Golden Yachts has emerged over the past 25 years as a serious but sometimes enigmatic contender in the charter, refit and new construction arenas. With plans for 100-metre plus builds, SuperYacht Times toured the yard in Athens, Greece, and spoke with its founder about the company’s past and its exciting future.
It should come as no surprise to learn that Captain Paris Dragnis, founder of the Golden Yachts shipyard in Athens, Greece, is himself a multiple boat owner. That he started his long and illustrious career as a professional seaman, gaining his captain’s certificate before his 26th birthday, and progressed to becoming a commercial ship owner is important, because it speaks not only to a passion for the sea but also to great experience in all aspects of owning and operating vessels. Even more so, in fact, as most of the vessels Golden Yachts has built remain under the company’s ownership and serve as a fleet charter business.
It was around this time that the company invested in its own project and engineering teams, gearing up not only for refit works but also for bringing new yacht construction in-house. That was realised in 2007 with the launch of the first GY 50 series yacht, O’Ptasia (now Vertigo). New shipyard facilities followed in 2010, and in 2011 the award-winning semi-displacement 39.5-metre O’Pati emerged.
The 2010s marked a change of pace for Golden Yachts which, with long-term design collaborator Giorgio Vafiadis, stepped up its construction with the build of the 71.85 metre O’Pari3 (now Natalina A), launched in 2015, and the 85 metre O’Ptasia (2018) and 95 metre O’Pari (2020) have confirmed the company’s push to significantly larger builds. The completion of the 88 metre Project X – a build that had lain dormant in the Delta yard for more than eight years – suggests a move toward working with external clients. SuperYacht Times spoke to Captain Paris Dragnis and one of his sons, Vasilis Dragnis, about the past and future of the company.
Paris Dragnis: I have been a ship owner for 52 years and have been building yachts for 32 years. When I was young I had sailing boats, and then I took a wooden boat for my family and I started to love it. I decided in the early 1990s to build a 40-metre yacht in GRP – quite a big boat for that time – at the Intermarine yard in Italy.
A lot of people asked to charter the yacht, and I found that with two weeks charter I could cover all my expenses for the year. That first yacht actually covered its costs five and a half times over and also brought me a lot of happiness.
I started to go bigger, to 50 metres through to 60 metres. It was all done with cash from our own pocket because I had a very bad experience with banks – when you have a problem they turn on you, which is happening to a lot of ship owners in Greece and internationally. I consider yachts a luxury item and I do them in cash with no banks involved.
PD: We entered the charter market almost by coincidence, but then our company started to become very well known. We have a lot of very famous people who come as charter clients – I can’t mention names due to confidentiality agreements, but they include kings, prime ministers, famous sports stars, and many others.
I don’t like to have competition from the market for chartering. There are too many 50-metre boats, so I want bigger boats – my next yacht is 122 metres. The charter market is also very high right now and our boats are fully booked. We also take care of our customers as friends.
PD: O’Ptasia has been remarkable – too many buyers wanting her, and so many charterers, and the crew are amazing.
The name O’- was really a coincidence. When I signed for the first 42-metre it turned out the yard had advertised the boat with the name Paris – my name. They wanted $300,000 for it, so I said don’t worry, we will put an O’ in front of it, because in ancient Greek that actually gives emphasis to the name. Since then all my boats have had the O’ in front – it gave me a sort of trade name.
PD: Honestly, I love yachting more than shipping at the moment. I’ve owned more than 600 ships, and I’ve now left my sons to take care of the shipping business. I like the yacht industry, and I joke with friends sometimes that the yachts are my new girlfriends!
I am 78 years old and I am still working. I am very happy that I have a family and grandchildren and I’m still very active 24 hours a day because work, especially in yachting, makes me very excited. Sometimes I have ideas in the middle of the night, and the following morning I start consulting people on them. I am also very happy that I give jobs to more than 400 people in my country, which is very important at the moment, and in a sector that is not so well known here.
Your sons John and Vasilis work in the Golden Yachts side of the business – how important is that family aspect to you?
I’d love to leave behind Golden Yachts for my kids as a brand that they will improve more and more. But I’m also the old style of Greek ship owner, and I also consider my staff as a family and I look out for them in both in the good moments and the bad ones.
As far as my children are concerned, Vasilis deals with the shipyard because John – although he is involved in the yachting, chartering and sometimes construction side – doesn’t have the time to cover everything because we still have quite an active shipping company with a lot of ships.
PD: Our second yard here opened earlier this year, but we are actually in the process of trying to buy a bigger shipyard with all the facilities including synchrolift and floating dock to be able to both build and refit yachts up to 150 metres. We wanted to buy both the shipyards here in Piraeus but once the sellers realised who we were the price tripled overnight.
We have a 125-metre yacht in design – a fantastic boat – and I have a proposal for a 140-metre yacht that has been built at another shipyard and that yard has made a proposal for me to finalise the yacht for them. I have had a lot of people approach me lately to do business with them – I didn’t expect it but if you perform and you build in a timely way the results will come, and I take care of my boats.
Vasilis Dragnis: The second shipyard in Piraeus took 18 months to develop. We built the yard specifically for yachts from 40m to 140m – the yard covers 7,500 square metres and it also has an underground piping network for gas which makes it very safe for welding. We have a floating dock for vessels up to 4,000 tons but we have plans for a new floating dock with a 10,000-ton capacity. We also have all sorts of services inhouse, including steel fabrication, piping, mechanics, electricians, hydraulics specialists and more. And although we’re focused on new-builds, we do also do refits.
PD: In our other shipyard in Piraeus we do refits up to 60 metres, and we do quite a lot of them. In the new shipyard I would like to take on refits up to 150 metres.
VD: Yes, we want to change and evolve; we want to be different and always at the vanguard. For O'Rea, we had a lot of meetings with Giorgio Vafiadis, the architect, and I spent a lot of time studying and choosing the elements from the GA and all the materials for the interior. But she is something very different – it’s the first time we have done an axe-bow yacht, and it’s the first time we have put guest cabins on the lower deck and not just on the main or upper decks.
We’ve also used many different techniques in the aluminium construction as she has a lot of curves, which is more demanding in terms of construction. We gathered all the experience from our previous yachts and instilled it all in this new project. My brother John and I pushed Vafiadis to try something different – we specifically wanted this different design. So far so good – we’ve already got a lot of demand for charter!