N68

Built for owners who had already outgrown the N62

Nordhavn did not design the 68 to open a new market segment. The brief came from its own owner base, couples who had taken a Nordhavn 62 across an ocean and wanted a bigger, more comfortable boat without adding a professional crew to run it. The yard answered by stretching the platform onto the same hull mold used for the smaller N64, so the 68 shares its underwater lines and much of its systems architecture with a boat one size down, rather than starting a new hull form from a blank sheet.

The first hull splashed in 2007, slotting into the range between the N62 and the larger N72, and the model has stayed in continuous production since, unusually long for a semi-custom yacht of this size. Nordhavn's own delivery log put the most recent hull at number 44 in May 2025, and the yard was still quoting the 68 as a current, orderable model through 2026, which for a design now approaching its twentieth year is a genuine vote of confidence from repeat buyers rather than a boat kept alive on paper.

One hull, three very different boats on deck

What sets the 68 apart from a typical production model is that Nordhavn sells three distinct superstructures on the same hull. The Aft Pilothouse follows the older N62 layout, with the owner's cabin forward on the main deck for a single-level, liveaboard feel and a flybridge above the pilothouse. The Forward Pilothouse borrows from the N64, moving the owner's cabin amidships on the lower deck, further from the bow's motion at sea, which many offshore owners prefer for long passages.

The third option, the Non-Flybridge, drops the flybridge entirely and opens that deck space to give the pilothouse full headroom and better mast access, at the cost of the elevated helm view some owners rely on for docking. Nordhavn built its first NFB hull for an owner heading to Scotland who did not expect to use a flybridge in North Sea conditions, and reviewer Nick Burnham, writing as Aquaholic for YachtBuyer, noted the same hull was commissioned by an experienced owner running the boat without crew, so the layout has no crew cabin at all and gives that space over to a larger, more open pilothouse with its own daybed.

A single John Deere turning one propeller, a wing engine standing by purely as insurance and a fuel tank sized for an ocean: the N68 is the boat Nordhavn's own N62 owners asked for when they wanted more room but still no crew.

One main engine, a wing engine and a fuel tank built for oceans

Power is deliberately simple rather than powerful. The standard 68 runs a single John Deere 6135AFM75 M2 diesel rated at 425 hp at 1,900 rpm, turning one propeller through a Twin Disc gearbox, backed by a separate 160 hp John Deere 4045AFM85 wing engine on its own shaft, tank and controls purely as a get-home backup (Nordhavn Yachts official specification, cross-checked against YachtBuyer and itboat aggregated spec data, which independently list the same main engine and a closely matching wing engine rating). A Scania DI13 080M is offered as an alternative main engine.

Cruising speed is 9.5 knots and top speed sits just over 10, numbers that will not impress anyone cross-shopping a flybridge motor yacht, because the full-displacement hull was never meant to plane. What it buys instead is range: fuel capacity runs 3,136 US gallons on the Aft Pilothouse and 3,230 gallons on the Forward Pilothouse (Nordhavn official specification, matching independent aggregated data from YachtBuyer and itboat), and reported range varies with speed and source rather than settling on one number. Nordhavn's own materials and several reviewers cite figures from 3,000 to 4,000 nautical miles at 8 to 9 knots, and a fuel-burn test run by N68 owner David Sidbury and published on fellow owner Ken Williams' KensBlog measured 6.25 gallons an hour at 7 knots, working out to roughly 3,000 nautical miles on the tank. Rather than pick one figure, the honest answer is a boat that reliably clears an ocean crossing at passagemaking speed, with the exact number depending on load, weather and how hard the owner runs the single engine.

Sans Souci: 60,000 miles under one Nordhavn 68

The most documented N68 afloat is Sans Souci, owned by Ken and Roberta Williams, the Sierra On-Line co-founders who became well known in the Nordhavn community after crossing the Atlantic in a Nordhavn 62 during the 2004 Nordhavn Atlantic Rally and writing the book Crossing an Ocean Under Power about it. They moved up to a Nordhavn 68 afterward and, across roughly 60,000 nautical miles logged on Ken's own blog, took the boat through the Panama Canal, up the US East Coast and Hudson River past the Brooklyn Bridge, across the Atlantic again and along the Mediterranean and Pacific coasts, running it themselves without permanent crew.

Williams eventually sold Sans Souci not because the boat disappointed him but because it could not do a different trip he wanted next. Planning America's Great Loop, the roughly 5,000-mile circuit up the Atlantic coast, through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi, he found the 68's draft of just over 7 feet and roughly 40-foot air draft ruled out the shallow rivers, low bridges and locks the Loop requires. His own words on the decision: Sans Souci had been more than a boat, having guided them safely around the world, but he did not expect another boat to match her comfort, accepting that tradeoff deliberately to reach water she could never have entered.

Karajas: the Art Deco N68 built for the South Pacific

A second well-documented hull, Karajas, shows how far the 68 can be pushed away from its default look while keeping the same platform underneath. Delivered new to Sydney owners Bob and Pam Shelston as hull number 25 and the first N68 built to CE certification, Karajas paired Nordhavn's standard passagemaking engineering with an Art Deco interior designed by Scott Cole of Seattle-based Ardeo Design, in satin-stained mahogany, marble and stainless detailing, a look PassageMaker magazine covered as a genuine departure from the usual trawler interior.

What matters for a buyer is less the styling than what the boat then did with it: Karajas has cruised extensively through the South Pacific to some of the most isolated anchorages on earth, solely with her owner-operators aboard, which is the same real-world argument every N68 owner report makes in different words. The boat is customizable enough to be a Sydney couple's Art Deco showpiece and an offshore singlehander's Scottish expedition boat on the same hull, without changing the engineering that gets either of them home.

What owning one actually costs

Nordhavn does not publish a base price for the 68, and every dealer inquiry is quoted against the owner's chosen engine, layout and equipment list, so there is no single new-build figure to point to. The closest independent estimates come from boat-tour producers who have priced fully equipped current hulls at roughly USD 5 million to 5.3 million, a ballpark for a loaded example rather than an official starting price and one that should be read as informal, since neither Nordhavn nor a broker has confirmed it.

The used market is thin. Only a handful of N68s change hands in any given year, and recent asking prices have run from around USD 2.5 million for a 2011 hull to USD 2.995 million for a well-equipped Seattle-based example named Hokulani, a range that has held fairly steady rather than showing clear appreciation or depreciation, simply because too few sales exist to establish a trend. Running costs are not independently published either; industry rule-of-thumb estimates of roughly 10 percent of a boat's value per year are commonly cited for yachts this size but are not specific to the 68, and neither insurance nor haul-out costs for a full-displacement 68-footer built in Taiwan are broken out anywhere in public sources.

Who it is for: An experienced owner-operator couple moving up from a smaller Nordhavn who want genuine ocean range and three-cabin comfort on one hull, without hiring permanent crew to run it.