Oceanco Brings the Rebuilt 92.9 Meter Draak to FLIBS 2026, With the First Decompression Chamber Fitted to an Oceanco Yacht

Oceanco will present the 92.9 meter Draak at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, running from October 28 to November 1, 2026, after her appearance in Monaco alongside companion yacht Leviathan. Delivered in 2014 and previously named Equanimity and Tranquility, she returned to Zwijndrecht for a rebuild that turned her into a research and exploration platform for the Inkfish fleet.

Read the list of what Draak now has and the more useful list appears underneath it: what she gave up to get there. The helideck on the upper deck aft was removed to create the clearance for a dedicated tender operations area. The former beach club and spa became the dive center. The main saloon became a shared dining room. On a new build a yard adds capability by adding volume. On a rebuild every capability is paid for with something that was already there, and that constraint is what makes this project worth reading as engineering rather than as a refit story.

A chamber built around a door

The six-person chamber was developed with the specialist manufacturer Hytech-Pommec and supports both oxygen and Heliox decompression through an integrated Built-In Breathing System, which lets Draak cover dives too deep for oxygen-only procedures. It sits in a dive center that also holds diving equipment and a medical treatment room.

The interesting part is how it got in. Rather than cut a new opening in the structure, Oceanco custom-built the chamber around the dimensions of the existing access route, redesigned its profile to reduce overall height and repositioned windows, pipework and other components to suit the space. A dedicated rail system was then built to move it aboard, with only millimeters of clearance.

That is the whole discipline of a rebuild in one component. The cheapest engineering answer was to open the hull. The answer they took instead was to redesign a certified pressure vessel until it fitted a door that already existed. Control panel layout, paint color, seating, upholstery and interior details were customized too, with an integrated entertainment system.

What the deck gave up

Losing the helideck bought a working deck. The tender operations area on the main deck aft carries the dive boat Scylla, the RIB tender Minotaur, a Nautique Paragon sports tender and two Ribeye SOLAS rescue tenders. Handling them required a 12.6 metric ton Van Driel jib crane with 11 meters of outreach on the upper deck aft, plus a custom C-davit system with twin 6.7 metric ton units on the main deck, which Van Driel states is the largest it has produced. Modular chocks were added for containerized transport and compatibility across the fleet, and the swim platform was extended with an extendable boarding platform and a retractable fender system, which added just over a meter to her overall length.

For an owner weighing a rebuild against a new build, that paragraph is the argument. A helicopter is the most conventional status object on a yacht of this size, and it was the first thing removed. What replaced it is lifting capacity, because a yacht that exists to put people and equipment in the water is judged on how fast it can launch and recover, not on what it can land.

Guests and crew in the same room

The second conversion is social rather than structural. The interior was upgraded by Vedder and reconfigured to encourage interaction between guests and crew: the former main saloon is now a shared dining room, the upper deck saloon is a Chef's Lab used for intimate dining, menu development and chef training, and accommodation was expanded to an owner's stateroom and eight guest cabins. Crew members were involved throughout, with operational experience feeding decisions from spaces and ergonomics to materials and working practices.

That line refers to the communal mess, and the owner describes it as the heart of the vessel. Deliberately erasing the line between guest and crew areas is unusual at 92.9 meters, where the layout convention exists precisely to keep the two apart, and the owner extends the same thinking to employment, describing a program built around crew wellbeing and their families over the long term. Whether that survives a change of ownership is another question, but as a design brief it is the most distinctive thing on board.

Commercially, Draak is the showcase for Oceanco's Life Cycle Support division, which spans maintenance and refit through complex rebuilds, upgrades and lifetime extensions, while the yard continues to build custom yachts up to 150 meters. The project manager frames the yacht as proof of what rethinking an existing platform can achieve. The sharper version is that a 2014 hull now does work no 2014 brief anticipated, and that Fort Lauderdale is where the American market gets to price that idea.