It’s huge. She looks like an impeccable cruise ship and yet she is a yacht. Since last Wednesday morning she has occupied 138 meters of the Moll d’Espanya, in Marina Port Vell. The facility is used to hosting large private boats that pass through the city, although the profile of the Rising Sun, which will be in Barcelona until May 31, makes it one of those boats that do not go unnoticed. Even less so, in an area as busy as Moll del Dipòsit, in the heart of Port Vell.
Its image is not the usual one for this type of boat. When Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle Corporation, commissioned the shape of his ship to Jon Bannenberg at the beginning of this century, he was betting on being different. This naval designer had already had the demanding Malcom Forbes, Adnan Khashoggi and Robert Maxwell as clients. Launched in 2004, the Rising Sun stands out in the visible for the number of glass panels on its upper bridges and in the not so obvious, for its speed, since it can develop up to 30 knots, about 55 kilometers per hour. In addition, she has eight suites for 16 passengers, 30 cabins for 45 crew members and cost 400 million dollars.
After a few seasons of enjoying it, Ellison found his yacht too big and ordered a smaller one, measuring 88 meters, which he named Mushashi, selling the Rising Sun to its current owner: David Geffen, with whom he already shared 50% of his ownership until the delivery of the new ship. Film and music producer and former talent scout, Geffen occupies, with $8 billion, 322nd place on the Forbes list, a place he shares with Micky Arison, president of the Carnival corporation, the largest cruise company holding company in the world and also owner of the Miami Heath of the NBA. Arison’s yacht is in Barcelona these days: it is called Sixth Sense and it spends a few weeks in the MB92 shipyard, where it is being thoroughly revised for the summer season.
