On board 65m yacht Adamas V with owner Nikolas Pateras

He previously owned Adamas, a 33-metre Benetti; Adamas II, which was built for the Emir of the UAE; Gloria, a ketch that he eventually sold to British businessman Peter de Savary; Adamas III, a 37-metre Cantieri di Pisa; Adamas IV, a 33-metre Cantieri di Pisa; and Arionas, a 40-metre that was built in the UK in 1967. In fact, he explains, the only series boats he’s ever bought were two Cantieri di Pisas, one 33-metre and one 37-metre, for his children.

“They reminded me a lot of Ferraris because they had these beautiful lines and large side exhausts,” he says. “When I first saw one back in the 1980s it belonged to the Libyan dictator Gaddafi! They have good speed… but then I couldn’t stand them.

By this, he means he prefers a more solid-looking boat, describing Adamas V as a “battleship”. “We were out last week in six or seven gale force winds and she sailed like a frigate – it was fantastic!” he exclaims. Clearly, Pateras adores spending time at sea. It’s a good job, given it’s been the cornerstone of his ancestor’s business for five generations. When he was a seven-year-old child, his father, who ran the shipping company Pateras Brothers Ltd, would take him into the office on Saturdays.

“It was magical; back then you didn’t have computers, you had big magnetic world maps that you put the ships on [to track them],” he recalls. “So I’d see we had a ship in, say, India, and I’d try to imagine what would it be like to be in India.”

Playing with magnets was all well and good, as was ferrying around glamorous designers (a 14-year-old Nikolas once played chauffeur to Jon Bannenberg, having no idea who he was), but the acid test came when his father sent him to work in his fleet as a junior officer in his teens. “I think more or less he looked at it as a punishment, because I was not what you would call a top student,” he smiles.

With each assignment, he would present the captain with a letter from his father. “It didn’t say ‘Take care of my son,’ it said, ‘Treat my son like any other junior person on board,’” he says. “I didn’t have any special treatment. People either love it or hate it. I loved it.”

His first two voyages were particularly memorable – one was on a reefer ship between Florida and Turbo in Colombia carrying bananas for Chiquita, while the other was on a bulk carrier crossing from Durban, South Africa, all the way to Yokohama in Japan. Today, he has the utmost respect for those who work within his fleet. “Especially during the Covid-19 period,” he notes. “These are the people that kept the entire world alive and prevented the supply chain from breaking.”

Shipping in his family runs back to Pateras’s great-grandparents’ generation. His grandfather passed away young, forcing his father to inherit the family business of just two cargo ships back in 1953 as an inexperienced 23-year-old. History would later repeat itself, with Nikolas’s father, Diamantis, then handing over the reins to his son, Nikolas himself when he was also just 23. “I had uncles who were 60 and were not given the opportunity to sign a cheque!” he says with amazement.

Now, he is in the process of handing the business down to the next generation once more, with his two eldest children, Anastasia, 27, and Diamantis, 24, working within Contships. By any measure, Pateras has made a huge success of his life’s work. “I’ve been through two important cycles during my career where I almost lost everything and then I rebuilt everything,” he explains, “and I do feel the pressure sometimes.” He estimates he’s bought and sold close to 160 ships during his career.

He set up the well-known Pacific & Atlantic, which he created in 1993 (“my baby”), and by a stroke of good fortune sold 50 ships just before the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008.

Riding high off his success, he thought, “What the fuck?! Let me take a sabbatical,” and took a break that included running Panathinaikos Football Club from 2008 to 2010 as chairman and shareholder, and winning the Greek Championship and Greek Cup.

He then entered the container ship market, establishing Contships Management in 2015. At the beginning, “it was hell”, he recalls, “because it’s a very closed market”. Major players didn’t take him seriously, so Pateras upped his fleet from three to 59 ships. Over Covid-19, shipping firms boomed, with companies such as MSC making $66 billion in profit in three years. “A little of that money came to us,” notes Pateras. And, what better to spend it on than Adamas V, and the refit that transformed her into his life’s dream.

But of course, Pateras’s love for yachting goes back to when he first began working on the ships. And, as much as he had a passion for the business, he had a passion for the boats. He bought his first Adamas, a Benetti, in 1990, moored it under the Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel in Athens and lived on board.

“My father and my uncle said, ‘You know you’re going to get some health issues here because it’s humid, and it’s not nice to live on the boat in winter,’” he smiles, “but the boat always relaxed me.”

He’d invite colleagues, friends and family, but shied away from using the yacht as a business tool, something he maintains to this day. “A lot of people say that Adamas V is large, so why don’t we charter it out? But I like to have my family photo frames, my personal belongings, everything in place,” he says.

Having monitored the yacht, Pateras’s moment to acquire her took place in 2022. She was on the market at a high price and needed a significant investment to refit her, so he held back on making an offer.

As time went on, the owners reduced their price, and at last the deal was done. Pateras hadn’t even stepped on board – just seen videos from the two inspections his team had done. “They told me, she’s a very solid boat with not a spot of rust anywhere,” he remembers. “They said, this is the kind of yacht that you can use to circumnavigate the globe.”

“I’ve been through two important cycles during my career where I almost lost everything and then I rebuilt everything”

His first move was to enlist designer Giorgio Vafiadis, who he’d worked with on previous projects. Vafiadis was quick to flag one of the boat’s major issues, the 69 thick (eight centimetre) bulletproof windows that had to be replaced along with the frames.

Not that he was shy of getting stuck into the project. “He said, ‘Listen, since we’re going to strip the whole boat, let’s change the entire air-conditioning system – which was a big deal – let’s put marble on all the bathroom floors [replacing carpets from the Emir’s time] and let’s change all the equipment, modernise everything,” recalls Pateras. “So I followed his instructions. It was a substantial cost but it was worth it.”

The yacht’s interior and exterior are an unusual but “successful marriage”, as he puts it. From the outside, with cranes extended, she looks “like some kind of warship”, but inside her interiors are luxurious and contemporary, moving away from the silks and gold finishes favoured by her former owner to light woods and new lacquers.

The walls are adorned with attention-grabbing photography sourced via Condé Nast, but Pateras would rather guests admired his electric Citroën Ami, which takes pride of place on the top deck, alongside his two motorcycles and four jet skis. “People look at me and they say, ‘Come on, you can’t be driving these’”, he laughs.

Pateras’s focus for the yacht was ever practical. It’s “a real family boat,” he says, where no-one is afraid of messing things up. “Fuck that,” he says, “we just want everyone to run around, enjoy the boat, children to jump from here to there... that’s what boats are for.”

The yacht’s huge transformation took only nine months at Restis Hellenic Shipyard, halving the predicted timeframe. “I think I am an easy client because I know what I want,” Pateras notes. Safety is paramount for him, and a lot of his requests were to make things more practical.

He changed the position of the tenders, previously stored vertically, for example, to make using them more straightforward, and moved all the safety equipment from the sundeck to places where it would be easier to access, filling the void with a lounge area and spa pool.

At night, he’s insistent on having a double watch, and if the boat’s underway, he’ll always be found up on the bridge. “In shipping I’ve seen a lot of accidents happen. We’ve had ships run aground because they’ve lost their anchor. We’ve had fires because the engine crew were not on watch at night. So all these things have made me very safety conscious,” he explains.

It seems Pateras has reimagined Adamas V exactly how he had hoped. Does he really need Wally B, I ask? “Why not? I love having both,” he says. His weekends are happily spent travelling from Athens to visit the yachts, discussing plans with the captains, upgrading bits of kit and mulling over potential new additions.

He enjoys exploring Greek islands such as Hydra, Spetses and Patmos, and at the beginning of last summer he themed his cruising itinerary around incredible monasteries (“Because I look like a priest!” he laughs), taking in breathtaking sights in Patmos, Oinousses and Tinos, which has “one of the most famous churches in Greece”.

He bemoans, however, some of the effects that tourism has had on his homeland. “I like the fact that some places have been modernised, but the islands should protect themselves,” he notes. Take Santorini and Mykonos. “Greeks don’t visit anymore because there are 90 per cent tourists and 10 per cent Greeks – plus the passenger ships bring in 5,000 to 6,000 people a day and cause havoc...”

“We just want everyone to run around, enjoy the boat, children to jump from here to there... that’s what boats are for”

Pateras dreams of doing a circumnavigation, but for now his priority is his foundation, which is “doing a lot of work for schools, hospitals and churches in Greece”. When we speak, he is planning an ambitious cruise with both yachts – Adamas V housing the adults, and Wally B filled with their children and friends.

It’s clear that Wally B isn’t his favourite of the two boats, I joke, and he laughs in response, “Not at all! I think that what I’ve realised over the last 30 years is that kids want to be independent. This was my first experience with Gloria in 2004, I put 10 kids on [her] and they felt like kings…”

Pateras’s enthusiasm for yachting is contagious, and it’s hard to imagine that those on board won’t soon share his passion. “Yachts are a great escape – from day to day anxiety, from all the pressure from work,” he says. “I only wish I’d been able to use the yachts that I’ve had during my lifetime more often.”