Skip to main content

Cruise like a prince or princess in this royal superyacht for just $1.8 million

Academy Award-winning American actress Grace Kelly married Prince Ranier of Monaco in 1956, in what was widely referred to as the “Wedding of the Century.” In 1971, yacht builder Visch Holland constructed a 24-meter (78-foot, 8-inch) yacht named Stalca for the couple, who entertained extensively onboard during the 1970s.

There have been other owners since the Prince and Princess, as well as several upfits and renovations, the most recent finishing just this year. Now yacht brokerage Bluewater has listed the royal superyacht for sale. The Stalca’s asking price is 1.5 million euros, nearly $1.8 million, Boat International reports.

If you’re a fan of the sleeker, newer, and faster yacht designs from Italian and Dutch ship builders, the Stalca won’t light you up. If your tastes run more to classic yachts with lots of teak and brass, however, here’s an opportunity to own a classic vessel that has been thoroughly updated without changing its original aesthetic. Plus, the Stalca comes with an unmatched history that will fascinate your guests.

Stalca’s name represents the first two letters of the Prince and Princess’s three children: Stéphanie, Albert, and Caroline. Stalca has a full displacement steel hull with a 19-foot, 5-inch beam, an aluminum superstructure, and a teak deck.

Two 300-horsepower Caterpillar D336TA turbocharged and after-cooled V8 engines power Stalca at a maximum 12 knots. At her 9-knot cruising speed, Stalca consumes  60 liters, or 15.85-gallons of fuel per hour. Fuel capacity is 2000 gallons, which gives a maximum potential cruising range of 1,136 nautical miles.

Stalca accommodates eight guests. She has a full-beam master stateroom and a full-beam VIP stateroom, both en-suite and two additional twin stateroom with a shared bathroom. Crew quarters and capacity is not listed.

The yacht’s engines and generators were replaced in 2009. A 2016/2017 refitting including extensive hull work, new paint, and new wiring and plumbing. Boat International describes the latest renovation as an almost full rebuilt.

Stalca is ready for personal use but can also be used for charters, with all required licenses and commercially compliant features.

If you’d like to own the yacht built for a princess, at a relatively low price compared to most ships of Stalca’s size, here’s your chance.

Bruce Brown
Digital Trends Contributing Editor Bruce Brown is a member of the Smart Homes and Commerce teams. Bruce uses smart devices…
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more
4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon
Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.

Read more