Fred Coyle’s new J Craft Torpedo RS isn’t just a boat, but the most delicious way to conduct a once-in-a-lifetime epicurean maiden voyage.
“She’s the most beautiful boat I’ve ever laid eyes on,” drawled Fred Coyle as we approached his J Craft Torpedo RS, a 42-foot powerhouse of varnished beauty. “See how the Hermès orange upholstery just pops against that Prussian blue hull?”
Amazon Queen, named in honor of Coyle’s Brazilian wife, Rejane, sat moored up in Visby Harbor in Sweden’s Viking stronghold of Gotland, home to the J Craft shipyard. Her mahogany details glinted under the morning light as a small gust blew off the Baltic Sea, causing her to seemingly bob with excitement.
Coyle, a former US fighter pilot who now owns car and marine dealerships in Knoxville, Tennessee, had patiently waited two years for this moment. The 60-something-year-old boat lover had been on the lookout for a second-hand yacht to replace his existing trawler when he read a magazine article on the 8,500 manual hours it takes to hand-build a J Craft, and he promptly fell in love. He wasted no time commissioning only the 24th Torpedo in existence, and, together with Rejane, set about customizing it to their exact requirements.
Easy on the eyes while packing a 47-knot punch, J Crafts combine gorgeous craftsmanship with blistering performance. Costing from €1.56 million (around $1.8 million excluding bespoke upgrades), the thrill-driven runabout’s mahogany veneer is mounted onto a lightweight fiberglass hull. The first model, Polaris, a Cabrio Cruiser built in 1999 for His Royal Highness, King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden, features a head-turning cream and turquoise color scheme. His high-profile endorsement helped to launch the brand, and the vessels soon became renowned for their achingly good looks and limited-edition production.
No two J Crafts are alike, and Amazon Queen is the first Torpedo to sport such a bold color combination, and only the second to wear a metallic livery, much to her owners’ delight. Coyle’s Torpedo RS (the RS referring to an upgraded Volvo Penta IPS 650 engine) is fitted with a raft of customizations, including a bespoke logo designed by Rejane’s daughter that’s featured on the leather seating and Italian Nardi steering wheel (originally designed for Ferrari’s 250 GTO). There is also a Seakeeper for a smoother ride, and this is the first J Craft to have heating in the open cockpit, fully tested and appreciated within minutes of our leaving Visby.
Inside, the interior is dressed in a cream fabric by Fortuny of Venice that recalls the salons of the Serenissima. “When I saw the orange leather stitching and the custom-designed logo, I knew it was the perfect Fortuny fit,” Radenko Milakovic, who bought the J Craft company in 2007, told me. The artisanal details extend to a Viking-like throne dayhead, shower, living area, and double cabin that make J Crafts a luxurious option for a weekend on the water. Or in Coyle’s case, lingering days on the lakes. “It’s the ideal size for our lakeside home, and the visual appeal of that wood is undeniable,” he said, as we filled the boat with luggage and supplies for the couple’s culinary European maiden voyage.
I had the privilege of joining the pair in June, 2025 for the first three days of a seven-week shakedown that would take them from Sweden through Finland, Denmark, and Greece, before ending in the French Riviera. “I can’t wait to see how this boat handles,” enthused Coyle. “I’m tired of slapping against waves in my trawler at a dogged 12 knots.”
As Zoltan Antunovic, J Craft’s master builder, gently maneuvered us out of Visby Harbor, Rejane bounced to the beat of Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again. “I played this tune the first time I flew my F15 transatlantic from Germany to California, so it seems fitting to play it now, the first time we take Amazon Queen across the water,” explained Coyle.
The five-hour crossing was both exhilarating and grueling, made all the longer by the need to reroute when we hit a Russian blackout zone that caused the boat’s modular radar to draw a blank. But this was just a temporary blip. Beneath her 1950s tumblehome curves, Amazon Queen is kitted out with the latest gadgets, including Starlink and Garmin MFDs that sync controls with Garmin’s Quatix 8 watch, meaning Coyle can steer his boat from his wrist or receive anchor drift alerts even when ashore.
As we ripped across the formidable Baltic Sea, covering a distance the equivalent of Monaco to Corsica, the saline-scented air was tinged with a palpable sense of expectation. Back when Milakovic and his wife Kristina first acquired J Craft, they launched the new Torpedo model with substantial modifications, including a rudderless Volvo Penta IPS pod system for improved maneuverability.
“This joystick control is a dream—makes even a novice like me look slick on the water,” beamed Coyle at the helm. Accompanying us on the journey was Zens, an immaculate, all-cream 15-year-old J Craft Torpedo with tan leather accents. Her Austrian owner gifts the builder use of his boat in exchange for overwintering it at the yard. He greeted us from his summer house in Saltsjöbaden, ready for another season of cruising the Swedish Hamptons. And then the gorging began. Platters of sashimi, octopus broth and soy-cured egg yolk on bluefin tuna swooped into view, freshly prepared by chefs from Stockholm-based restaurant Sushi Sho, which received its first Michelin star that same day.
The next morning, having spent the night at The Grand Hotel in Sandhamn, one of 30,000 islands in the Stockholm Archipelago that’s characterized by stepped cliffs lined with wooden-clad fishing huts and the collective clink of moored sailboats, we cruised past astronomically priced summer houses on the fertile banks of Lake Mälaren. This included King Gustaf’s hunting grounds and permanent home, Drottningholm Palace, before we continued through the narrow Baggensstäket strait where we noted Amazon Queen’s ideal proportions for the passage. We arrived at Stockholm’s city center where we tied up outside of famed restaurant AIRA, both gleaming hulls eliciting sighs of admiration from onlookers.
This two-Michelin-star establishment, perched on the edge of a marina, is aptly housed in a boatyard-inspired building designed by prominent Swedish architect Jonas Bohlin. The interior lighting and color scheme resemble the archipelago’s seasonal shifts, also reflected in the Nordic cuisine that set our stomachs alight. We dined on curated plates of hand-dived scallops, succulent Wagyu, and Swedish dairy-cow tartare with caviar before returning to the J Crafts for a digestif.
Stockholm is a city built on water, with yawning skies and wild islands that even cloud cover and rain couldn’t dull our enthusiasm for. As we motored down slow winding rivers where trees sprout from rocky outcrops, and danced in the cockpit while performing high-speed pirouettes, the sight of two J Crafts cruising in tandem drew smiles and waves from island residents.
“Each of our boats is a labor of love, destined for exacting owners who demand the one-of-a-kind,” said Johan Hallén, J Craft’s chief technical officer. That is certainly the case for Coyle and Rejane, who after depositing me with waves and cheers on Stockholm’s banks, continued their onward journey. They took in the fishing village of Grisslehamn in northern Sweden, and the quiet inlets of Finland’s Åland Islands, where they sampled 200-year-old bottles of Veuve Clicquot that were discovered in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. “That was simply incredible, and we met with Åland-born oenophile and sommelier Ella Grüssner Cromwell-Morgan, who led the discovery,” said Coyle.
Plans to venture to Helsinki were thwarted by weather, so they turned around and explored the Swedish coast, stopping off somewhere new every day, including a stint at ABBA-singer Björn Ulvaeus’ modern waterfront Slottsholmen Hotel in Västervik. Strong winds further prevented them from taking Amazon Queen to Copenhagen. Undeterred, they spent three days relaxing on the sunlit Danish island of Bornholm, after which their captain took the boat to Germany where it was shipped across to France while they spent a week among friends on the Cycladic Greek islands of Mykonos and Santorini. “My friend has a good concierge who got us a table at Nōema, which is typically impossible to get into, and we enjoyed the best food we had in all of Europe. It’s one of the top two restaurants of my life,” he said with a smile.
They rejoined their J Craft in the yachting hot spot of Saint-Tropez where they rented a large villa in Port Grimaud hosting friends and family for 10 days—rubbing shoulders with LeBron James and Jeff Bezos at Le Club 55—and even found time for a little J Craft promotion. “Since I was a fighter pilot, Bremont (watch company) wanted to do a photoshoot of me wearing a watch at the helm of Amazon Queen, which was fun.”
Their grand Mediterranean tour finished with three days in Monte-Carlo where they met up with the owners of Amazon Queen’s sister Torpedo, Toucan. “It was a meeting of two sisters under the Côte d’Azur stars, where both boats’ clean, classic, flawless lines made for a truly beautiful sight,” said Coyle. “From the outset, Rejane and I really wanted an epic vacation, and by the time our maiden voyage was done we’d put 150 hours on the boat and banked a lifetime of memories.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
