Ascending the Throne

New from the keel up, the princess 30m is built to rule the seas in comfort.

- Alan Harper

The massive, mile-long breakwater that shelters Plymouth Sound from the gales of the English Channel was begun during the Napoleonic Wars and not completed until 30 years later. With a handsome lighthouse at one end, a beacon at the other, and a fortress in the middle, it absorbed four million tons of stone and still serves today to create a huge, sheltered harbor for all manner of shipping: crosschannel ferries, commercial vessels, pleasure craft, and, of course, Her Majesty’s warships.

The breakwater proved its worth on the day of our test of Princess’s latest superyacht, the 100-foot 30M. The company’s Plymouth shipyard had been working on a tight schedule to complete the yacht’s predelivery trials, and almost anywhere else on the south coast of England, the test crew’s timetable would have been scattered by the full-blooded southerly gale that had been blowing for the previous few days. The wind had abated, but outside the seas were still high, crashing clean over the breakwater’s rugged masonry in great sheets of spray. Even inside the harbor, the swell was around 3 feet, overlaid with a white-flecked chop. From the snug and eerily silent confines of the 30M’s wheelhouse, it was like watching storm footage with the sound turned down. It didn’t look like the sort of day in which normal people would want to go boating.

But the decision was made, and permission was sought over the VHF from Longroom Port Control, the office of the Queen’s Harbor Master, to run our speed trials inside the breakwater. Given such extreme conditions outside, there was no one else about. Even with the swell and the chop, the broad expanse of comparatively sheltered water made a perfect test track.