Refit, Conversion and Hybrid Debuts at Fort Lauderdale Put Vessel Lifecycle Choices on Show
When the 2026 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show opens on 28 October, the largest yacht on the docks will not be new. Draak, at 304'6" (92.8 metres), began life in 2014 as Oceanco’s Equanimity and later sailed as Tranquility. Today she has a different purpose. Her owner, Gabe Newell, had her redesigned and re-engineered as a companion vessel to his 111-metre Leviathan. Her former beach club and spa now house a dive centre with a decompression chamber, she carries a dedicated dive tender, and she has room for extra guests and crew. Newell is also Oceanco’s majority shareholder, and the yard is presenting Draak in its own display as an example of its Life Cycle Support refit work.
In the Burgess display is a yacht with an even longer history. Scintilla Maris, a 45.6-metre explorer, started out as a North Sea beam trawler built by Damen in the late 1980s. Her owner, Erik Vonk, spent more than a decade on the project, from finding the right hull to having her stripped back to bare steel and rebuilt. He kept the trawler’s structure and gave her a new hybrid propulsion system. Her shakedown cruise took her 11,000 nautical miles through the Outer Hebrides, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and North America. Now Vonk is ready to let her go: she will be auctioned through Boathouse Auctions on 5 November, with no reserve.
Hybrid power also arrives in a smaller package. The Pearl 100 Hybrid, first presented as a design at the 2025 Cannes Yachting Festival, makes her world debut at Fort Lauderdale. At 96'7" (29.4 metres) LOA, she is the flagship of the Pearl Yachts fleet and the yard’s first hybrid. She pairs two MAN V12 diesels with electric motors, with operating modes that include silent electric cruising and extended range. She completed her first sea trials in late September.
Two other yachts at the show demonstrate how far a well-built hull can go. Northland, a 103'6" (31.5-metre) yacht built by the Burger Boat Company and delivered nine years ago, covered nearly 10,000 miles in her first year and a half, according to Megayacht News. Her maiden voyage took her from Burger’s Great Lakes yard to the Bahamas, and Nova Scotia, Norway and Tahiti followed. The Nordhavn 96 ViviRae II has logged more than 24,000 nautical miles in nine years, starting with a 3,000-nautical-mile maiden voyage from China to Bali. She is for sale with Autograph Yacht Group.
Taken together, these yachts show that a yacht’s life is no longer defined only by the day she is launched. Hulls are being rebuilt around new missions, propulsion is being renewed inside existing structures, and long cruising records are part of how some yachts are now presented.
The means to compare are arriving too. In February, ISO approved ISO/TS 23099, a technical specification developed from the Water Revolution Foundation’s Yacht Environmental Transparency Index, which gives yachts over 30 metres a common method for assessing environmental performance, in new builds and refits alike.
As refits, conversions and hybrid systems become more common, the ability to show how a yacht was built, rebuilt and operated over the years is likely to matter more to the people who own, buy and sail her.
