yacht stalking: the Attessa

[Note: Looking for information about the Attessa yacht? Go here: Yacht Spotting: The Attessa (August 2005) or read below to see where it traveled from August 2005 to December 2006]

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What better thing to do on December 31st than to look through your web analytics for the year and see what people are reading on your website?

Well, no surprise here. While I'd like to think some of my lengthier posts about design or cycling or books or whatever are being read the most, they're not. No, the page with the most reads (10,000 page views / 27,000 page views total in the last 12 months) is the yacht spotting page I put up about the Attessa. Over 101 comments later, its managed to become the number one Google hit for the term (as of this post at any rate).



And the extraordinary thing that's happened is that people started logging where it was. I honestly had no clue about the yacht-spotting community when I put my post up about the boat. I was simply interested in who owned that giant megayacht with a helicopter that had been parked in English Bay here in Vancouver.

But thanks to a global network of internet savvy yacht spotters, I have tracked the last 16 or so months of Attessa activity in a Google Earth KMZ file. All based on comments from this blog.



The ship has been in some pretty nice places. Last update was in October of 2006 and it was parked in one of my all-time favourite spots, the harbour at Palma off the island of Mallorca, Spain. I was there in 2003 and can confirm that this yacht fits right in with the crowd of boats that you find there...

The shorthand version of the journey, which started in Sept 2005 is this:
Vancouver, San Francisco, Marina Del Ray, Long Beach, San Diego, Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco, Panama Canal, British Virgin Islands, Saint Maarten, Madeira Island, Monte Carlo, Malta, Croatia, Venice, Croatia, Malta, and finally Mallorca.

After 101 comments on the site, the trail has gone quiet. Although I'm sure after this post I'll get some more updates...

Here's to user-generated content, high-tech yacht stalking, and a phenomena that only could happen with the help of the internet.

Update: I just found the yachtspotter.com homepage for the Attessa and it looks like it's on its way back to the Pacific... last spotted at Christmas in Saint Maarten. So my map is somewhat incomplete, but charts the points along the way that people contributed to the comments on the original article.