Nahlin
 Before Grenada , 2012
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The Nahlin is a steam yacht completed in July 1930 for the heiress of businessman Sir David Yule, Annie Henrietta Yule. Before the start of the Second World War, it was acquired by King Carol II of Romania and remained in Romania until 1999.
history
The yacht Nahlin was built in 1929/30 as the first of three ships on behalf of Lady Yule at the John Brown & Company shipyard in Clydebank according to plans by the renowned design office GL Watson & Co. Until 1934 Lady Yule undertook a series of voyages that took the ship from the British Isles to the Baltic Sea, the Greek Islands, the Atlantic, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico. The Galapagos Islands were visited as well as Honolulu, Hawaii, Tahiti, the Society Islands, New Zealand and Australia. In total, the Nahlin covered more than 200,000 nautical miles on these voyages.
In 1936 King Edward VIII chartered the Nahlin to go on a pleasure trip with Mrs. Wallis Simpson . The following year, the Romanian royal family bought the yacht for 120,000 pounds and initially renamed it Luceafarul (evening star). During the Second World War, the Romanian Navy used the yacht as a patrol vehicle .
After Carol's abdication, she was renamed Libertatea in 1948 and listed as the property of the Romanian Ministry of Culture under the number 3041. Romania used it as a charter yacht and later as a museum ship, most recently it was operated as a floating restaurant on the Danube .
After being rediscovered in 1988 by the head of the design office GL Watson & Co., the Libertatea initially came into private hands in the course of the political upheaval in Romania and was transported back to Great Britain in 1999 on the dock ship Swift . Since then her name has been Nahlin again and her home port is again Glasgow . The restoration began during a lengthy layover in Liverpool's Sandon Dock. In 2005 she was brought on the dock ship Condock V from the Mersey to Rendsburg , where the restoration, which lasted until the end of 2009 and cost around 60 million euros, was continued at the Nobiskrug and Blohm + Voss shipyards . In the course of this restoration, supervised by her original design office, the steam turbine ship propulsion was replaced by a continuously variable diesel-electric propulsion system. A steam boiler was specially installed to operate the restored steam piston engines for the anchor winch and the mooring winch. The old steam pipe was also brought back to life.
Today the yacht is owned by Sir James Dyson .
The Nahlin on a shipyard test drive
Aft of the Nahlin
Construction detail of Nahlin
Nahlin clipper stem
Trivia
As one of the three largest steam yachts ever built in Great Britain, the Nahlin still ranks nineteenth in the ranking of the largest powered yachts.
Individual evidence
Ship data at Miramar Ship Index (in English)
literature
- ed: The restoration of the "Nahlin" is complete . In: Daily port report . tape 62 , no. 248 , December 2009, p. 1 .
Web links
- GL Watson ( Memento from January 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
- Older page with photos before the restoration and history
- Page with photos and history