GO

The calling card of modern Turquoise

Every builder has one yacht that resets how the market sees it, and for Turquoise that yacht is GO. Delivered in 2018, she was by far the largest and most ambitious project the yard had completed under its post-2014 ownership, and she arrived impossible to miss, her hull finished in the vivid turquoise of the brand itself. The colour was a statement of confidence: this boat was built to be looked at, and to be recognised.

At 2,008 gross tonnes on 76.75 metres she carries true flagship volume, and she carried it years before the yard's current 80 metre platform existed. GO proved that Istanbul could deliver a fully custom yacht at a scale the market had reserved for the Netherlands and Germany, and the commissions that followed, Roe, Infinite Jest, Nympheas and Angelique, walked through the door she opened.

H2 inside and out

GO is an H2 Yacht Design work through and through, exterior and interior both, drawn at the midpoint of the studio's long relationship with the yard. The profile is sleek and clean, organised around a stretched arch that runs around the aft of the vessel and ties the decks into one gesture. It reads as calm and inevitable from every angle, which is the hardest trick in exterior design.

The interior established the refined Art Deco character that has since become something of a house style for the yard's flagships, and when Angelique was designed her interior was explicitly developed from GO's. From the grand lobby, guests move by an elegant staircase or a full-sized elevator that serves every deck from the tender garage and galley level to the sundeck, a piece of circulation more common on 90 metre yachts.

GO opened the door that Roe, Nympheas and Angelique later walked through.

An owner's deck facing the bow

GO's extra length and beam over her predecessors bought something specific: a dedicated owner's deck with a forward-facing suite. The owner wakes to uninterrupted views over the bow, steps out to a private exterior deck with a spa pool, and shares none of it with the guest programme below. An owner's office and a VIP suite with its own convertible lounge complete the private quarters.

Total accommodation is unusually elastic, with flexibility for up to 18 guests across the owner's suite, VIP, three doubles and two twins plus convertible spaces. That range makes GO equally workable as a private family yacht and as a boat for large gatherings. It is a layout designed by people who understood that how many beds a yacht has matters less than how many configurations they can take.

Water at every level

The deck plan is organised around water and air. The sundeck carries a raised pool with a built-in waterfall feature, the bridge deck holds an open-air gym, and at the waterline a full-beam beach club opens to the sea, with a dive store and massage room behind it. A gym session, a swim and a treatment happen on three different decks, each with its own climate and view.

The central tender garage houses two serious boats, a Pascoe limousine tender of 9.6 metres and an 8.6 metre Pascoe beachlander, plus wave runners, so guest transport never depends on shore providers. With the elevator linking garage to sundeck, provisioning, service and guest movement all flow without crossing. This is the operational grammar the yard now applies to everything it builds at scale.

Proven, and still the reference

The engineering is deliberately conventional. Twin Caterpillar 3516C diesels of 2,575 hp each give around 18 knots flat out, generators are Caterpillar C9s, stabilisation is Naiad with 8.44 square metre fins effective at rest, and class is Lloyd's Register with Cayman Islands flag. Nothing exotic, everything serviceable in any major yard in the Mediterranean, which is exactly what a seven-year-old flagship should offer.

Eight years on, GO remains the reference point inside the yard, the boat new projects are measured against and the interior the flagship borrowed from. For a buyer looking at the brokerage market or at commissioning, she is the proof of how Turquoise yachts age: the design still current, the systems still mainstream, and the hull still the most recognisable calling card the builder has.

A steering failure handled in thirteen seconds

On 24 February 2021, GO suffered a sudden loss of steering while under way in Simpson Bay Lagoon, St Maarten. Her captain, Simon Johnson, later told Megayacht News and Latitude 38 that the yacht "started moving mysteriously forward," and that "there was nothing I seemed to be able to do; all the controls on the bridge were showing normal." With the Simpson Bay drawbridge ahead and a grounding near a fuel-spill risk the other option, Johnson deliberately steered GO into the St Maarten Yacht Club's wooden dock, striking it twice to bring her under control. Nobody was hurt. "The fact that there were no warning alarms, no lights on board to indicate something was wrong was really scary," he said.

The club's general manager, Michele Korteweg, confirmed the aftermath to the Daily Herald and Boat International: "We've been removing all the debris and our insurance person has already been here to assess the damage." No published report has since identified the root cause of the steering fault, and no source found describes a fix or a subsequent refit tied to the incident. It stands as the one documented operational failure in GO's otherwise award-winning career, and a reminder that even a well-regarded flagship carries real, reported risk at sea, not just brochure figures. It also sits alongside a smaller pattern of unresolved detail on this yacht: her broker listings disagree on guest capacity by as much as six people, and her top speed is cited as either 17 or 18 knots depending on the source, with no independent trial ever published to settle either figure.

Für wen: The owner who values a proven, serviceable flagship with a recognisable identity, and an interior language strong enough that the yard's record boat borrowed it.