The refit that gave owners a new superyacht in just two years

What a boat! Every time we look at it, we say, ‘what a boat!’” A year after taking delivery of Moonstone, her owners still marvel at her. Richard and Jennifer Sands first set eyes on their completed rebuild in London in May 2025. Fresh from more than two years spent with Amels Refit at Damen Yachting’s Vlissingen yard in the Netherlands, the 79-metre yacht glowed on the Thames. The crew welcomed the owners in crisp new uniforms.

“I teared up,” says Jennifer as we chat in the yacht’s bright main saloon a year later. “It was midnight when we arrived and we were tired, but I kept asking to go around,” she remembers. The couple opened their curtains the next morning to a postcard view of Tower Bridge. They celebrated with a first cruise around the south coast and then they headed north to Scotland and Norway.

Their decision to reinvent a yacht of exceptional pedigree was hardly impulsive for these experienced yacht owners. According to their fleet manager and former captain Damon Smallwood, they began their yachting journey with a 27-metre Pershing “to see if they liked boating”.

They progressed to a 40-metre Mangusta, a 48-metre Delta, a 50-metre Mangusta, a 60-metre Amels and a Damen Yachting Yacht Support vessel before buying and transforming Moonstone, launched as Albatross at Delta Marine in the US.

Boating fulfilled their innate sense of adventure. Over the years, they visited places such as Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, the Maldives and Papua New Guinea, often the only yacht in any anchorage. So, it was a natural evolution that, as their family grew, they looked at a larger explorer yacht.

They had enjoyed their 60-metre Amels 200 Limited Editions, also named Moonstone, which they acquired mid-build, and were in advanced discussions with Damen Yachting on an 80-metre SeaXplorer a few years back.

However, the build time gave them pause. “I was 72 at the time, probably,” Richard Sands says. “If you think about it, four and a half years, five years is a long time [to wait].” They were meeting Damen Yachting and designers at the 2022 Monaco Yacht Show, and the next logical step was to look at some of the yachts for sale there. And that’s when they came across the 72.2-metre that Delta Marine had built for an experienced owner, the Espen Øino- and Zuretti-designed Albatross.

The Seattle-based yard had delivered the yacht in secrecy a mere six years earlier. She had hardly been seen since delivery until she appeared on the brokerage market in Monaco, following her owner’s death. The consensus on the docks was she was a great yacht. Although not an explorer in the sense of the Damen Yachting SeaXplorer, which is purpose-built, the Øino-designed luxury expedition yacht ticked many boxes. “It is quite a large volume boat,” Smallwood says.

The crew area is generous; there is plenty of cold and dry storage, a special door to load supplies, a refrigerated room for refuse and large fuel capacity. “We can stay autonomous for quite a while,” he adds. For the owners, the deciding factor may have been the owner’s deck and its observation room. “We walked on this boat and the layout looked ideal,” Richard says. “It was a little bit gaudy and dark, and had many, many, sinks and TVs.” And, adds Jennifer, “A lot of embellishments!”

“Owners need a good team. We would not have been as successful if it weren’t for our team”

But they also saw the great bones of this very well-equipped and built custom yacht, admiring the stonework, the woods and the spaces, from main saloon to bridge. “Everybody agrees that Delta is a fantastic boatbuilder, whether you’re just talking about layouts or woodwork or, as important, the technical spaces, and everything is very organised and well laid up.

So, we felt we were starting with a great boat,” Richard says. Jennifer agrees, immediately noting the potential that Albatross held. “When we walked on here, I think both of us knew we could work with this. I remember probably five minutes in, I said, ‘Richard, this is the boat,’” she says.

Roughly 10 weeks later, Burgess announced the sale of Albatross. In parallel, the Sands had been interviewing designers and visited some of the yachts they had created. They saw the Abeking Elandess (now M'brace), a custom yacht designed by Harrison Eidsgaard. They already had a good rapport with the firm discussing their potential new build and ultimately brought them on to join the team that would transform Albatross into Moonstone.

There was, equally, no hesitation about the shipyard. They had a good relationship with Damen Yachting and knew the yard could handle what started as a relatively modest refit. The team also spoke with Delta, but Smallwood says they did not have the capacity to do the project at the time. However, the American shipyard provided support and documentation that proved invaluable, especially as the project grew.

At first, they were thinking interior refresh and a relatively minor platform extension. “The original intent when they purchased the boat was to extend the swim platform to get a better connection with the water,” says Captain Nathan Milicich. It was also about docking and boarding a large chase boat. From there, the project evolved into something much bigger.

“Design explorations made it clear that everything they hoped to add by way of lifestyle and wellness amenities, could not be established in one part of the boat,” says Michel Coens, head of refit and services at Damen Yachting. Instead of one wellness area, which exists now, they would have had to split the gym from the sauna and spa on different levels.

Damen Yachting, which had recently rebuilt and extended the Amels Here Comes the Sun (now Mirage), adding six metres to it in 2021, was confident it could improve the yacht’s amenities and preserve the looks that had attracted the Sands. And while time was a factor in their decision not to build a new yacht, the owners were flexible enough to go along with the changes that would allow them to achieve their ultimate goals.

“Colours were replaced by very luxurious textures. The interior was calmed down in a very cocooning way”

They met Harrison Eidsgaard again to discuss the refit after closing on the new Moonstone, on board in December of 2022. “We were there for two days, and it was a whirlwind of activity and out-of-the-box thinking but the real change came when Amels came up with the idea to extend the boat,” says Nick Houghton, designer at Harrison Eidsgaard.

That extension made it possible to create a spectacular pool on the main deck. It contains 20 tonnes of water – which can be stored in a tank fully heated and ready to go – and can be refilled in 20 minutes. A full wellness centre is below it, which encompasses a gym, a sauna and steam room.

The area also incorporates large windows that had to be approved by Lloyd’s – they don’t require storm shutters – and a curved ceiling to create sufficient clearance for the gym equipment. It was an engineering feat to do all this elegantly around the emergency steering and incorporate the housing for a sturdy passerelle “that does not bounce” just above the sauna.

Forward of this is the existing garage, which now accommodates an Iguana chase boat and six WaveRunners. There is also a nitrox system as “the programme is quite diving-focused”, Smallwood explains. The crew area, the mess and technical spaces were good, but the shipyard reviewed, reset and recertified machinery and upgraded a few systems, including the propellers.

The Harrison-Eidsgaard team kept the architectural backdrop relatively neutral to allow the art to become the focal point

The owners kept the public announcement system, which Richard finds handy to round up the children on a family trip, and a paparazzi floodlight, which they have never used but their guests are curious about. There was another major structural transformation, which was the creation of a winter garden on the bridge deck’s aft section.

This is a great dining space, sheltered from sun and wind with a system of louvres and framed by protective glass. Beyond the table for 16 is a new seating area with a fire pit to linger over after-dinner drinks, which occupies a portion of the former helideck. All of that, of course, required naval architecture work.

The owner's deck below also received extensive modifications, including a new spa pool, which the grandkids love to splash in. There’s also a new office with three windows and a back office with storage and a coffee machine, in place of the original study, small cabin and space for a running machine.

Richard points out it is more accurate to describe the transformation as a rebuild than a refit, citing as an example a change to the staircase that connects the bridge deck to the sundeck. “One of the big arguments that we had was the staircase up to the sundeck bar,” he says.

“The whole staircase had to be rebuilt, because Jennifer and the designers thought it was absolutely necessary for the connectivity of the winter garden to the sundeck,” he says. The team was evenly split, but Jennifer eventually won him over.

He credits her for many of the appealing changes inside as well. About 80 per cent of the interior was changed in some way. The owners also have an amazing eye for art and purchased numerous pieces from a collector in St Barths and from galleries in Monaco, plus Murano glass art that adds personality to the yacht and enlivens spaces.

“Objects from galleries and sophisticated high-end ranges of furniture added to the eclectic atmosphere, which allowed us to blend the new and old,” says Ewa Eidsgaard, co-founder of Harrison Eidsgaard, which handled the interior redesign. “I think that is why it works so well.”

The Harrison Eidsgaard team deliberately kept the architectural backdrop relatively neutral to allow the art and objets, which they had not yet seen, to become the focal point. The overarching goal was to modernise and lighten the interior, which was originally very masculine and on the darker side. Yet, they wanted to preserve the wood and the spectacular stonework. The trick was to incorporate changes that would look cohesive.

“We changed all the carpets and most curtains, most of the headliners, anything that could easily be brightened,” Eidsgaard says. “We were well aware that the majority of the [original] rich mahogany brown colour would stay in place; to offset it, we wanted to go for something very bright, beige and silvery, that was an easy gain.”

A distinctive scroll that originally served as a frieze on bulkheads was clad in leather. “We redecorated some of the doors with leather, which gave it a tasteful heritage. Colours were replaced by very luxurious textures, very tactile soft materials. [The interior] was calmed down in a very cocooning way,” she says.

Furnishings were commissioned, such as a custom dining table by British artist and designer Alex Hull, or a sculptural marble table by French ar tist Mathieu Lehanneur. Jennifer worked closely with Eidsgaard, choosing the pieces for each space. A fan of Loro Piana, she hand-picked a chair that looks like a soft sculpture on the owner’s deck.

While evidently very happy with their new Moonstone, the Sands acknolwedge the challenges that come with a rebuild. “Would I recommend it?” Richard says, and after a thoughtful pause, “Yes, but I think that [owners] need the right team. We would not have been as successful if it weren’t for our team,” he says.

“The original intent when they bought the boat was to extend the swim platform”

Captain Milicich, Smallwood and David McQueen, part of a team of 10, spent most of their time in Vlissingen during the refit, which helped with prompt decision-making. Still there were a few surprises along the way, Smallwood says. The construction methods were different than what Damen Yachting is accustomed to doing, due in part to the fact that the yacht’s superstructure is in GRP, rather than the more typical aluminium over a steel hull.

“Rather than a floating floor, all was glued directly down. If you want to retrofit, that is where the real challenge comes in,” Houghton explains. That is always part of the adventure of retrofitting anything.

“We came to the project without prior engineering knowledge of the boat,” Coens says, adding that the refit relied heavily on Damen Yachting’s new build expertise. In the end, the success of the outcome came down to cooperation between yards,designers and the owners’ team. While the rebuild earned Moonstone a World Superyacht Award in 2026, what matters most is that every time they see her, the owners can’t help but say, “What a boat!”

First published in the October 2026 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.