| IMO | 8907216 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 8,343 GT |
| Length | 116.41 m |
| Beam | 17.22 m |
| Passenger capacity (max) | 70 |
| Crew | 60 |
| Service speed | 15 knots |
| Builder | Rauma Yards |
| Hull number | 305 |
| Launched | 1990 |
| Operator | Sete Yacht Management |
| Status | Active |
| All names | Turama; Delfin Caravelle; Sally Caravelle; Columbus Caravelle |
Overview
Turama is the directory's clearest example of a hull escaping its category. She was delivered in 1990 from Rauma, Finland, as Delfin Caravelle, a small luxury cruise liner for Baltic and conference cruising, with berths for some 330 passengers. Within a year her owner had lost her to the builder; within two she was an expedition ship under a German charter; by the mid-1990s she was a Hong Kong casino ship; and in 2003–2004, laid up in Greece, she was rebuilt as a private mega-yacht — one of the largest in the world — with room for about 70 guests in 43 cabins, a helipad, a cinema and a 200-square-metre master suite. The dataset still files her as an active cruise ship under Sete Yacht Management, her Athens-based yacht managers. Both descriptions are true; they are just separated by a conversion so thorough that only the hull, the engines and the IMO number carried over. Her IMO number is not in the dataset, but it is firmly established as 8907216: the ShipStamps history drawing on Equasis gives it (with call sign C6KP5), an independent vessel-register list gives the same number for Turama, and VesselFinder's AIS record is indexed under it.
Key specifications
The dataset records only her launch year (1990), her names, her operator and her active status — every specification field is blank (checked directly against the dataset row for this re-research). The figures below are from yacht-industry and ship-register sources describing her in her present form. As Turama: length 116.41 m (the 117.35 m figure in some charter listings is a listing variant supported by no register or contemporary source — the register history gives 116.4 m and Maritime Reporter's contemporary profile gives 382 feet, the same measurement), beam 17.22 m, draught 4.38 m, gross tonnage 8,343 GT in current yacht listings, steel hull and superstructure, twin Wärtsilä 8R32D diesels each rated about 3,040 kW, cruising speed about 14 knots. Her tonnage figures are a chronology, not a conflict: 7,650 gross as built in 1990, 7,560 gross (2,614 net) in the Equasis record from her 2004 conversion era, and 8,343 GT in her current yacht form. As built she carried around 330 passengers at a service speed of about 15.5 knots. She was built by Rauma Yards (Rauma-Repola) at Rauma, Finland, as yard number 305 — given both by the ShipStamps/Marine News history and by the independent register list. (One caution on the contemporary record: Maritime Reporter's January 1991 profile prints her engines as "6R32D" with a far lower total output; the register history and every yacht source agree on the 8R32D, so the contemporary line is treated here as a misprint.)
Design and construction
Contemporary reporting in Maritime Reporter describes Delfin Caravelle as the second of two smaller luxury cruise liners delivered by Rauma Yards to Delfin Cruise Ltd, a shipping company based at Nauvo, Finland; the ship measured 382 feet overall with a 56-foot beam and a 14-foot draught. Her exterior design is credited to the Japanese designer Y. Kose — an unusually international pedigree for a Finnish Baltic cruiser — and her naval architecture to the yard. She was a real ship, not a ferry in fancy dress: Lloyd's Register classed, twin-screw, built for open-Baltic winter work and for the dual role, common in that market then, of cruise liner by itinerary and conference centre by charter.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
She was launched on 12 January 1990 as Delfin Caravelle and christened by Leena Mätomäki, wife of the Rauma-Repola group's president. Delivered in May 1990, she went into service on short cruises from Turku, Finland, to Gotland and Borgholm, to Tallinn and to Saaremaa in Estonia — 24-hour cruises and conference charters in the first summer after the Baltic began to open to western cruising. No formal maiden-voyage record beyond that first season was found.
Career by operator
| Name | Operator / employment | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Delfin Caravelle | Delfin Cruise Ltd | 1990–1991 |
| Sally Caravelle | Chartered to Sally Line | 1991 |
| Columbus Caravelle | Odessa Cruises Ltd; chartered to Transocean Tours | 1991–1994 |
| (casino-ship names reported) | Hong Kong / Taiwan casino service | 1996–2002 |
| Turama | Sete Yacht Management (private mega-yacht) | 2004–present |
The researched sequence: repossessed by her builder in 1991 when Delfin Cruises failed, and chartered to Sally Line as Sally Caravelle; sold the same year to Odessa Cruises Ltd of the Bahamas and renamed Columbus Caravelle, chartered by Germany's Transocean Tours as an expedition cruise ship ranging as far as the Falkland Islands in the southern summer; laid up at Helsinki in 1994; in service from 1996 as a casino ship based in Hong Kong and Taiwan — marketed under names including Captain Omar, Hong Kong Dragon Star and Ernest Hemingway, though the source itself is unsure she ever actually carried those names; laid up at Singapore and later in Eleusis Bay, Greece, from 2002; and converted there from 2003 into the mega-yacht Turama, in service under that name from 2004. The dataset's operator history lists Sete Yacht Management alone, so the whole of her cruise career rests on the sources cited below.
Onboard character
In cruise form she was a conventional small liner of her era: two-person cabins for a few hundred guests, a main dining room, lounges and conference facilities sized for the Finnish charter market. The conversion rewrote the interior completely around a radically smaller headcount. Yacht listings describe a ship rebuilt for about 70 guests in 43 cabins — 16 single, 17 double and 10 twin — served by around 58–60 crew: a main salon with grand piano and dance floor, a dining room seating 104, a 16-seat cinema and conference room, a theatre for 80–100, a spa, sauna and beauty salon, an onboard hospital, a certified helipad, and a 200-square-metre master suite occupying its own private area of the upper deck with its own sun deck. The era-defining point is the arithmetic: a hull built to earn from 330 fare-payers was refitted to pamper 70, which only the mega-yacht market of the early 2000s could make rational.
Major refits and incidents
The 2003–2004 Greek conversion is not a refit so much as a change of species, and it is covered above. No earlier structural rebuild is documented, and no grounding, fire or other major incident for this hull was found in the sources consulted.
Sister ships and class
Contemporary reporting calls her the second of two smaller luxury cruise liners built by Rauma Yards for Delfin Cruise. The first ship of the pair is not named in the sources consulted for this guide, so no sister is asserted here. The dataset assigns her no class, which matches her effectively one-off status in service.
Fate and where she is now
The dataset lists her as active under Sete Yacht Management of Athens, Greece, and yacht-industry listings continue to carry her as the mega-yacht Turama. Her flag history resolves the apparent conflict in the listings: she entered service as Turama in 2004 under the Bahamas flag (call sign C6KP5, per the Equasis-derived record, and the register list carries a Nassau entry for her), then in March 2005 she was sold to Kenora Investments and moved to the Malta registry — the register list's Valletta entry — and current listings (CharterIndex) still give her flag as Malta. The Bahamian reports are her earlier registry, not a competing current claim. No recent operational report — a sale, a refit, a scrapping — was found in the sources consulted, and for a private yacht that silence is normal rather than suspicious. She survives, in other words, by having stopped being a cruise ship at exactly the moment when most of her 1990 contemporaries were heading for the breakers.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships, https://www.yachtcharterfleet.com/luxury-charter-yacht-23683/turama.htm, https://www.superyachttimes.com/yachts/turama/overview, https://shipstamps.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5635, http://magazines.marinelink.com/Magazines/MaritimeReporter/199101/page/34, https://www.charterindex.com/en-GB/yachts/7072-turama, https://fleetphoto.ru/list.php?rgid=5&sort=built&st=1500&lang=en