Nine investigations · evidence first, story second
The Case Files
A register is only as good as its scepticism. These are the investigations that shaped this one —
each opened by a contradiction, closed by evidence, and logged in full on the
conflict ledger. They double as a field course in how boat data goes wrong.
Case 1 · identity fabrication
The Phantom of Hull 88
The register inherited a proud entry: hull 88, "Easy Chairs layout", a €330,000 refit, an owner named Padberg,
sole source a De Valk listing (803929). The live page was fetched and read: the broker's comment field contains,
in its entirety, the word SOLD. No hull number. No Easy Chairs. No Padberg. No refit.
But the page did contain a fingerprint: 1988 build, Volvo TAMD41PA 200hp installed 1996, 9 knots max /
8 cruising, electric bow and stern thrusters, De Valk Monnickendam, 3,580 engine hours. Another listing —
808555, the boat named Bedouin, hull 63 — showed the identical rare configuration down to the 1996
repower year, at approximately 3,900 hours. Same boat, listed twice, years apart, hours advancing.
Verdict. Hull 88 never existed as recorded. Its entire biography belonged to hull 63; the details had been quilted onto an
empty page by an earlier automated researcher. The record was deleted, the listing reattributed, and hull 88
returned to the dark fleet — where honest ignorance beats confident fiction.
Case 2 · mistaken AIS identity
The Superyacht Wearing a Sailboat's Name
The American HR 49 Halcyon — Bermuda One-Two veteran, star of a sea-rescue story — carried MMSI
319431000 and IMO 8991889 in the register. One anomaly: MID 319 is the Cayman Islands, not the USA. The auditors
flagged it; the lookup settled it. That MMSI belongs to a 41.1-metre, 339-ton motor yacht, ex-JUNELUCK,
ex-ODYSSEY, currently moored in the Aegean.
A 15-metre sailboat had been wearing a superyacht's papers for an entire research generation because both are
named Halcyon and somebody once matched on the name alone. The plausible true identity — a US-flag sailing
vessel named HALCYON, ~16 m — was found in the same sweep and is graded I until corroborated.
Verdict. Both identifiers stripped, the anomaly resolved, and the register's first commandment reaffirmed: never match on
names. There are five AIS Big Blues, four Pegasuses and three Kismets in HR-49-plausible sizes alone.
Case 3 · copy-paste contamination
Two Boats, One Biography
Two 1987 boats, both once brokered by Williams & Smithells, carried word-for-word the same life story:
Italian flag from new, British since 2020, £75,000 invested. One (BEAR, Port Napoleon, 200hp/2,840 hrs) and
one (Lefkas, 150hp original/7,500 hrs) — different engines, different hours, provably different boats.
The live Lefkas listing contains the story in full, with the paper trail: Italian safety certificate to 2020,
flag-closure documents, a 1995 notarised Italian transfer. BEAR's own listing is delisted and — the Wayback CDX
is categorical — was never archived. Its version of the story cannot be checked and was struck.
The bonus: a 2017 archived listing from Tuscany (€260,000, same rare engine phrasing) and a Porto Ercole
broker PDF turned out to be earlier chapters of the Lefkas boat's Italian life — reconstructing a nine-year price
slide from €260k to £149,950.
Verdict. One boat kept its biography because the documents exist; the other lost it because they don't. The Lefkas boat now
has the deepest verified condition file in the fleet — and, not coincidentally, the best economics on the board.
Case 4 · AIS forensics
The Boat That Went Dark in Monfalcone
Norway's ship register revealed that hull 63 Bedouin had a previous name nobody had recorded:
DRESSCODE BIKINI. Searching that name found a German-flagged AIS identity (MMSI 211876780, call sign DC9744)
whose last transmission was Monfalcone, at the top of the Adriatic, on 7 March 2023 — then silence.
The silence is the story. In 2021–22 the boat received a €330,000 refit in Italy. In May 2023 a Norwegian buyer
paid a notarised €370,000. She sailed to Greece as Bedouin, and in 2024 was voluntarily deregistered again.
The AIS record going dark in an Italian yard town in March 2023 is exactly where the refit-and-sale timeline says
the German chapter should end.
Verdict. Three independent record systems — a ship register, an AIS network, a broker archive — interlock into one
continuous life: German flag, Italian refit, Norwegian purchase, Greek waters, registry exit. This is the register's
proof-of-method for reconstructing a boat's life nobody wrote down.
Case 5 · the explicit statement
Hull 85 Confesses in Print
A sold listing at a Dutch brokerage for a 1992 boat in Portimão was suspected of being hull 87 — one of the
last built. The suspicion survived until someone actually read the listing body: "One of the last built
Hallberg Rassy 49's (1992) with hull #085."
Hull 85 is Xora, London, whose owner separately reports year of construction 1992 to the club. Broker
text and owner statement agree; the hull 87 theory dies; and the register gains its rule that the highest-yield
research act in this domain is reading brochure text nobody read: the same method later produced hull 71 outright
("hullnr.71", De Valk 31459) and hull 87's own confession ("number 87 from a serie of 89").
Verdict. Three hull numbers in this register exist because a broker's copywriter typed them into prose twenty years ago.
Archives do not give up their facts to metadata queries; they give them up to readers.
Case 6 · the conflated crossing
One Article, Two Atlantics
Klenkes, the Aachen-crewed HR 49, was recorded as an ARC 2000 hero: 15 days across, 8th of 176 overall,
Spirit of the ARC. The rescued newspaper PDF — once its text layer was extracted — says the crew crossed in the
rally's anniversary year, the tenth ARC. The tenth ARC was 1995. And the archived ARC 2000 results show
Klenkes finishing that later rally in a leisurely 16 days 16 hours, 6th in division.
Verdict. Two separate Atlantic crossings, five years apart, had been fused into one. The article's achievements belong to
1995; the 2000 result stands on its own. Even primary documents need dating before they need believing.
Case 7 · archive diffing
The Hidden Sale of Hull 48
The owners' club lists hull 48 as Rigoletto, Gothenburg. A Wayback capture of the same club page from
December 2024 lists hull 48 as Moana, 1987, Greece, home harbour Mandraki, Captain Cordonnier. Between
August and October 2025, the entry changed hands, name, and country — a sale no broker listed and no register
recorded, visible only as a diff between two snapshots of the same page.
Verdict. Ownership changes in this fleet routinely leave no market trace. Archive diffing is the only instrument that
catches them — it also recovered hull 20's former name Novatrix, and with it a live AIS identity still
transmitting from the boat's home port.
Case 8 · fingerprint arithmetic
The Price That Matched to the Cent
Two anonymous 1985 ketches in Preveza, one listed at €139,500 on a European aggregator, one at $146,475 with
a US brokerage as Queen Anne. Same year, same port, same rig, same three cabins. €139,500 × 1.05 —
the exchange rate of the day — is $146,475, to the cent.
A 2026 capture closed the loop: the Denison page now shows Queen Anne off-market at exactly €139,500, ashore
three years, "inadequate maintenance… owner's health issues".
Verdict. Merged as one boat (probable — no engine hours exist on either listing to make it certain). Prices are
fingerprints too: brokers translate currencies, but arithmetic doesn't lie.
Case 9 · correcting the corrector
The Audit Audited
The external audit that triggered this register's rebuild was excellent — it caught the phantom hull, the
formula error, the parser bug. It also asserted, as background fact, that the class was built 1982–1992. The
yard's own website, fetched and snapshotted, says: "built from 1982 – 1997 with 89 hulls completed."
The 1990s tail is real: hull 86 (1992, statutory), a 1994 boat in the UK, and the yard's brochure archive
runs to 1991 print dates. The register's own earlier "1995–1997: fifteen hulls, zero coverage" claim was equally
invented — nobody has per-year production numbers except the yard.
Verdict. Corrections need provenance like everything else. The register now carries the yard's sentence, verbatim, with a
snapshot — and treats every unsourced 'fact' in its own files as a suspect until it cites something.
