Dilbar: 7 Facts

You’ve probably all heard of the yacht “Dilbar”. She is, after all, the world’s biggest yacht! Dilbar was built by Lurssen in Bremen, Germany. A feat of engineering, she is absolutely unbelievable. Just check out these stats.

1. Dilbar has a displacement tonnage of 1230: equal to around 186 Elephants.

Your average African Bush Elephant weighs just over 6000kg. There are (more or less) 907 kg in one US ton.

So, if we know that an elephant weighs 6.62 tons, we can also conclude that Dilbar is truly as heavy as a whole load of Elephants.

2. She has a colossal amount of cabling onboard…

…1,100 km worth to be exact; which is longer than the drive from the very North to the southern-most point of France (a mere 962km). For a yacht 156m long and 23m wide, that’s seriously impressive. Ooh-la-la! ??

3. Owner & Guest living space onboard is spread over 3,800 square metres, or 104 London apartments.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the average London flat covers 46 square metres- meaning Dilbar is much, much larger than your flat (and your friend’s flats, and their parents flats, and their neighbors flats, all rolled into one).????

4. Lurssen says that the 156m Dilbar only took 52 months to build.

To put this into perspective, it took around 100,000 slaves over 20 years to build the Great Pyramid: a stone structure of average height with no diesel engines or advanced audio-visual system.

5. Reportedly, you could actually fit the owner’s previous boat ONA inside Dilbar with space to spare.

This one doesn’t need much more explaining. The owner is Russian though, so it could be that he’s playing some sort of yacht-version of matryoshka dolls… ??

6. There’s a 25m swimming pool onboard, which is the largest superyacht pool in existence.

Dilbar has a beam (width) of 23m and a draft (depth below the water) of 6m, so this pool is relatively massive! Our sources tell us that the pool is around 6m across and around 2m deep, falling to 1m at the shallow end. Therefore we can perform a variable depth calculation to find the volume- which results in an estimated requirement of 225,000 liters of water to fill the Dilbar swimming pool.

Now, a typical Shell or BP Oil Truck can hold 11,000L (see where I’m going here…?). You would need 21 Oil Trucks filled with water just to fill the Dilbar swimming pool.

What’s even more incredible is that, due to the pesky free-surface effect, this pool probably has to be drained every time the boat is moved in order to maintain stability. The watermakers onboard would have to work at an incredible speed and efficiency to get this filled in time for the owner to take a dip once the anchor is dropped!

7. You definitely wouldn’t know all of your colleagues for quite some time if you were new onboard Dilbar…

The average human (never mind a hardworking yacht crew member) consumes 2kg of food a day. This means that the Dilbar chefs cook a whopping 73,000 kg worth of crew meals a year to keep their hungry colleagues’ ship shape and ready for work.

Mind-blowing.

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