tcm
...
Beady-eyed MBY readers will have noted that the April issue of MBY advertised a forthcoming report of the Mangusta 108. Yet in May’s issue the article failed to materialise - replaced by a article on a 27metre Leopard. Nice effort, but not quite the same, I think.
MBY were chasing one particular Mangusta 108: the first full-spec example with twin turbine engines. It has total engine power of around 10,000 horsepower, overall length of 108 feet, and can reach over 55 knots at which speed it uses 2500 litres of fuel per hour. Yahoo! It's called "Nobody", and that name seems to be the only crummy thing about it. Why “Nobody”, one wonders? Is it just a jolly VHF jape?
Recently I took our boat to St. Tropez, in the old port, and some of the largest gawping crowds that will ever watch you on a boat. Quite fun, if you like that sort of thing. Oh alright, I admit it, we stayed a whole week.
One day, by chance, a visitor on the quayside hailed our skipper. It turns out that the visitor is his brother, and is the skipper of “Nobody”. Would we all like to have a little look around? Oh, go on then. At last, a first-hand report on the twin-turbine Mangusta 108. Totally unauthorised, unfortunately, so this can't go into print. Or could we say that "Nobody authorised us"? Teehee.
I haven';t done much in the way of boat reports and this isn't an easy place to start. Any description of this particular boat requires repeated use of the word "huge". I’ll also have to find a stack of words that mean the same as “huge” to vary the text. Otherwise I'll get a C-minus for the English again. But it’s bound to get difficult after describing the "huge" swim platform, the "vast" aft deck, the "enormous" saloon, "gigantic" sofas, "massive" engines and erm, “Siberia-sized” owners’ cabin. So do please freely season the text below with your own choice of adjectives. Think HUGE.
So, we’re through the special security gate and up the gigantic passarelle. Oops, I mean passarelle. Now we're on the aft deck. There’s space for a game of footie even with all these sofas and built-in sun-loungers.
The 108 has rear-quarter "haunches", which give the boat a powerful profile. On some boats, lumps of curvy GRP contain nothing at all. They're called "exciting modern design". Aside from looking whizzy at boat shows and helping sell the boat in the first place, they also give gainful employment to an army of deckhands who clean them with big brushes until all the shine has gone which takes two or three years hard graft.
But on the Mangusta 108, the space under the curves is used productively. Okay, fairly productively: a large section of each rear quarter cover swings up to reveal a top-of-the-range wet-bike on each side, ready to crane sideways, out, and down to the sea a long way below. Or, straight through the coachroof of any boat with the audacity to raft alongside.
Now, we're off to Darkest Africa. Indoors, through electrically operated patio doors to the main saloon. With a retractable roof, this full width area is safari-styled with fur, beige/brown leathers, and contrasting dark woods. The ocean of leopard fabric and loose fur cushions are obviously fake - because there just couldn’t ever have been that many real leopards in the world. And if they were real, see, we'd all be eating Kentucky Fried Tiger.
Over on a distant sofa is a worryingly life-like stuffed leopard which sits guard on the stern sun-lounger on sunny days, so I presume that they don't bother with a "Welcome Aboard!" mat from the chandlers. All the exterior fabrics are leopard-print too. Do the chandlers do mats which say "Any further and you'll get ripped to shreds!"
The 108 has four double cabins. There’s enough space for all 8 or 9 guests to sit together at port side of the saloon, the starboard side of the main saloon, or at either side of the aft deck, or around the helm, or on the rear or on the forward sunpads - and still stay as one group. For a decent party, you should invite around 200 people. Full sized bar of course and an electrically powered 50" plasma screen which rises out of its hidden compartment just behind the helm. The helm features several square metres of dashboard. Probably dead simple when you get to know it, heh. The tour continues, and quickly now cos Daddy Bear may return at any moment.
We descend a flight of stairs at the starboard side of the saloon, and enter a more private, modern and sleekly-designed sitting area. The whole starboard wall is made up of metallic grey lacquered square doors, and there's storage behind every one. For a boatie, this is more like it. Grey leather seating, fully-fitted automatic expresso machine, Phillipe Starck-ish tables, the lot. "Crew quarters!" explains the skipper airily. Cripes. Around a corner is a restaurant-sized kitchen, entirely fitted with brushed stainless steel units and worktops. Up forward they pointed to the numerous crew cabins.
A secret door leads out from the crew area to the downstairs central guest bedroom corridor. Now we’re back to the safari theme, this time with lighter wood-veneered walls and gold fittings. One bedroom (can't call these "cabins") has a tiger theme and two others have leopard and elephant, I think. The ensuite bathrooms are entirely fitted gold, including the sinks. Probably not real gold, though. Probably.
The low voltage lights are gold too, encrusted with crystal glass to make them twinkle. Yet somehow, it all manages to avoid being vulgar. Perhaps it's difficult not to get fairly near "vulgar" when using these quantities of soft furnishings, ornaments and statues. But the giraffe-themed owners cabin with an eight-foot wide four-poster "Treetops" bed comes close. Gold ensuite bathroom here too, with a bath, I think, or was that the sauna? No, that's the sauna, this is the steam room. I'm lost now.
Another staircase comes neatly back up to the main saloon. Port and starboard doors lead outside to the side decks, and forward to the massive sunpad. Yes, this time I do mean “huge massive” sunpad. For a 55-knot boat I might have liked more handholds. Seatbelts too.
Our tour has almost ended. Just time to see the engine room. Headroom of at least nine feet, the full 7 ? metres width. Two contraptions in front of us look like space exploration projects. These are the turbines. Each is the size of a Transit van. The exhausts are the same again, all in metallized heat protection. It looks a bit one-off but the skipper says that it all works, and gets him the 25 miles from Golfe Juan to St. Tropez in under 25 minutes. I stayed a safe distance from the turbines. I didn't go too close to the forward bulkhead either, because it reminded me of an electrical substation and looked similarly dangerous. Fortunately, there's plenty of space.
I’m afraid I couldn’t fathom any of the workings of the turbines. There was a shaft a foot in diameter down below each of them, but the visible works had pipes all over the place. I was reminded of William Woollard when he did car reviews on TV: although mechanically clueless, he could convincingly lift a car bonnet and look knowledgeably to camera an say "So, as you can see, this power unit - packs quite a punch". Even though you could see no such thing. But here in the Mangusta's engine room, there’s no need to say "packs quite a punch". It looked frighteningly capable.
We said goodbye and returned to our shed. It’s a 23 metre boat, but it felt like a shed, less roomy in total than the 108’s crew quarters. Boating or not, we were all "Nobody's" at that end of St Tropez – we weren’t on the 108. Our skipper stayed with his brother on the 108 all eveing, the git.
I haven't clue why you'd actually *need* a Mangusta 108. But that's a very good thing - because the waiting list is over three years and they cost about 8 million quid. You might order one for somewhat less with cheaper conventional diesel engines that will still do 40 knots instead of 55, but would be slightly less fabulous. And you'd get overtaken by the incredibly amazing, massive, gigantic, great, big, huge... absolute Nobody.
MBY were chasing one particular Mangusta 108: the first full-spec example with twin turbine engines. It has total engine power of around 10,000 horsepower, overall length of 108 feet, and can reach over 55 knots at which speed it uses 2500 litres of fuel per hour. Yahoo! It's called "Nobody", and that name seems to be the only crummy thing about it. Why “Nobody”, one wonders? Is it just a jolly VHF jape?
Recently I took our boat to St. Tropez, in the old port, and some of the largest gawping crowds that will ever watch you on a boat. Quite fun, if you like that sort of thing. Oh alright, I admit it, we stayed a whole week.
One day, by chance, a visitor on the quayside hailed our skipper. It turns out that the visitor is his brother, and is the skipper of “Nobody”. Would we all like to have a little look around? Oh, go on then. At last, a first-hand report on the twin-turbine Mangusta 108. Totally unauthorised, unfortunately, so this can't go into print. Or could we say that "Nobody authorised us"? Teehee.
I haven';t done much in the way of boat reports and this isn't an easy place to start. Any description of this particular boat requires repeated use of the word "huge". I’ll also have to find a stack of words that mean the same as “huge” to vary the text. Otherwise I'll get a C-minus for the English again. But it’s bound to get difficult after describing the "huge" swim platform, the "vast" aft deck, the "enormous" saloon, "gigantic" sofas, "massive" engines and erm, “Siberia-sized” owners’ cabin. So do please freely season the text below with your own choice of adjectives. Think HUGE.
So, we’re through the special security gate and up the gigantic passarelle. Oops, I mean passarelle. Now we're on the aft deck. There’s space for a game of footie even with all these sofas and built-in sun-loungers.
The 108 has rear-quarter "haunches", which give the boat a powerful profile. On some boats, lumps of curvy GRP contain nothing at all. They're called "exciting modern design". Aside from looking whizzy at boat shows and helping sell the boat in the first place, they also give gainful employment to an army of deckhands who clean them with big brushes until all the shine has gone which takes two or three years hard graft.
But on the Mangusta 108, the space under the curves is used productively. Okay, fairly productively: a large section of each rear quarter cover swings up to reveal a top-of-the-range wet-bike on each side, ready to crane sideways, out, and down to the sea a long way below. Or, straight through the coachroof of any boat with the audacity to raft alongside.
Now, we're off to Darkest Africa. Indoors, through electrically operated patio doors to the main saloon. With a retractable roof, this full width area is safari-styled with fur, beige/brown leathers, and contrasting dark woods. The ocean of leopard fabric and loose fur cushions are obviously fake - because there just couldn’t ever have been that many real leopards in the world. And if they were real, see, we'd all be eating Kentucky Fried Tiger.
Over on a distant sofa is a worryingly life-like stuffed leopard which sits guard on the stern sun-lounger on sunny days, so I presume that they don't bother with a "Welcome Aboard!" mat from the chandlers. All the exterior fabrics are leopard-print too. Do the chandlers do mats which say "Any further and you'll get ripped to shreds!"
The 108 has four double cabins. There’s enough space for all 8 or 9 guests to sit together at port side of the saloon, the starboard side of the main saloon, or at either side of the aft deck, or around the helm, or on the rear or on the forward sunpads - and still stay as one group. For a decent party, you should invite around 200 people. Full sized bar of course and an electrically powered 50" plasma screen which rises out of its hidden compartment just behind the helm. The helm features several square metres of dashboard. Probably dead simple when you get to know it, heh. The tour continues, and quickly now cos Daddy Bear may return at any moment.
We descend a flight of stairs at the starboard side of the saloon, and enter a more private, modern and sleekly-designed sitting area. The whole starboard wall is made up of metallic grey lacquered square doors, and there's storage behind every one. For a boatie, this is more like it. Grey leather seating, fully-fitted automatic expresso machine, Phillipe Starck-ish tables, the lot. "Crew quarters!" explains the skipper airily. Cripes. Around a corner is a restaurant-sized kitchen, entirely fitted with brushed stainless steel units and worktops. Up forward they pointed to the numerous crew cabins.
A secret door leads out from the crew area to the downstairs central guest bedroom corridor. Now we’re back to the safari theme, this time with lighter wood-veneered walls and gold fittings. One bedroom (can't call these "cabins") has a tiger theme and two others have leopard and elephant, I think. The ensuite bathrooms are entirely fitted gold, including the sinks. Probably not real gold, though. Probably.
The low voltage lights are gold too, encrusted with crystal glass to make them twinkle. Yet somehow, it all manages to avoid being vulgar. Perhaps it's difficult not to get fairly near "vulgar" when using these quantities of soft furnishings, ornaments and statues. But the giraffe-themed owners cabin with an eight-foot wide four-poster "Treetops" bed comes close. Gold ensuite bathroom here too, with a bath, I think, or was that the sauna? No, that's the sauna, this is the steam room. I'm lost now.
Another staircase comes neatly back up to the main saloon. Port and starboard doors lead outside to the side decks, and forward to the massive sunpad. Yes, this time I do mean “huge massive” sunpad. For a 55-knot boat I might have liked more handholds. Seatbelts too.
Our tour has almost ended. Just time to see the engine room. Headroom of at least nine feet, the full 7 ? metres width. Two contraptions in front of us look like space exploration projects. These are the turbines. Each is the size of a Transit van. The exhausts are the same again, all in metallized heat protection. It looks a bit one-off but the skipper says that it all works, and gets him the 25 miles from Golfe Juan to St. Tropez in under 25 minutes. I stayed a safe distance from the turbines. I didn't go too close to the forward bulkhead either, because it reminded me of an electrical substation and looked similarly dangerous. Fortunately, there's plenty of space.
I’m afraid I couldn’t fathom any of the workings of the turbines. There was a shaft a foot in diameter down below each of them, but the visible works had pipes all over the place. I was reminded of William Woollard when he did car reviews on TV: although mechanically clueless, he could convincingly lift a car bonnet and look knowledgeably to camera an say "So, as you can see, this power unit - packs quite a punch". Even though you could see no such thing. But here in the Mangusta's engine room, there’s no need to say "packs quite a punch". It looked frighteningly capable.
We said goodbye and returned to our shed. It’s a 23 metre boat, but it felt like a shed, less roomy in total than the 108’s crew quarters. Boating or not, we were all "Nobody's" at that end of St Tropez – we weren’t on the 108. Our skipper stayed with his brother on the 108 all eveing, the git.
I haven't clue why you'd actually *need* a Mangusta 108. But that's a very good thing - because the waiting list is over three years and they cost about 8 million quid. You might order one for somewhat less with cheaper conventional diesel engines that will still do 40 knots instead of 55, but would be slightly less fabulous. And you'd get overtaken by the incredibly amazing, massive, gigantic, great, big, huge... absolute Nobody.
. Was most disappointed that MBY failed to deliver Mangusta report, having promised I think the previous month. There was an article on cutlery/the get-stuffed factor, and one on berths, you might have seen?