On a recent day this summer, an $80 million clipper called the Maltese Falcon left the Turkish shipyard of its birth and zoomed up the Bosporus, showing up rickety tourist boats and grimy cargo ships.
Three enormous carbon-fiber masts towered over the 88-meter yacht, which belongs to Silicon Valley financier Thomas Perkins (and which played a cameo role in the boardroom drama roiling Hewlett-Packard Co.) From a touch-pad console on the bridge, the captain can rotate the masts and unfurl the sails embedded inside, a technological first.
Made entirely in Turkey, the Maltese Falcon is the most visible sign of a boat-building boom that has turned this once-sleepy town on the Marmara Sea into a bustling industrial hub in just over a decade. Not so long ago, the idea of using Turkey to build a boat as sophisticated as the Maltese Falcon would have sounded like “building a Ferrari in Afghanistan,” jokes Baki Goekbayrak, the Turkish naval architect who supervised the project.
Things have changed so quickly that Ted Hood, a renowned yachtsman who won the 1974 America’s Cup, calls Turkey “a secret boat-building area of the world” and has invested in a shipyard in Tuzla. Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula-1 tycoon, has had two yachts built here, while several marquee Western boat-makers have struck partnerships with Turkish shipyards.