2019 Palm Beach 65 review

Living in a properly posh mansion must be a pleasant experience, and no doubt it does make you feel like a king in his castle. However, you can’t really do much with your giant house.

You can’t take it with you on holiday, for example, which is what makes a properly posh boat like the Palm Beach 65 so special.

It feels mansion-like inside, with its beautiful finishes, fine materials and exquisite joinery at every turn, but you don’t just get to look at it – you also get to drive it.

To do so, holding that perfectly crafted timber tiller in your hands, makes you feel more like an emperor than a king, or some kind of God of the Seas. I certainly felt the urge to grow a long, grey beard and buy a trident.

The Palm Beach 65 really is a millionaire’s home away from home, as it has the ability to take its owners over long distances on epic holiday adventures. If you’re more of a homebody, you could buy quite a nice mansion for the millions this bravura boat will set you back.

What you are buying, however, is the exacting work of a perfectionist. Mark Richards, champion sailor, Wild Oats skipper and all-around success story, created the Palm Beach brand in the famous Sydney suburb back in 1995.

It’s now part of a larger, global brand, along with Grand Banks, but he’s still the chief executive of all of it, and nothing comes out of the shipyard without his deep involvement in the detail.

As the company’s creative director, Joel Butler, tells us: “His [Mark’s] eye for detail can be challenging, but that’s why the product is so incredible.

“He’s an amazing guy, super passionate, and he can jump from a board meeting, walk through the yard saying hello to everyone, and then he can step onto a boat he hasn’t been on in months, it’s halfway through its build, and he’ll see something that shouldn’t be there because he remembers every detail.

“It’s just amazing to see someone’s brain work like that.”

That focus on detail, the same perfectionism that’s driven Richards to be such a success in ocean racing, is evident as soon as you walk onto the Palm Beach 65, and it’s there in every surface you touch.

The Palm Beach 65 starts at a kind of notional price of $US3,800,000, but there is so much freedom to personalise the boat to your own tastes, and thus to spend more money, that it would seem rude not to do so.

All manner of gear is included for that price. It runs from a remote docking station to a self-launching, 35kg Ultra anchor with 90m of chain, Silestone benchtops (“we want everything to feel as classy as it does in your home”), Miele appliances, Burmese teak surfaces everywhere, a tender garage with a tender carrying a 15hp outboard engine, and even a stainless-steel nameplate on the transom. And teak toilet seats.

Frankly, there are too many standard inclusions to mention, but you can add some big extras, such as a flybridge for $250,000, or small ones including underwater lights for $3500 (you do get two of them) or an ice-maker for $3750.

There’s no denying that the Palm Beach 65 feels like a hell of a lot of boat, and that a lot of the engineering you’re paying for isn’t immediately obvious – although you’ll quickly come to appreciate the twin Volvo Penta IPS1350 pod drive units, rated at 1000hp each.

In terms of value, it’s a difficult thing to express when you’re spending north of $US4.0 million on a boat.

Making this much boat look shapely is an achievement and the folks at Palm Beach, no doubt with plenty of input from Mark Richards, have done a hell of a job.

Personally, I think the classic trawler styling would look better without the flybridge, but when you stand up there and look down on all of creation, and all of that boat stretching out in front, it’s easy to see why you would make that choice (and spend the extra).

There’s a real balance to the way the 65 looks – vast, but not overly heavy. It turns heads exactly the way you would want a multimillion-dollar boat to.

It measures almost 71 feet in length, with a 19-foot beam, and the sense of space onboard is vast; there’s no pulling in your elbows or ducking the head.

The 65 sits on a warped semi-displacement hull, a Richards/Palm Beach trademark, which means almost no hull slapping, plenty of form stability at rest, and staying super smooth on the move. Stabilisers are not necessary, apparently, but similar to anything else at this level, you can have them if you want.

The hull is formed from vacuum-infused E-Glass with a Corcell and Airex foam core. The E-Glass is infused with vinylester and epoxy resins, which are “impervious to osmosis”.

Butler says Palm Beach uses E-Glass for the hull rather than fully infused carbon-fibre – which makes up the entire superstructure from the deck up – because it’s stronger and, in the event of a berthing mishap, easier to repair.

“It also means that we’ve got the weight down low, which helps keep the centre of gravity down low,” Butler says. He says the Palm Beach 65 also locates its blocks in the middle to keep mass aligned along the centre of the motor yacht, and runs lightweight carbon-fibre jackshafts “all the way to the powerplant”.

“It’s all about keeping it flat and stable and smooth, and of course you get awesome durability and no creaking.

“The other thing is that these boats are just super strong. They can take an absolute beating – and I’ve seen Mark [Richards] punish them with his lead foot, and they just love it.”

Access to the saloon from the cockpit is via a single sliding door. To starboard, a pair of two-seater couches face each other across a low table, with the aft seats facing a large TV that rises from the rear of the helm station.

The amidships galley, accessed via stairs descending from the saloon, is compact but with plenty of benchtop space, and lighting to compensate for the lack of natural light that was filling it on our gloomy test day.

It has plenty of storage options, a small fridge, convection microwave oven and an induction cooktop.

While the underpinnings are impressive, the parts you can touch and enjoy are simply wonderful. The Burmese teak that even lines the floor surprisingly spacious showers (there are two bathrooms, both spacious and both with toilet) looks and feels suitably expensive, and the quality of the joinery is exquisite.

The full-beam master stateroom is simply vast, big enough for both a large bed and a couch for lounging on. Forward is a VIP stateroom built into the bow, and to one side, which was set up with two single beds and plenty of space between them, but you can specify it however you like.

Off the galley is a Tokyo hotel-style crew cabin, with a thin but surprisingly comfortable double bed. It’s cosy rather than claustrophobic and could make a happy home for an extra guest or two if you were motoring without crew.

Palm Beach does all of this work, and all of the furnishings, everything, inhouse because perfectionists are like that.
The overall impression is one of class. Everything even smells good.

All bulkheads and fixed furniture are structurally bonded to the hull and deck for superior rigidity, and strength. To say it all feels solid and classy is like saying that Uluru is a sizeable rock.

A fixed swim deck leads up to a large covered cockpit lined aft with a comfortable couch sitting behind a large adjustable-height table. Moving forward, another L-shaped lounge wraps around the starboard side and against the saloon bulkhead.

To starboard is the ladder leading up to the flybridge, with a wet bar tucked in behind it. The bar top has a pop-up cover that reveals a joystick controller for performing low-speed maneuvers from the cockpit rather than in at the helm.

There’s no seating forward of the cabin, but there is a large, flat space near the bow to set up a couple of folding chairs and a table. You can strap a mattress down out there for a bit of sunsoaking, if you wish.

Rather than just a chair, the skipper sits on a lush couch in front of the starboard-mounted main helm station, and the Bentley-esque Palm Beach emblem engraved on the hub of the helm’s wheel is a work of art.

The carbon-fibre hardtop-covered flybridge, accessed via a cockpit ladder, has a helm station equipped with a pair of captain’s chairs protected behind a low wrap-around windscreen.

A wet bar and barbecue, and a comfy L-shaped couch wrapped around a high-gloss varnished table turn the space into a social zone.

Down the rear of the flybridge is a large open space ringed in a stainless steel rail that’s perfect for, say, assembling to watch the Australia Day fireworks.

Sure enough, as Butler promises, the Palm Beach 65 is very smooth and unruffled at anchor, but it’s only when you take the controls and let rip that you really appreciate why someone might part with so much money for one of these.

The clever design of the hull means that the 65 stays incredibly flat and superlatively smooth, even when you ask it do seemingly stupid things.

Accelerating this thing from a bobbing start and up to 35 knots was an experience I won’t soon forget. It felt like moving heaven and earth, or at least a large amount of luxury and water.

There is so much power from the 2000hp generated by the twin Volvo Penta D13s, and it’s so effortless that 20 knots feels like you are barely moving. Push on and you soon exceed 30 knots, with the power showing no signs of dropping off.

Throttle response is simply awesome, and while it feels like you have to work the helm quite a bit to get the Palm Beach 65 turning, it’s truly surprising just how easy it is to master the controls of something so evidently enormous.

As a passenger it’s a wonderful place to be, and that maxim about the best boat to ride on being someone else’s would certainly hold true, except that being the skipper of something this epic, powerful and grand is an addictive experience.

The idea of buying this much boat has never really made sense to me before. It’s just too much; who could need all that space? Surely it’s too intimidating to be enjoyable?

But the Palm Beach 65 isn’t just great to admire from a distance, and lovely to be a passenger on. It’s genuinely fun and involving to skipper.

I can almost see why the owner of the one we were lucky enough to have a run on is already working on personalising an even bigger 85-footer for himself.

If he doesn’t want this one any more, I’ll be happy to take it off him.

Specifications
Model: Palm Beach 65
Length overall: 21.3m
Length: 19.81m
Beam: 5.85m
Draft: 1.1m (shafts)/1.3m (IPS)
Displacement: 30,000kg
Fuel: 6000L (diesel)
Water: 1100L
Holding tank: 400L
Engines as tested: Volvo Penta IPS 1350
Optional engines: Volvo Penta D13 Shaft @ 1000HP
Top speed: 40 knots (IPS 1350)
Cruising speed: 34 knots (IPS 1350)
Accommodation: 6/8 people

Priced from: $US3,800,000 including twin Volvo Penta IPS 1350 pod drives

Price as tested: $US4,500,000 including flybridge fitted with electronics and two helm seats

Supplied by: Grand Banks Yachts