What do all those celebs do when the bank balance goes stratospheric? Get themselves a yacht of course. Not necessarily one you want to sail, just something you can park off say Port Hercule, Grand Harbour or Green Island and look very, very cool. That is until snap, snap, photo-zap - the pappayachtzies get you.
The new celeb-chasing craze
Haven't heard of the pappayachtzies? Hey, it's loads more fun than sitting at Gatwick watching 767s queuing up to go to Barbados or Gran Canaria. And way more satisfying than standing at Doncaster waiting for blue-painted Deltic Co-Co's to come through double-heading with a half-mile train of coal. I refer of course to yacht-spotting, the new and apparently all-consuming variation on celeb-chasing.
Tracking websites
Of course there are websites devoted to it, the best of which is the French originated yachtspotter.com, which keeps a tally of which mega-yacht is where, who built it and other information relevant to determining the size of the chequebook that bought it.
Over 100ft
What qualifies as a mega-yacht? From the looks of it, any luxury craft more than 100 feet long - which in practical terms means one of those jobs with a helicopter deck and cranes for two PWCs - the kind of thing that does at least 40 knots and costs as much to refuel as your brand-new out-of-the-box Nice-Enough 45.
Top 100 mega-yachts
There is actually a Top 100 List of mega-yachts, something like the Sunday Times list of the 100 richest people in Britain. It appears once a year in Power & Motoryacht magazine (www.powerandmotoryacht.com) which ranks the craft according to size.
Twenty years
Believe it or not, they've been running this list for the last twenty years. And wow, have things changed in that time. In 1985 there were approximately 300 yachts measuring 100 feet and up worldwide. Today there are close on 7,000.
The No 1 whopper
Top of the heap for 2006 is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum's, 525ft Dubai, which currently qualifies as the world's largest mega-yacht. As you would expect for the Crown Prince of Dubai, the Dubai is reported as last seen on June 2 at the Jebel Ali port in Dubai.
World's No 2
Number Two in the rankings is the 453ft Rising Sun, built for Larry Ellison, the American billionaire behind Oracle software. Obviously there is no accounting for taste - or sour grapes for that matter. According to Power & Motoryacht "One yacht-spotter remarked that Rising Sun resembles an upside-down wedding cake sitting on a navy ship hull, and yet another commented that the expanse of glass in the superstructure makes her look like a greenhouse."
Glass-bottomed lounge
Number Three is more famous, but a dwarf by comparison. Paul Allen is co-founder of Microsoft and owns Octopus. At 414ft she's complete with a professionally outfitted recording studio, a cinema, and a glass-bottomed lounge on her lower deck. As a demonstration of how the pappayachtzies track mega-yachts, Octopusstarted the year off in Jamaica, headed through the Panama Canal in March and reached Tahiti in mid-April. She was last seen in early June off Exmouth, Australia
Celebrity backlash
Predictably, the celebs don't like all this attention. Car-park tycoon Sir Donald Gosling reckons pappayachtzies are a threat to his security. With good reason, yachtspotter.com has tracked and reported his 245ft yacht Leander G every step of the way from the British Virgin Islands to St Barthélemy and through the Straits of Gibraltar.
They won't get me though. Bathtub toys of under 100 cm aren't listed.
