Wake · Issue No. 01 · Summer 2026

Eclipse

Roman Abramovich — sanctioned by the UK (10 March 2022) and EU; Eclipse has sheltered in non-sanctioning Turkey since 22 March 2022, and by 2026 sits at Vega Yachting in the Kocaeli Free Zone undergoing a reported $100m midlife refit.

There was a moment, around 2010, when the superyacht arms race had a clear winner, and he was a quiet man from Saratov who owned Chelsea Football Club. Eclipse left Blohm+Voss's Hamburg sheds in December of that year at 162.5 metres — the longest private yacht on earth, a title she held until Azzam outstretched her in 2013 — and she was never really a boat so much as a statement of what Roman Abramovich thought sovereignty should look like when it floats.

Consider the manifest. Two helipads, plus a hangar under the foredeck for a third machine. A mini-submarine rated to 50 metres, in case the surface got tedious. A missile-detection system — an actual one, not marina bravado — along with reported armour and an anti-paparazzi laser rig said to sweep the horizon for camera sensors. Terence Disdale wrapped all of this menace in taste: a 56-metre owner's deck, 18 staterooms for 36 guests tended by roughly 70 crew, and a 16-metre pool whose floor rises to become a dance floor. The World Superyacht Awards named her Motor Yacht of the Year in 2011. Valuations have ranged from $438 million to $700 million, depending on who was counting and why. Nobody ever chartered her. That was the point.

Then came the fortnight that turned naval architecture into geopolitics. On 10 March 2022, Britain froze Abramovich's assets; Brussels followed within days. Chelsea would be prised from him by May. But Eclipse was already moving. She crossed the Atlantic from the Caribbean and threaded the Mediterranean with a navigator's paranoia — skirting Greek islands to stay clear of EU territorial water, where a single bureaucrat with a mooring line could have ended the voyage. On 22 March 2022 she slid into Marmaris, on Turkey's Aegean coast, a NATO harbour in a country that had declined to sanction anyone. Solaris, her 140-metre stablemate, made the same sprint from Barcelona to Bodrum. Two hulls, a combined billion dollars, parked precisely one jurisdiction beyond the reach of the people who wanted them.

And there they sat. For three years Eclipse swung at anchor off Marmaris, the most photographed prisoner in the Mediterranean — never seized, never quite free, her Bermuda flag still flying out of Hamilton. Lesser owners watched their boats rot in Trieste and Fiumicino under impound orders. Abramovich's rode at anchor with the crew paid and the varnish kept up, which tells you something about the difference between losing a game and refusing to play it.

The latest chapter is the most telling. In 2025 both yachts left the resort coast for the İzmit Bay industrial waterfront near Istanbul, where Eclipse is now at Vega Yachting in the Kocaeli Free Zone, fifteen years old and reportedly absorbing a refit in the region of $100 million — structural surveys, machinery overhauls, the full midlife reckoning of a 13,500-gross-tonne diesel-electric ship with ten MTU engines and Azipod drives. A hundred million dollars buys a very respectable new yacht outright. Abramovich is spending it to keep an old one — a boat he cannot sail to Monaco, Porto Cervo, or any harbour flying a flag that has frozen his name.

Read that however you like. WAKE reads it as conviction. Sanctions took the football club, the London houses, the easy geography. They have not taken the ship. Somewhere in a Turkish free zone, the defining megayacht of the oligarch era is being rebuilt to last another twenty years — waiting, immaculately, for a world that changes its mind.

The record

• At 162.5m, Eclipse was the world's longest private yacht from 2010 until Azzam overtook her in 2013.
• She carries a missile-detection system, a mini-submarine rated to 50 metres, and two helipads plus a below-deck hangar.
• Sailing after the UK's 10 March 2022 asset freeze, she skirted Greek waters to dock in non-sanctioning Marmaris, Turkey, on 22 March 2022.
• Her 16-metre pool has a rising floor that converts it into a dance floor, serving 36 guests and roughly 70 crew.
• By 2026 she was at Vega Yachting in Turkey's Kocaeli Free Zone for a midlife refit reported at around $100 million.

Photo: Moshi Anahory · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons