Aboard Neptune: hull, cabins and safety kit

I am Jewel, and I inspect the partner boats that Komodo Explorer sells. Neptune is one of them. This report follows the order I use on every boat: the hull figures first, then the plan from the lowest deck up, then the cabins, the systems and the safety kit.

Each line below matches Neptune's 2026 specification sheet or the boat's own photographs. Where neither gives a figure, the line stays blank.

Read together, the figures give a hull five times as long as it is wide, 4 m deep, in the two timbers listed. Bulukumba is the South Sulawesi district where phinisi are built. UNESCO inscribed the art of boatbuilding there in 2017; that listing honours the craft and does not certify any single boat, this one included.

1. Lower deck. Deluxe I to IV, four studio cabins. One double bed each, air conditioning, an en-suite bathroom with a hot shower, a private balcony. The Deluxe balcony is a timber deck with a slatted rail and a glass-panelled timber door back into the cabin.
2. Upper deck. Mansard I, Mansard II and the Junior Suite, with the same fittings and room for an extra bed for one or two guests. The Mansard cabins have wide windows onto the sea and a balcony with two woven lounge chairs and a round timber side table.
3. Shared rooms. An air-conditioned lounge with sofas and wide glass windows, a bar counter with stools, and an indoor dining room around a long timber table.
4. Open deck. A long dining table in the open air near the mast, and sunbeds and wicker chairs on the foredeck, with a white life ring on a stand.

The bathrooms repeat one pattern: marble-look walls, a shower and a wall-mounted water heater.

The claim I test first on any boat is the one the price leans on. For Neptune that is page 21: every cabin has an en-suite bathroom and a private balcony. It holds. All four kinds of cabin, the two Mansards, the Junior Suite and the Deluxe cabins, have a balcony or a door opening onto one. In the Junior Suite the shower opens at the side onto the teak deck.

Each cabin has one double bed. No cabin areas or bed dimensions appear in the specification, so I give none here. Fourteen guests sleep aboard on the base price and up to 18 with the upper-cabin extra beds.

• Main engines: two W Marine 8D16.
• Generators: two Mitsubishi 120 PS units, each driving a 30 kVA dynamo.
• Fuel: 5 tonnes. Fresh water: 10 tonnes.
• Water makers: two, each rated at 9 m³ a day.
• Navigation and communication: Garmin, Furuno GPS, a compass, VHF radio and CCTV.

The pattern is redundancy: two engines, two generators, two water makers. At their rating the water makers produce up to 18 m³ a day between them, almost twice the 10-tonne tank, and that is the figure behind a hot shower in seven bathrooms. Generator running hours and air-conditioning hours are not recorded, so I state neither.

• A liferaft for 50 people
• Two lifeboats
• 40 life jackets
• 10 ring buoys
• 10 fire extinguishers
• AIS and a radar SART
• Flares and SOS signals

Set the list against the guest numbers. The overnight maximum is 18 guests and the day charter carries 30. The liferaft is rated for 50, which is 20 places above the day-charter limit before any crew are counted. No crew count appears in the specification, so the sum stops there. Forty life jackets is 22 more than the overnight maximum of guests.

Outside this report: a crew list, a medical-kit inventory, an EPIRB. If any of these matters to your booking, ask, and we put the answer in writing before you pay.

The liferaft takes 50 and the day charter carries 30. Neptune's survival kit is sized for her busiest day, not her quietest night.