Royal Huisman Reveals 728 Ideas Behind 65m Aquarius

Royal Huisman has released a detailed technical and design account of the second 65-metre Aquarius, explaining how returning owners used six years of experience aboard their previous yacht to shape the successor. The new ketch was delivered in 2025 and was conceived not as a replacement for a disappointing boat, but as an attempt to improve a yacht the owners already regarded as close to ideal.

The result is a larger yacht with significantly more internal volume, more accommodation and service space, and a long list of practical changes generated by the people who actually lived and worked aboard the first Aquarius. Royal Huisman says the new yacht had to preserve the earlier vessel’s family comfort and classic character while becoming faster, more responsive and capable of serious regatta performance.

Forty-five per cent more volume

The owners asked for an additional ensuite guest stateroom, another double crew cabin, a larger gym and media room, more storage, and enlarged engine-room and service areas. Accommodating those requests required approximately 45 per cent more volume than the previous yacht, forcing the design team to grow the platform without losing the sailing qualities that had made the first Aquarius successful.

Increasing length and beam is straightforward in principle, but maintaining responsiveness as displacement and volume rise is much harder. Royal Huisman says the 65-metre successor was therefore developed around the idea that extra comfort should not come at the expense of sailing performance, an especially demanding target for a yacht with traditional visual cues and modern performance expectations.

728 ideas drawn from six years aboard

One of the most revealing parts of the project is a list of 728 ideas compiled by the captain and crew after six years of operating the owners’ first Aquarius. The list covered practical interior changes, maintenance improvements, galley arrangements, systems and storage, turning accumulated operating experience into a structured design brief rather than a collection of abstract preferences.

That process is significant because custom-yacht development often focuses on what an owner wants before a yacht has entered service. In this case, many decisions were based on what had actually worked, what could be improved and what the crew had learned during long-term use, giving the second project an unusually mature operational starting point.

The original team returned

The owners reassembled much of the team behind the first yacht, including project manager Godfrey Cray, captain James Turner, Dykstra Naval Architects, Mark Whiteley Design and Royal Huisman. Continuity meant the group already understood the owners’ preferences and the strengths of the earlier boat, reducing the need to rediscover basic design priorities.

It also allowed the second project to concentrate on refinement rather than reinvention. For a complex custom yacht, retaining institutional knowledge can be valuable because technical decisions, service access, storage logic and crew workflows are often shaped by thousands of small interactions that are difficult to capture in drawings alone.

A repeat-owner project built around use

Aquarius is therefore an unusually clear example of how a second custom yacht can evolve from real operational evidence. The headline figures are the 65-metre length and 45 per cent increase in volume, but the more useful story is the way hundreds of lessons from the first yacht were fed back into the new design.

For owners considering a second large yacht, the project shows the value of documenting what works during years of operation instead of starting each new brief from zero. For builders and designers, it demonstrates how comfort, maintainability and performance can be treated as connected objectives when the team has detailed feedback from a predecessor already tested in the real world.