Owned by Prince Jefri of Brunei, this superyacht’s infamous name still makes people splutter into their drinks almost three decades on, says Daniel Pembrey.
Is something really as sweet if called by any other name, to paraphrase Juliet’s words about Romeo? When it comes to yachts, Feadship estimates that 90 per cent of names are given by women, but that is unlikely to have been the case with the arrestingly styled 55-metre the yard delivered to Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei 28 years ago, the most infamously named superyacht ever launched: M/Y Tits.
Everybody approached for this feature declined to speak on the record about the yacht, yet off the record a revealing picture emerges, not least thanks to former crew members’ vivid recollections. One recounts being driven at night, in 1996, through a Dutch industrial estate to the new yacht that Feadship was readying for handover at its facility near Amsterdam. While the yacht’s up-lit profile was strikingly beautiful – monumental, even – the side-facing name was startling.
“It wasn’t just the scale of the lit-up capital letters,” says an ex-crew member, a sense of wonder still discernible in his voice. “It was also the undulating line beneath, forming the two domed shapes. It left no room for doubt about what it signified.”
Winch Design and Studio de Voogt had designed the boat for another client altogether, reportedly Theodore Angelopoulos, the Greek shipping magnate. At some point during the build of Feadship’s hull No 775, Prince Jefri, or rather one of his representatives, entered the process. The boat’s original budget was said to be handsomely exceeded by Prince Jefri’s offer.
The Brunei royal family could certainly afford it. As a country slightly smaller in land mass than the US state of Delaware, and situated on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, it had gained independence from Britain only a decade prior, in 1984. It equally gained the Shellfare State nickname due to the copious oil reserves lying beneath its slender territories, which comprised two adjacent strips of land, lushly covered in rainforest. The country was a combination of absolute monarchy and Islamic jurisprudence that includes Sharia, all with Anglophile leanings.
Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah had attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and enjoyed good relations with the British royal family. It is likely that the Sultan and his younger brother, Prince Jefri, were influenced by the late Queen’s affection for the Royal Yacht Britannia. A plan was hatched for a Brunei royal fleet to be stationed at Muara Port in Brunei Bay.
The first vessel to arrive there was Jon Bannenberg’s space-age-looking 55-metre Oceanfast, delivered in 1991 and named Bolkiah 1. It emerged from the prime of Bannenberg’s freewheeling, can-do collaboration with Australian naval architect Phil Curran and featured a semi-displacement aluminium hull and a stark white GRP superstructure with distinctively big, powerful window forms.
A car dealer, local to the Oceanfast yard in Fremantle, Australia, supplied a blood-red Ferrari Testarossa for a photo shoot on board the yacht. The yard evidently knew what it was doing: the Brunei royal family was keen on Ferrari, a marque well represented in its car collection running to at least 6,000 vehicles, worth billions of dollars and allegedly protected by Gurkha soldiers.
According to Australian members of the crew, the sleek yacht never ventured far, but nevertheless the royal fleet grew. In 1995, a Mulder-designed, Heesen-built 37-metre called Teeth appeared. She was a sister ship to Bonita (delivered to the Sultan of Johor) and Norship-built Moonraker, the fastest superyacht in the world at that time, claiming a blistering speed of 67 knots. A Princess motor yacht named Hassan also arrived here. Bolkiah 1, Hassan and Teeth would soon be joined by Tits.
What made Tits’s name all the more curious (besides Brunei being a Muslim country) was that the design, while being opulent enough, was not ostentatious (besides the obvious). The steel hull was 10 metres shorter than Feadship’s Al Riyadh, built for the Saudi royal family and predating Tits by almost two decades. In the interim, the Brunei royals had commissioned the largest residential palace in the world – and the largest single family residence ever built – with 1,788 rooms.
Inside the yacht’s aluminium superstructure, a glass lift spanned her four decks. The full-beam owner’s suite had an observation room and a huge – double king-size – bed. Gold thread woven into carpets lent a shimmer, but not bling. There was relatively little outdoor space, for reasons of privacy as much as for climate control, it is believed.
The demure grey colour, accented by deep scarlet, denoted Prince Jefri (each family member reportedly having identifying colours) and were to be found on Teeth. The mystery of why the name Tits was picked, and more importantly why it was kept, would only deepen as her life unfolded.
Sailing from Dutch waters for Brunei, crew became aware of an ongoing challenge: communicating with the outside world. “On the radio, there would be this incredulous silence on the other end, after we’d been asked to repeat and spell out her name,” remembers one. Safety can never be compromised out on the ocean, yet the crew found themselves contemplating making up acronyms, such as “travelling in tranquil seas”.
Name invention and serious-minded seafaring don’t make easy bedfellows. This the crew discovered when stopping in the port of Palma de Mallorca. It was a time to decompress and cut loose after the shaky start. The berthed boat, and her name, drew crowds of onlookers – and other attention. Sitting outside at the Arena bar, crew members joked among themselves that perhaps that yacht’s tenders should be called Nipple 1 and Nipple 2.
A lurking reporter overheard and believed the crew to be stating the invented names as fact. They were reported in the Majorca Daily Bulletin, picked up by Daily Mail and other major titles in the UK and US. They have been repeated as fact in credible outlets ever since; part of yachting folklore. “It went viral as fake news before fake news and going viral were even a thing,” says an ex-crew member.
On Tits sailed, powered by her twin 2,600hp Caterpillar diesel engines. A capable cruiser, she enjoyed speeds of up to 17 knots and a 4,000 nautical mile range at 12 knots. Sailing in the Indian Ocean was particularly rough. She took on fuel in Colombo, Sri Lanka, before stopping off in Singapore, where Feadship technicians checked her over. Finally she made the last leg of the journey into Muara Port – to a navy base, a new royal dock there not being quite ready.
Arrival at night, in what was effectively jungle, was an unforgettable experience. The tide of the Brunei River was strong and challenging, but that wasn’t the biggest problem, according to one ex-crew member: “When we got there, we made the mistake of putting all the lights on. I’ve never seen so many insects in my life. It was terrifying, extraordinary; they were huge. The boat was entirely covered in these other-worldly creatures. You could barely see the paintwork.”
The wildlife would only become more noteworthy to the reptilian parts of the crew’s brains: snakes (one of which met the chief engineer on the boarding ladder), sea snakes too, giant monitor lizards “the size of Komodo dragons”, whale sharks in the river – supposedly large crocodiles there, as well – and, on the beaches, spectral-looking jellyfish “the size of dustbin lids”. Says a former crew member: “You were in your own private David Attenborough documentary.” Gibbons calling to one another were the soundtrack of this tropical enclave.
Another regular sound was the dull thud and metallic clatter of a military-class Black Hawk helicopter flying low down the Brunei River before banking at an unnaturally steep angle, revealing fuel tanks shaped like missiles under its winglets. The Black Hawk was piloted by Prince Jefri’s eldest son, Prince Hakeem. The boyish-faced prince wore a baby-blue jumpsuit with the name badge “Iceman” sewn on – a reference to the Top Gun character played by Val Kilmer.
Cigarette Rough Rider 14-metre offshore-racing boats, powered by Hawk Marine, joined the evolving fleet. “They ordered several, each in a different colour,” says an executive with Hawk Marine Power at the time. “One would be painted to show the stars at night; another would be yellow; a third one, vivid pink. We had a couple of engineers from Florida to maintain the engines and ensure they were always ready to go.”
Tits herself barely left the royal dock. Whereas Bolkiah and Teeth were mainly crewed by Australians “it was mostly Brits on Tits”, one says. The crew members interviewed for this feature report no untoward behaviour on board – besides jokes they played to lighten the mood, for example filling a galley with boxes of Boobs brand pasta. Royal family members were polite, softly spoken and typically interested in where crew members originated from in the UK.
Guests – usually dignitaries from the region, whose first language was not English – would step aboard but not stay. Tits might sail up and down the river for an hour or two, but no more. Crew would keep Cokes and Pepsis on ice and “go-to” mini burgers ready to serve. The boat was maintained on constant standby for royal use, whatever that might be.
The heat and atmospheric conditions could be commensurately airless; stifling. Storms, heralded by a mere kick of cool wind on an otherwise hot clear day, would blacken skies and bring rain sounding like bowls of uncooked rice being emptied on the boat’s hard surfaces. The burning of rainforest for palm oil cultivation in neighbouring states gave off pungent smoke, sometimes so thick that crew members needed to switch on their headlights while driving to work in the mornings. Still the smoke remained barely penetrable – equally so to the low-slung lights of the royals’ Lamborghinis.
Tits rarely left Brunei territorial waters, but one foreign trip she made was a cruise to the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, at Manila and Subic Bay in the Philippines, in November 1996. These summits sought to promote greater free trade and economic openness, yet barely had Tits berthed before she was asked to leave again.
President Bill Clinton had reportedly been keen to come aboard, but his visit abruptly fell through, perhaps because his staff learned of the name and foresaw the inevitable headlines. If there had been any doubt about what Tits meant in the English language, and its implications, then such doubts were dispelled here.
Meanwhile, the Brunei royals had in mind a bigger yachting vision altogether – indeed, a vision for the biggest yacht in the world, with a length exceeding 160 metres. It would be designed by Winch Design and built by Blohm+Voss. The new behemoth would need a bigger berth, probably down the coast at Jerudong where various real-estate developments, such as six-star hotels, were under way. Rumours swirled about a plan to blow up an island, possibly two, to provide the construction materials.
However, turbulent currents belied tranquil seas, in the form of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. The Sultan saw storm clouds on the horizon and instructed firms, including accountants Arthur Andersen, to audit the financial structures Prince Jefri had used to develop the royal fleet. The boats were to be sold (including the unfinished behemoth, which would become Dubai), so too real estate, jewellery, container loads of (only) Ferrari engines plus other curios.
A Guardian article suggested that while it was unclear exactly how much Arthur Andersen and law firm Freshfields billed the Sultan, neither complained when a local newspaper reported that their combined fees to that point [October 2000] exceeded £190 million.
According to the sources consulted for this feature, two theories remain as to how the boat came by its name. One is that a member of the Prince’s entourage believed it would amuse Jefri – just as it amused him, say, to be able to pick from a line-up of new Porsches. “The entourage would have been very controlling,” speculates a former crew member, loyal to the last.
“Did he [Jefri] instruct that every new 911 Turbo was purchased in every colour, or did it come from somebody thinking they have unlimited funds, so they may as well buy every one?” The ex-crew member adds: “I’ve seen this a lot in my career, particularly in royal circles. They’re required to live on an elevated platform, and you wonder what goes on that they effectively have no control over.”
Yet a source connected to the eventual sale of Tits believes that nobody in the entourage would have taken the risk of giving that name. The stakes were too high; the choice could only have come from the Prince – goes the second theory. In order to sell Tits in 2000-2001, various brokers became involved, in different territories. The boat was renamed Claire, purportedly after broker Merle Wood’s wife’s name. Since then, she has been renamed again, at least twice.
Later legal cases would reference Prince Jefri’s personal collections of erotic statues, pens and even watches depicting two figures who’d copulate on the hour. So perhaps it’s no surprise that his yacht was christened with a name that to this day makes people splutter into their drinks at yacht clubs the world over.
First published in the October 2024 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.