world’s 6,000 superyachts pump into the atmosphere, but one study of billionaires’ footprints found yachts were the single biggest contributor, ahead of private jets.”
Humans being humans — in other words, insane egomaniacs — a mere superyacht is now actually for the hoi polloi. Here’s a spokesperson for SF Marina, a company that supplies to what is wistfully described as “increasingly crowded marinas”.
“‘The trend in yacht size goes towards bigger, bigger and bigger,’ said Lina Odhe of SF Marina. The industry had moved ‘from superyachts to megayachts to gigayachts’.”
Who owns these superyachts? The usual suspects, including some actual criminal suspects. From the United States of Avarice we have the tax-dodging, planet-killing likes of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns Koru, a 127m sailing yacht worth over $500m, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt who own, respectively, the 142m Dragonfly and the 95m Whisper. Mark Zuckerberg is the rumoured owner of the 118m Launchpad, and other superyacht owners from the technoligarch sphere have included Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Paul Allen.
There are a bunch of even more unsavoury oligarchs, such as the Russian contingent. Following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian superyachts are being seized or sanctioned by Western nations to pressure oligarchs allied with Putin.
Imagine if these yachts start turning up at the V&A. We already have the 2022 controversy around the $500m, 142m superyacht Nord, owned by Putin ally Alexei Mordashov. The yacht was fleeing to Cape Town, and at the time (shades of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir), the South African government said it was not bound by the EU and US sanctions. And in 2024 the superyacht Cloudbreak, owned by sanctioned Russian businessman Alexander Svetakov, docked in Cape Town harbour with apparent impunity. So who knows what political opprobrium we risk with our new superyacht basin?
In case you were worried about the lack of equality among all these inequalities, don’t be. Though the majority of superyacht owners are, as you would expect, men trying to compensate for something on both land and sea, and in the case of Bezos, space, there are also a few women who own superyachts. The largest is in fact a megayacht, the 110m KAOS, which belongs to Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie. It’s worth $300m and was originally commissioned by the Emir of Qatar in 2017. It’s got four decks, swimming pools, an aquarium, a beach club, a helipad, a cinema, a massage parlour, a gym, and a private retreat called The London Bar.
Maybe Cape Town does belong on the superyacht circuit. It’s not like we can discriminate against floating privilege, given that we have wholeheartedly welcomed its land-based equivalent into the mansions and maisonettes of our increasingly fair and fundamentally unfair city. But I do worry about the quality of company we’re going to be forced to keep, given that a superyacht owner is more likely to be an avaricious, planet-destroying, anti-democratic egomaniac than a jolly sailor here to spend a few pennies on local crafts.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.