EDITOR’S LETTER
As I write this, our cover boat, La Datcha, is in the Maldives, on her way to the Kamchatka Peninsula, a vast, largely empty wilderness hanging appendix-like off the edge of Russia. The region is home to bears, tigers, orca – and more than 300 volcanoes, which provide some of world’s most extreme heli-skiing. As a place to shake down your new explorer yacht, and test all its toys (twin helicopters and Triton submarine, to name a few), it doesn’t get much better than that. But beyond the headline features, it’s the more prosaic aspects of a boat like this that really amp up its functionality in far-flung places: the substantial mud room for getting cold-weather gear on and off, vast wastewater tanks for cruising in no-discharge zones and sufficient…
