For most of her construction she was a number. The 79.75 metre Feadship known throughout her build as Project 716 has now been photographed on sea trials off the Dutch coast, weeks after her name, Love, was first seen in public during her September transit towards Rotterdam. SuperYacht Times reported her conducting trials off Maasvlakte, Rotterdam, on 12 October, and manoeuvring off the coast between IJmuiden and Zandvoort two days later. The sightings close the public chapter of a deliberately quiet build and open the last one: proving, finishing, and delivery, which is scheduled for 2026.
The build, as far as the record goes
The build chronology itself shows how little the yard has published. YachtBuyer and SuperYacht Times reporting dates the start of construction to 2022, while BOAT International, citing BOATPro, has reported an order placed in January 2024 with construction starting in September of that year. Feadship has issued no chronology of its own, so the start date rests on trade reporting that does not agree, and we record both accounts rather than choose between them. The firmer milestones are physical: her hull was rolled out at the Scheepswerf Slob facility in 2025 and transferred to Feadship De Vries yard at Aalsmeer for outfitting, and she was launched there in August 2026. The structure is the classic Feadship recipe at this scale: a steel displacement hull and an aluminium superstructure, with a beam of 13.5 metres, a draft of 3.3 metres, and an internal volume reported at around 2,450 GT. She was built to Lloyd Register classification standards. Beyond that, the official record thins out quickly, and the thinness is itself information about the kind of project this is.
What can be read from the photographs is the design intent. Love carries a near vertical bow, a broad and largely uncluttered foredeck, and a traditional tiered arrangement of decks stepping back towards the stern, with a sculpted upper deck and a partially sheltered sundeck. Long bands of dark glazing run through the superstructure and break up the volume visually. It is a conservative silhouette by current fashion, closer to the classic Feadship proportion than to the explorer styling now common at 80 metres, and it reads as a yacht designed for an owner who wanted presence without novelty.
The trials were the second public act of the autumn. Love was first spotted in late September, moving towards Rotterdam in preparation for the trial programme, and it was during that transit that her name was first seen on the hull and superstructure. The journey itself is a fixed feature of Dutch large yacht building: a yacht outfitted at Aalsmeer reaches the North Sea through inland waterways, under tow and at walking pace, passing through a landscape of fields and villages that makes an 80 metre yacht look briefly like a piece of misplaced architecture. The photographs from that transit, sheep in the foreground and tugs at bow and stern, have become the defining images of the project precisely because Feadship released so few of its own.
What Feadship has not said
Even the credits come with a caveat. Feadship itself has not announced the design team for Love, and SuperYacht Times and YachtBuyer both record the team as undisclosed by the yard. Trade database reporting goes further: BOAT International, citing BOATPro, credits Studio De Voogt with the exterior and Sinot Yacht Architecture and Design with the interiors, and the YachtBuyer fleet record credits De Voogt with the naval architecture. Those attributions rest on database reporting rather than a yard announcement, and we present them on that basis. What no source has published is an accommodation layout or guest capacity, and engine specifications, speed, and range have likewise not been disclosed. Yacht and Ocean will not fill those gaps from dockside reporting: on a custom build of this size, the specification is the owner property until the yard or the owner chooses to release it. What the trials photographs establish is narrower and firmer: the yacht floats, moves, and is being tested as a complete vessel.
Why the trials matter
Sea trials are the audit phase of a custom build. Propulsion, manoeuvring, vibration, noise, and the behaviour of every installed system are measured against the contract specification in real conditions, and the findings set the list of adjustments that stand between a launched yacht and a delivered one. For a project assembled across two facilities, hull built at Papendrecht and outfitting completed at Aalsmeer, the trials also validate the join between the two halves of the programme. BOATPro reporting around the trials put the delivery window in the fourth quarter of this year, which makes the October trial dates a schedule that is holding, not slipping.
Love also lands in a busy Feadship order book. Reporting during the trials period counted 15 superyacht projects under development at the yard, including the 83.3 metre Project 832, first seen in August moving to outfitting. The Dutch custom sector works in long cycles, and a delivery at the end of 2026 positions Love as one of the largest yachts to hand over this year. Her first season in service will answer the questions her build has declined to: where she cruises, and in whose company. Until then, the record stands at a name, a set of dimensions, and a yacht photographed doing exactly what she was built to do.
Photography: Photography: Ruben Griffioen, via YachtBuyer.
