Mutiara Laut

Mutiara Laut means pearl of the sea, and she was conceived less as a phinisi than as a schooner. Her designers looked to the merchant schooners that worked the North Atlantic some three hundred years ago, then gave the woodwork and the rigging a distinctly Indonesian accent. Her story begins in March 2008 in Pagatan, a small town in Borneo, where local craftsmen started shaping a keel and hull of ulin ironwood alongside the man behind the project, Leo. In April 2009 the unfinished shell was towed 350 nautical miles to Bali to be completed; in July 2010 she raised her 850 square metres of sail for the first time, and that October she carried her first guests on a 1,400-mile voyage through Komodo, Banda and Raja Ampat.

After Leo died in 2015, his friend Kees kept the boat going, and she has been cared for rather than reinvented. A refit was finished in 2023, and in May 2025 she received a full wardrobe of new sails from Europe, the first complete change since those early voyages. She carries seven sails and a single Yanmar diesel for calms, and the people who run her present the wind as the point of the trip, not as a backdrop.

She spends November to April in Raja Ampat and the rest of the year around Komodo, with occasional expeditions further afield, such as a 2025 voyage to the Asmat region of Papua. Life aboard is warm and unfussy: teak decks, Balinese carving, a Balinese masseuse and PADI professionals in the crew for diving. The master suite is on the main deck aft and has its own small terrace. Worth knowing before you enquire: besides private charters she also runs shared voyages sold cabin by cabin, so a private week means taking the whole boat.

She suits friends or an extended family who want to sail, dive and go ashore to villages in a boat with a story, and who do not need a long list of motorised toys. The cabins are compact, between 14 and 18 square metres, and the four doubles convert to twins, which makes it easy to place friends who are sharing. At eight knots under way she is slow, so anyone hoping to cover the whole archipelago in a week, or wanting jet skis and big indoor lounges, should look at a larger yacht.