What In the World is Wally?

The Wally owner should budget, say, $400,000 a year for a professional crew. A marine engineer/mechanic with turbine experience is compulsory, for if a Cigarette or a Donzi is the turbo Mooney of fast boats, the 118 WallyPower is the Learjet, filled with complex—and dangerous if mishandled—hydraulic, electrical and electronic systems. These systems, like a biz jet’s, require pros who thoroughly understand them and are prepared for fast action. “If one of those engines comes apart, it’ll go right through the bottom of the boat,” says Greg Mullen of Dockwalk, a magazine for yacht crewpeople and captains.


Wally is awaiting a firm order before building the next 118. The company might have to wait a while. “I don’t think it’s a marketable product,” says Roger Marshall. “It’s a high-speed boat that is way overpowered and expensive as hell to run, so the market consists of very few people.”



Yachting magazine technical correspondent Dudley Dawson, who last September sailed aboard the 118 WallyPower for a demo run, points out that though several different gas-turbine luxo-yachts have been built recently, “almost without exception, the second owner of those boats, and the second boat in the series, have diesel engines rather than turbines. Very few people keep the turbines. They’re finicky to maintain in a marine environment, and the fuel consumption—gallons per horsepower—is much higher than that of diesel engines.”

Still, there is demand out there for exotic mega-yachts, which are the ultimate realization of the classic definition of a pleasure boat: a hole in the water into which you pour money. There are currently two 400-footers under construction in Germany, and a 500-foot private yacht is rumored to be quietly abuilding elsewhere in Europe, the latter longer than the tramp freighters and tankers aboard which I crewed during my misspent youth.


“You start talking that kind of money,” says Mullen, “and there’s speed freaks who have it too. But after the first (118 WallyPower) is out there, and maybe the second, that’s probably it. The thing about mega-yachts is that the next buyer always wants to outdo the guy before him. The next boat always has to take it a little bit further, a little bit faster.”

If so, the increments of advance will be minute, for water is an obstinate medium. Imagine where we’d be if today’s cars and airplanes went not even twice as fast as their century-ago equivalents. In 1902 a boat named Arrow did 45 mph, a world record. This was a narrow, classic Victorian steam yacht with a deckful of passenger chairs and a foursquare wheelhouse. She was 132 feet long and developed 8,000 hp from two steam engines. The similarly proportioned 118 WallyPower has double the power but not nearly double the speed.