About Support Yachts & Shadow Boats

Like a garage, a guest-house or a man-cave for your yacht, support or ‘shadow’ boats represent an interesting evolution of the yacht sales market.

It’s essentially a boat designed to trail your main yacht and provide logistical support and garage your tenders. They unclutter an owner’s primary yacht, provide helicopter access and create more flexibility in terms of the types of toys & tenders yacht owners can carry.

Like a garage, guest-house or a man-cave for your yacht.

These fabulous and capable vessels are designed to carry a yacht owner’s toys, including cars, helicopters, submarines, fishing boats and more. Generally, they also provide an expanded range of guest accommodations, like a guest-house.

If you feel like you’re outgrowing your existing yacht, consider the practicality of buying or chartering a shadow boat. Rather than selling your existing yacht and buying a larger one, just to add space for staff, tenders and a helipad, it is often a much better approach to consider developing a support boat. It is an economical and a practical approach. It’s more economically viable to add a yacht support vessel than it is to upgrade a 50-meter superyacht to, for example, a 90-meter to accommodate extra guests and equipment. The combined cost of ownership is lower and obviously offers greater flexibility.

Pioneered in the 1990s from old offshore oil and gas craft, support yachts have become as beautiful as the vessels they’re intended to serve. In addition to adding features and capacity to your existing yachting program, they can also expand your cruising options. Often based on ice-class commercial ship hulls, they can be used to explore areas of the world that most yachts cannot reach.

The boats also need to be equipped with high-performance deck cranes for deploying and retrieving all the toys, which can weigh as much as 10 tons each. Support vessels are not just for heavy equipment though. They can carry everything from spare provisions, laundry and fine china to garbage and waste water. To allow more privacy, the support craft could house cabins for staff or family office executives. These days the vessels are swank enough to even serve as overflow accommodations for guests. The in-laws, for example.

Dutch shipbuilder Damen has delivered a half-dozen 70-meter support yachts with ‘yacht-level’ finishes and high-specification features. The Damen Yacht Support line starts at 46 meters and $14 million. Contact us for more information on these Damen boats or alternative suggestions.

There are also very nice, existing support and shadow boats that are on the used boat market for as little as USD$8M, like this. Equipped with a swimming pool, helideck, tender garage and with accommodations for 12 guests and 13 crew. Very nice submarine is available.

We have a 43 meter support boat currently in development with a completed price of approximately $7M. It is designed with a swimming pool, an English-style pub, a cinema, library, gym and submarine garage. A customer could purchase this vessel, decide on final arrangement and finish and have it ready to go in 13 months. A helipad could also be added to the final arrangement.

Review our expedition yacht conversion website for additional options and more information: https://vesselconversions.com/

Contact Daniel Voorhees here for more details and dependable counsel or call: +12064076411 or +393470485433.