New York’s Thousand Islands is renowned as a beautiful vacation area. But superyacht cruising grounds? Definitely not—well, not until Big Eagle showed up late last month.
The 172-footer (52.43-meter) was captured on this video by a local resident when she came calling on the region. The Thousand Islands is an archipelago of about 1,800 islands. It’s on the St. Lawrence Seaway, on the border shared by the United States and Canada. Plenty of boat traffic crisscrosses the waterway on a daily basis in spring and summertime. But superyachts? Not so much.
Big Eagle has quite a history. She was built in 1980 in Japan. For years, she was owned by the late Bernie Little, a Budweiser distributor based in Florida. He further owned the successful Miss Budweiser hydroplane racing team. Yachts were a real passion, with Little owning, and selling, a few yachts christened Big Eagle, an homage to the trademarked symbol of Budweiser’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch.
Big Eagle was a popular charter yacht under his ownership, a practice that continues today under her current American owners. Her LOA allows for a number of intimate and expansive relaxation spaces. Particularly noteworthy is the creation of a sports bar forward of the saloon. That was done during her last major refit in 2008.
The cinematic-like capture embedded below isn’t the first time that Big Eagle has been a film star of sorts. Movie buffs among you may recall that she appeared in the 1996 movie Striptease, starring Demi Moore. The megayacht’s nameboard was changed to Big Sugar in the film.
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