Aug 10, 2023 by YATCO
For 50 years it hosted some of the world’s most famous people – including, famously, Princess Diana. Now the Cujo sits at the bottom of the Med.
A famous party yacht that was once the scene of Princess Diana’s final summer vacation has sunk in the French Mediterranean.
According to multiple media reports, the Cujo sank after hitting an unidentified object off Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, on Saturday. All seven people on board were rescued.
In its half century on the water, the Cujo saw plenty of glamour and mega-celebrity guests – but the spotlight was never more brightly on it than when Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed, then the yacht’s owner, vacationed on the yacht in the summer of 1997, just weeks before their August deaths in a Paris car accident. Diana had finalized her divorce with the future King Charles a year earlier, and paparazzi were everywhere.
Launched in 1972, the Cujo had several owners including the family of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, according to Vanity Fair. According to the Robb Report, its original owner was Johnny Von Neumann, an Austrian entrepreneur and car racer who commissioned Italian shipyard Baglietto to build him something that could break speed records. Baglietto built the Cujo with twin 54-liter V-18 turbo diesel engines that delivered a combined 2,700 horsepower.
That horsepower means little now – the Cujo now sits at a depth of nearly 2500m about 18 nautical miles off the coast.
Tagged Cujo, Mediterranean, Princess Diana, sunk
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