Project Tanzanite Starts Sea Trials as Amels' Largest Ever

How big is Project Tanzanite compared with other Amels yachts?

Project Tanzanite measures 120 metres and 6,083 GT, more than 30 metres longer than Amels' previous flagship, the 89-metre Here Comes the Sun, and is now the largest Dutch-built motor yacht ever constructed.

Amels has spent most of the last decade building semi-custom hulls in the 55 to 80-metre range, the Amels 60 and Amels 80 lines among them, alongside a handful of full-custom flagships. Here Comes the Sun, delivered in 2017 at 83 metres and stretched to 89 metres in a 2021 refit, held the yard's size record until now. Project Tanzanite beats that by 31 metres and roughly doubles the gross tonnage, a jump in scale rather than a small step up the range.

The record is specifically Dutch-built rather than Dutch-flagged or Dutch-owned: it covers any motor yacht built in the Netherlands, a category that also includes Feadship and Oceanco hulls delivered from yards a short distance from Amels' own. Beating all of them from a builder whose commercial parent, Damen, is better known for tugs, ferries and naval vessels than for superyachts, is the detail that made this launch industry news rather than a routine delivery.

How long did Project Tanzanite take to build?

Construction started in 2020, the hull was launched at Damen's Galati yard in Romania in May 2023, and sea trials began in October 2025 in the North Sea, putting the yacht on course for delivery in 2026 after roughly six years.

The hull was built and launched at Damen Yachting's Galati facility in Romania before being towed to Vlissingen in the southwest Netherlands in June 2023 for outfitting, the specialist interior and systems work that a commercial hull yard does not do in-house. The yacht floated at Vlissingen in September 2025 and began sea trials the following month. Amels project manager Jeroen Waalewijn called the hull launch 'an emotional yet incredible moment for all of those who have played such an integral part in the realisation of the project so far', and Damen says more than 1,000 workers from the yard and its supply network are involved in the final outfitting push.

For an owner starting a full-custom order today, that six-year span and the two-country build route are the more useful number than the launch photos. Damen Yachting's own naval architecture team designed the hull rather than an outside firm, which shortened the design phase but tied the schedule to a single in-house team's capacity. Order books at the largest yards, Amels included, are reported committed into 2028 and 2029, so a hull this size started today would not reach sea trials before the early 2030s.

What propulsion does Project Tanzanite use?

Project Tanzanite runs a diesel-electric power plant driving azimuthing electric propulsion pods, a configuration Amels says will give her the lowest noise and vibration levels ever recorded on a yacht this size.

Diesel-electric propulsion generates power with diesel gensets and drives the propellers electrically through pod units slung under the hull, rather than through a conventional shaft and gearbox. It is standard on cruise ships and icebreakers, where it buys efficiency at partial load and eliminates the vibration path a mechanical shaft carries straight into the accommodation above it. On a yacht the same physics applies to the owner's suite instead of a cabin corridor, which is why Amels is marketing the noise figure rather than the speed one: reported top speed is a modest 18 knots, well below what a shaft-driven hull of this size and power could reach.

The trade is capital cost and machinery-space volume, both of which are harder to justify below very large tonnage, which is part of why pod propulsion is rare on yachts under 100 metres and unremarkable on cruise ships ten times the size. No independent trial data has been published yet: every noise and vibration claim so far is the yard's own, made before sea trials had run their full course, and it should be read as a design target the yacht is now being tested against rather than a verified result. Reporting on the pod supplier itself is inconsistent: BOAT International and Damen Yachting's own release call the units Azipods, a trademark belonging to ABB, while YachtBuyer names Kongsberg Elegance pods, a different manufacturer's product entirely. Neither Amels nor Damen Yachting has named a propulsion supplier in any material this desk could verify, so the brand behind the pods should be treated as unconfirmed even though the diesel-electric configuration itself is corroborated across every source.

Who designed Project Tanzanite and what does she offer guests?

Espen Oino drew the exterior and Zuretti Design the interior, with accommodation for 22 guests and a crew of 44, confirmed independently by both Damen Yachting and a second industry outlet.

The exterior carries Espen Oino's usual restraint at this size: five decks of near-vertical glazing, a stacked funnel structure rather than a single mast, and long unbroken sightlines down the hull sides. Zuretti Design, the Nice-based studio behind the interior, has built the guest areas around a cream, brown and marble palette, with a glass elevator spiralling up through a marble staircase as the main-deck centrepiece. None of the interior renderings published so far have been matched against finished photography, since outfitting is still under way at Vlissingen.

Industry outlet YachtBuyer reports two swimming pools, including a glass-bottom pool set above the beach club, and dual helipads fore and aft; the forward and aft helipad decks are visible in Amels' own sea-trial photography, which independently confirms the twin-helipad layout even where the pool detail rests on a single published source. Eleven guest suites is the commonly reported split for 22 guests, though Amels and Damen Yachting have not broken the figure down suite by suite in anything either publisher has put out so far.

Who is buying Project Tanzanite and what does she cost?

Neither Amels nor Deeside Maritime, the consultancy representing the owner, has named a buyer or a price, and no primary source has published a reliable figure for either.

Deeside Maritime has represented the client through the project for roughly two years and continues through delivery, the standard arrangement for a full-custom order where the owner's identity is kept out of the yard's own announcements. Figures north of half a billion euros have circulated on fan and listings sites, but none trace to Amels, Damen Yachting or Deeside Maritime, and this desk found no second source to corroborate any specific number, so none is repeated here.

That silence is itself a data point for a buyer weighing a comparable order: a yard the size of Amels can build, launch and sea-trial a 120-metre flagship without a single leak of the commercial terms, which says as much about how tightly a full-custom contract can be controlled as any number would. Whoever owns Project Tanzanite will get a delivery date before the public gets a name.