Sailing in the lap of luxury

Belgian textile heiress, art historian and licensed passenger-ship captain Ineke Bruynooghe stands on a balcony overlooking about $2 billion worth of luxury yachts moored in Monaco's harbor.

The 37-year-old owner of S.S. Delphine -- the last operational steam-powered superyacht afloat -- pointed a finger through the aroma of exhaust fumes toward the world's most flamboyant single display of seafaring wealth.

"Plastic and smelly," Bruynooghe huffs at the diesel-fueled composite-fiber palaces, whose owners pay more than $30,000 a month to drop anchor in Monte Carlo's flashy waters. "Yachting is a man's world. They want plastic, the modern look, with no sense of history. What I do in that world is unheard of."

Now, after 15 years at the helm of the ship that Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin reputedly met on to prepare the Yalta Convention at the close of World War II, Bruynooghe is seeking to negotiate its sale for nearly $47 million. The vintage vessel was launched in 1921 at Detroit's Great Lakes Engineering Works by U.S. carmaker Horace Dodge for his daughter, Delphine.

Hein Velema, chief executive officer of Fraser Yachts Ltd., says it looks like a tough sell in a climate where prices of secondhand superyachts have dropped about 40 percent and this year's summer season charters are down 35 percent.

Still, Velema says, a pedigreed superyacht might have the muscle to survive the global financial storm.

"The superyacht industry is far too macho," Velema says. "Before the September 2008 crash, Russian buyers comprised 25 percent of the market and all they wanted was to spend more money on bigger, faster and more luxurious vessels. That's changed. Forty percent of all yachts more than 132 feet are now for sale, and the Russians have become rational."

At 258 feet, Bruynooghe's refurbished Delphine is the largest yacht built in the United States that's still working today. Yet the Flemish sea captain says Delphine's most significant provenance is its ownership papers.

"She has been owned by women for 40 of her 89 years," Bruynooghe says. "Men, I'm sorry about this, but Delphine went 49 years with male owners, and she was a total mess when I bought her in 1997."

Over the following six years, Bruynooghe plowed about $43 million into returning Delphine to its Roaring '20s glory. She scoured museums and archives for the yacht's blueprints to ensure that the engineering and architectural refit precisely matched Dodge's original design, right down to the six-person Turkish bath, a hairdressing salon and a brace of 20-foot-tall quadruple steam engines that can take 12 passengers and 22 crew members on a 3,600-mile voyage without a fuel stop.

"I've devoted 13 years of my life to Delphine," Bruynooghe says. "It's time for a change, though I want to sell her to a yachting person who loves history and comfort."

OK, so it's not really a yacht

In 1926, Cabins 1 and 2 caught fire while Delphine was docked on the Hudson River in Manhattan.

"The fire department poured in too much water, and she sank," Bruynooghe says. "The Dodges rebuilt and relaunched her five months later, but with a different interior."

The U.S. Navy in 1942 commissioned Delphine as the flagship for the chief of naval operations. The dining room still can seat 77 admirals. Each of the vessel's tenders, handmade from Honduran mahogany in 1927, carries 10 people from ship to shore. The only new accoutrements are the toys: flat-screen TV sets, water scooters, whirlpool tubs and a concert Steinway that comes with a lounge-bar pianist as a member of the crew.

Between 1946 and 1968, the pipes of Delphine's Aeolian organ again filled the music room, until Anna Dodge sold the craft to the Lundeberg Maryland Seamanship School as a training vessel. Bruynooghe eventually bought the remains as "scrap" from a French hotelier in Marseille and began her quest to breathe "health" back into the dilapidated hulk.

Sailing costs a pretty penny

The steel-hulled vessel requires a minimum onboard maintenance crew of 10 whenever it sits idle.

"Horace Dodge spent $2 million to build Delphine," Bruynooghe says. "My banker tells me that's more than $180 million in 2010 dollars, but the ship couldn't be replicated. Dodge designed and built the steam engines himself and they're very environmentally friendly."

Delphine's two 6-foot-tall propellers are powered by more than 5,000 gallons of water converted into vapor pressure by diesel fuel.

"It's 19th-century hydrophysic technology that cuts costs and leaves a low pollution signature," Bruynooghe says. "Roman Abramovich's superyacht Ecstasy uses more than 1,000 liters of fuel an hour. Delphine consumes 600 liters an hour on a short trip and 300 liters an hour on a long trip."

As Bruynooghe tells it, the top hand below deck is the boilerman. He lubricates the machinery in a gargantuan engine room where the temperature is a constant 115 degrees. It takes the boiler seven days to build up the pressure required to commence a voyage from a dead start. Then it's full steam ahead.