Aboard the Hanse Explorer with EYOS Expeditions — where expedition-ready meets unapologetically luxurious, and the ice is always the destination.
It’s that hour between day and night when the Antarctic sky stages its most extravagant performance. Far below on the water, another spectacle is already underway: a pod of humpback whales circles our vessel, their flukes slapping the shimmering surface, honey-hued mist rising in their wake as they sound. We watch from the deck for a moment. Then we bundle up, climb into military-grade zodiacs, and go to meet them.
It is the kind of moment that no conventional destination can manufacture — and it is precisely what an increasing number of superyacht owners and charterers are now actively seeking. Monaco and Tahiti have their advocates. But there is a growing tribe of travellers for whom luxury is not the best table in St Barts, but the unrepeatable experience of going somewhere that almost no one else can reach.
The Market at the Edge of the Map
The global superyacht charter market has been expanding steadily, with leading operators reporting double-digit growth through 2015 and 2016. But the more telling shift is not in volume — it’s in direction. The frontier has moved. Destinations like Antarctica, the Arctic, Melanesia, and the remote reaches of North Asia are drawing a clientele that once measured a good season by its Mediterranean anchorages.
These places demand something different of a vessel. Ice-strengthened hulls. Sophisticated navigation systems. Redundancies built in at every level, the kind you’re grateful for when you’re several thousand kilometres from the nearest drydock. Not every charter yacht is built for this. The ones that are represent a distinct and specialist category — and EYOS Expeditions has made that category its entire business.
The Hanse Explorer
We’re cruising the Antarctic Peninsula aboard the Hanse Explorer, one of the custom-built vessels EYOS deploys for its most demanding itineraries. With her navy-blue hull and clean, rakish lines, she wouldn’t look conspicuous in a Mediterranean marina. But beneath the aesthetic lies something considerably more purposeful: cutting-edge environmental systems, the highest available rating for an ice-strengthened hull, powerful engines, and a cruising range of 9,000 nautical miles.
She accommodates twelve guests in spacious ensuite staterooms, with sunlit lounges, a proper dining room, open decks, and a hotel crew whose attentiveness never slips regardless of how remote the anchorage. This is the core proposition of expedition yachting at this level — genuine comfort in genuinely extreme places.
VESSEL Hanse Explorer
OPERATOR EYOS Expeditions (exclusive charter management and booking agent)
GUESTS 12, in ensuite staterooms
HULL Ice-strengthened — highest available rating
RANGE 9,000 nautical miles
CHARTER RATE From US$235,000++ per week
EYOS Expeditions
EYOS Expeditions was founded by Tim Soper and Rob McCallum and is led by CEO Ben Lyons (above far left), a former marine officer whose calm in difficult circumstances is the thing you’d want most from someone in his position. The company operates as a one-stop shop for expedition yachting, whether you arrive as a yacht owner or a charterer. That means preparing the vessel, securing the necessary permits, briefing crew, and embedding the guides and ice pilots who make the difference between a journey and an ordeal.
“Expedition yachting only continues to grow in popularity,” Lyons tells me as he pilots our zodiac across a glassy inlet. “It’s now not uncommon to find five charter yachts operating in Antarctica in a given season. Some of the larger vessels are now offering helicopters and private submersibles. Heli-skiing has become increasingly popular with EYOS clients over the past few seasons.”
“Luxury isn’t getting into the top restaurant in St Barts — it’s going somewhere nobody else can get to.”
— Ben Lyons, CEO, EYOS Expeditions
The polar regions are, by Lyons’ assessment, the defining destination of this moment for expedition yachts — and the itineraries are extending further with each season, drawn by clients who want not just access but understanding. “People who travel with us on expeditions want to see, learn and do more. They’re interested in where they’re going, and they have a different view of what luxury and privilege mean.”
Flying Over the Drake
A key enabler of this growth is the option to fly the Drake Passage rather than endure it. The stretch of water between Antarctica and South America has a justified reputation as among the most turbulent on the planet. Charter flights to King George Island, perched at the top of the Antarctic Peninsula, now allow guests to leapfrog the crossing entirely. Leave the mainland after breakfast; be cruising the ice-choked Antarctic Sound by lunch.
The Sound is our first destination — a landscape that rarely sees the larger commercial cruise vessels, which keep to the west coast of the Peninsula on fixed, inflexible schedules. Among the towering icebergs at the Peninsula’s northeastern tip, the Hanse Explorer‘s agility becomes immediately apparent. This is not a ship designed to observe from a distance.
Days on the Ice
Each evening, expedition leader Richard White — an adventure veteran of considerable experience — outlines the plan for the following day in the saloon, over canapés. What he’s really outlining is a framework. Antarctica runs its own schedule. The best laid itineraries here have flexibility sewn into them like gold thread; what the ice offers on any given morning takes precedence over what anyone planned the night before.
Even the chef — Luis Galego Pião, a quietly dedicated Portuguese cook who turns out remarkable meals in a galley the size of a cupboard — subscribes to this philosophy. The Baked Alaska can wait. The orca in Neko Harbour cannot.
Ports of Call
Antarctic Sound: Great sea caves, ocean swells, and the vast tabular icebergs of the Peninsula’s northeastern tip. At Brown Bluff, ice cathedrals — some blindingly white, others a deep glacial blue — crowd the beach beneath snow-dusted cliffs.
Mikkelsen Harbour: Fur seals, Adélie penguins, and the weathered timber hulks of longboats from the region’s whaling era. A place where wildlife is unimpressed and history is decomposing quietly at the waterline.
Grandidier Channel: Farther south than commercial vessels venture. Great fields of sea ice jostle with icebergs that rival Notre Dame in scale and intricacy. The captain positions the bow against a floe and lets the snowfall clear. The sun does the rest.
Neko Harbour: Orca country. When the pods appear, the zodiacs go in the water and the planned activities cease to exist.
I rise before dawn one morning to join captain Jens Köthen on the bridge — a perpetually cheerful German with the easy authority of a luxury hotel manager in considerably more demanding circumstances. The Hanse Explorer runs an open bridge policy; guests are welcome at any hour, and the view from up here, watching the icebergs emerge from the silver-grey mist as the day assembles itself, is unlike anything I’ve experienced on a yacht.
“Private charters mean freedom for a select few,” says White, steering us through a narrow channel between towering ice walls, Arctic terns dipping overhead. “These are people who want to use their good fortune to discover the wonders of the world. We’re only too happy to take them there.”
Beyond the Ice
Antarctica draws the most attention, but EYOS operates across a roster of destinations that reads like a geographer’s wish list. Papua New Guinea has become a particularly significant itinerary — intact traditional culture, superb diving, and layers of Second World War history that few travellers ever reach. The Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Indonesia’s Raja Ampat are emerging alongside it.
But on this journey, the conversation always comes back to the ice. To the light on the icebergs at an hour when it shouldn’t be light at all. To the humpbacks rising alongside the zodiac. To the silence, which is a different kind of silence from anything else — not an absence of sound so much as the sound of an absence, a world before interruption.
The city feels, out here, not merely distant but theoretical. The ice is real. The whales are real. The cold is very, very real. And somewhere in that reality is the thing that keeps drawing people back to the edge of the map.
