| Gross tonnage | 5,175 GT |
|---|---|
| Length | 110 m |
| Beam | 16 m |
| Passenger capacity (double) | 100 |
| Crew | 81 |
| Builder | Ha Long Shipbuilding |
| Yard | Ha Long |
| Hull number | EW02 |
| Launched | 2023 |
| Maiden voyage | 2023-08-05 |
| Operator | Emerald Cruises |
| Status | Active |
Overview
Emerald Sakara is a 100-guest ocean yacht — the second of two identical ships with which Emerald Cruises, the ocean arm of Australia's Scenic Group, moved from river cruising into the sea. She is a ship defined by what she is not: at 5,175 GT and 110 m, she is smaller than almost everything else in this directory's active fleet, and that smallness is the product. She was built to enter harbours, coves and canals that a conventional cruise ship cannot use, and to feel, in her operator's presentation, like a private superyacht with paying guests.
She was handed over at Ha Long, Vietnam, on 6 July 2023, according to the Croatian Register of Shipping notice that the dataset cites, and entered service on 5 August 2023. The dataset records no IMO number and no speed for her, and both are omitted from the spec box — the widely copied speed figure for this design is one the dataset builders specifically declined to use as not credible and not primarily sourced.
Key specifications
The dataset gives her as 5,175 GT, 110 m long and 16 m in beam, with a capacity of 100 guests and a crew of 81, built as hull EW02. A figure of about 5,300 GT circulates widely for her and her sister; the dataset's 5,175 GT comes from CruiseMapper and is the registered-style figure used here, with the variant noted in the dataset's own notes.
Crew numbers also vary by source — 76 in much contemporary reporting, 64 in some retail listings, 81 in the dataset, which follows the handover source. The differences probably reflect hotel complement versus total crew, but they are not reconciled in the sources used, so the dataset figure stands. She has 50 staterooms and suites for her 100 guests, the great majority with a private balcony.
Design and construction
Sakara was built by Ha Long Shipbuilding at Ha Long, Vietnam, as the second hull of Emerald's ocean-yacht design — her hull number, EW02, follows her sister Emerald Azzurra's EW01, and the Croatian Register of Shipping acted as the classification authority whose handover notice the dataset relies on.
The design is a yacht in the literal sense: a long, raked bow, clean super yacht lines, terraced aft decks, and a low profile on seven decks. She is custom-built for warm-water, small-port cruising rather than adapted from any working vessel type. Construction in Vietnam, for an Australian-owned, European-marketed brand, classed through a Croatian register, makes her a good example of how thoroughly international the building of even a very small cruise ship now is.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
Her name follows her sister's pattern of evocative, place-flavoured words — Azzurra for the blue of the sea, Sakara with an exotic, invented resonance that the line has not tied to a single place or person in the sources used for this guide.
The dataset dates her launch to 2023, the year of her completion and handover; the handover itself is firmly documented on 6 July 2023 at Ha Long. After handover she repositioned to the Mediterranean for an inaugural season. Her maiden voyage, the date the dataset records, was 5 August 2023, an eight-day sailing from Piraeus (Athens) to Civitavecchia (Rome) that included a transit of the Corinth Canal — a passage only a ship of her beam can make, and a neat demonstration of the design's purpose. She is reported to have been christened by Kelly Craighead.
Career by operator
She has carried one name for one operator.
| Period | Name | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| 2023–present | Emerald Sakara | Emerald Cruises |
Her career so far is that of a second ship doubling a new fleet: Azzurra had proved the concept alone from early 2022, and Sakara's arrival in August 2023 let Emerald offer the yacht product in more than one region at once, with a warm-water programme that has alternated between the Mediterranean and the Caribbean in the pattern established in her first year.
Onboard character
The character is boutique-hotel intimacy at yacht scale. Fifty suites and staterooms, most with balconies; a small number of public rooms rather than a deck of them; an infinity-style pool aft; and — the design's signature — a retractable marina platform at the stern from which guests swim and use paddleboards, kayaks and other water toys when the ship is at anchor. That platform, only possible on a ship that spends much of its life anchored off small ports rather than berthed in big ones, is the era-defining feature: the ship as a base for being in the water, not only on it.
Interiors are contemporary and coastal, with a monochrome base palette enlivened, in her sister's and her own case, by pop-art accents chosen by the owning family. Dining is centred on a single main restaurant with an adjacent terrace, rather than a choice of specialty venues — a consequence of 100 guests, and presented as a virtue.
Major refits and incidents
No refit is recorded for Emerald Sakara, and no casualty, fire, grounding or other major incident appears in the sources used for this guide. She is a ship in the first years of her career, and this section is left as that plain statement rather than filled with speculation.
Sister ships and class
Her sister is Emerald Azzurra, hull EW01, which debuted in 2022 as Emerald's first ocean ship. The two are described by the line and by contemporary reporting as identical, and the dataset accordingly records no separate class name for them — they are a pair, not the start of a large class. A larger follow-on yacht, Emerald Kaia, joined the fleet later on an enlarged development of the same concept, but she is not an identical sister.
The pair's significance in the wider market is that they were among the first purpose-built ships of the post-2020 "yacht cruise" wave, in which river and luxury operators began ordering 100-guest ocean ships — the segment to which Sakara belongs and which the directory's scope rules deliberately include.
Fate and where she is now
Emerald Sakara is in active service with Emerald Cruises, recorded in the dataset as status active and fate "Operating". No sale, charter to another operator, or renaming has been reported in the sources used here.
Sources: https://crs.hr/search-results/search-news/handover-of-passenger-ship-emerald-sakara-1, https://cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/2023/06/new-ship-emerald-sakara-to-debut-in-august/