Welcome to FRANK. Think of this as the monthly conversation you actually want to open… brought to you by the team behind FRANK Magazine.

Here you’ll find the stories worth reading, the people worth knowing, and the ideas shaping the future of yachting and luxury.

Curated with intention. Written with personality. Delivered to your inbox once a month, because quality is never rushed.

Welcome aboard!
- Jennifer Welker Peacock
Head of Global Partnerships & FRANK Magazine Publisher

In this edition, we’ll get into:
⌚️ The watch auction that just broke a U.S. record
🤿 The F1 driver who unwinds by sinking to the seabed
⚓ A 106-foot explorer with a dive ladder that vanishes into the sea
💬 Buy the boat that's afloat, or build new? Settle it.
Read time: about 4 minutes

June logged 42 sales, down from 50 a year ago, but the headline number is the money: $870M in volume against $277M last June. Read that with one eyebrow raised. Two trophies did most of the lifting, the 99.95-meter Feadship MOONRISE with a last asking price of €325M (around $374M) and the 107-meter Benetti MAR with a last asking price at roughly $225M. Strip those two out and volume sits near $271M, right in line with last year. The truer signal is the median sale price, up 25% to $6.0M, which says the middle of the market firmed up even as fewer boats changed hands. Boats did take longer to move, a median 357 days against 287.

Busiest yard: Sanlorenzo led every builder with 5 sales on the month.

The watch market just went supersonic. Phillips ran the highest-grossing watch auction in U.S. history in New York last month, $75.8M in two days, and did it by more than doubling the high estimate and beating its own record from six months ago. The star was an F.P. Journe that went for $13.9M, the most ever paid for an independent watchmaker. Sixteen watches cleared a million each.

The 100-meter club keeps clocking in, and one of them runs clean. Lürssen delivered the 114-meter Nausicaä (built as Project Cosmos) in May, a Marc Newson design with a glass dome where most boats put a sundeck. The headline is under the hood: she carries methanol fuel cells that can move her at up to seven knots with zero emissions. She follows a 2025 that delivered ten yachts over 100 meters, a record.

The luxury buyer got younger. The average superyacht owner is about a decade younger than they were twenty years ago, and the 35-to-45 set is the one to watch. The watch world is seeing the same shift, with more than 40% of Sotheby's watch buyers now 40 or under.

The fastest man on the grid relaxes by sinking. You know George Russell can drive. What you may not know is that the Mercedes-AMG Petronas driver unwinds by holding his breath and dropping to the seabed. We caught up with him on his Pershing 6X off Capri's Blue Grotto, where he explained he grew up on a farm, was a little afraid of the water as a kid, and only fell for the ocean later. His team principal Toto Wolff got him into freediving in Monaco, and not to toughen him up. He does it for his mental health, not his edge. He likes to drop down, sit, and take it all in.

Read the full Russell interview →

FRANK reaches the owners, buyers, brokers, and quietly wealthy who move this market. Not the biggest list in yachting. The most valuable one. Once a month, they open us on purpose. Your brand could be what they find.

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The explorer with a dive ladder that disappears into the sea. TROPA is a 106-foot Cantiere delle Marche explorer that looks equally ready to cross an ocean and to throw a very good party at the end of it. The detail that got us: a stern ladder that lowers and sinks straight into the water, so divers walk out of the boat and directly into a dive site. Pair that with a sportfishing fighting chair and an onboard dive compressor and you've got a boat built for the kind of day where you land a wahoo before lunch and explore a reef after it.

See TROPA’s full details →

▸ The Open (happening now through July 19, Royal Birkdale): golf's oldest major, on a brutal links where the wind off the Irish Sea is the real opponent. Sea, rough, and a Claret Jug. Our kind of weather.

▸ Belgian Grand Prix (July 17 to 19, Spa-Francorchamps): F1's longest and one of its fastest circuits, carved through the Ardennes forest, where it can rain on one corner and not the next. Spa drops to every-other-year from 2028, so soak it up while it's still annual.

▸ Bayview Mackinac Race (July 18 to 21, Port Huron to Mackinac Island): 203 boats and around 1,600 sailors racing up Lake Huron in the longest consecutively run freshwater race in the world. When the club considered canceling during WWII, FDR wired three words: "Sail your race." They have, every year since 1925.

→ Lürssen delivered the 102-meter NIXIE and sent her straight to charter, reportedly around 2.4 million euros a week. Her public debut is the Monaco Yacht Show in September.

→ WINWIN took a clean sweep at the Superyacht Cup Palma, winning all three days of Europe's longest-running superyacht regatta.

→ Feadship's 90-meter MILKY WAY was spotted out on sea trials, one more giant inching toward the water.

→ A converted offshore supply ship reappeared as the 80-meter support vessel U-81, repainted white with a helipad and hangar, built to haul the toys the mothership won’t.

Tap to vote. See where everyone else lands, then we'll show the final split next month. Got a strong take? Hit reply. We print the best one, and the most stubborn one, in the next issue.