Big Ships

After being spotted off midcoast Maine at the end of August, the largest single-masted sloop in the world was anchored off Bar Harbor last week. I first noticed it while driving into Bar Harbor through Hulls Cove and along the bluffs when I saw its 292-foot tall mast, nearly the height of a 30-story building, sticking up above the trees on the far side of Bar Island. Off all the big cruise ships I've seen in Bar Harbor over the years, I've never seen one looming up into the sky from behind Bar Island. And at 247 feet long, it is bigger than some of the smaller commercial cruise ships that visit Bar Harbor.

The ship Mirabella V, not surprisingly, has its own website. Among the "toys" listed on that site is a 29-foot Hinckley jetboat with a 400hp engine, which itself is considered a luxury yacht. Used Hinckley jetboats listed for sale online cost several hundred thousand dollars each, but my guess is that the owners of Mirabella V bought theirs new. Luciana and Joseph Vittorio, the latter of whom has been the CEO of both Hertz and Avis rental car companies, reportedly paid $50 million for the ship, which was built over seven years and completed in 2004.

To get a visual sense of its size, compare Mirabella with the more familiar Margaret Todd, a four-masted schooner that takes tourists on scenic rides around Frenchman Bay. The Margaret Todd is 151 feet long and its masts are much shorter. I took this photo (below) last week in quickly vanishing daylight from the top of Cadillac Mountain.

Mirabella is much smaller than the majority of commercial cruise ships that drop anchor off Bar Harbor every summer and fall (about half of the 115 cruise ship visits Bar Harbor is expected to get in 2011 are scheduled between now and the end of October, by the way). But most of the big cruise ships carry between several hundred and more than 3,000 passengers. Mirabella carries up to 25 - 12 passengers and 13 crew. It reportedly can be chartered for about $1 million per month. I wonder if the passengers on board last week came ashore and bought t-shirts and ice cream cones during their visit?

Another smaller but still impressive vessel called Hilarium was spotted Sunday, Sept. 11 in Northeast Harbor (photo below), but it appeared to motor in around 3:30 p.m. only to turn around near the end of the marina slips and then motor back out again. Poking around online, I could not find a conclusive indication of who its owner might be, though I did notice it is registered in Boca Grande, Fla., but one blog I came across suggested it might belong to "Stephen Forbes." If the bloggers mean Malcolm Stevenson "Steve" Forbes, that would be fitting. Forbes' father, the late Malcolm Forbes, was known to moor his 151-foot motor yacht Highlander in Northeast Harbor.

But other more credible postings suggest that the owner is Peter Nicholas, founder of Boston Scientific. According to Boston magazine and Forbes magazine (of which Steve Forbes in the editor-in-chief) he is worth between $2.3 and $2.8 billion. Why it did a u-turn in Northeast Harbor I don't know, but I suspect it will be in the Mount Desert Island area for a few days, if it hasn't been already.