The First One: How Patti Seery Built Silolona

In 2004 a woman who had never owned a boat launched the first luxury phinisi. Twenty-two years later, she is still sailing.

Patti Seery knew the phinisi long before she built one. Through the 1980s and 1990s she travelled the far east of Indonesia on the wooden cargo schooners that worked the islands, and later began taking small groups of adventurous guests with her. The boats carried them. They did not do much more than that. What she wanted, as she came to see it, was a phinisi that was itself a reason to go: a working tradition raised into something beautiful, and safe enough to take people to the edges of the map.

She had never owned a boat of any kind. “If I'd known more, I wouldn't have done it,” she said in 2015.

Where the Wood Was

She took the idea to the shipwrights of Tana Beru and Ara, the villages at the southern tip of South Sulawesi where the largest phinisi have been laid down on the beach for generations. The build itself went to Kalimantan. At the turn of the century the great timbers could still be had there, and a fifty-meter hull needs great timbers. The shipwrights went with the wood.

Among them was Nasir, who would become her master builder and is still with the company today.

What she asked of them had not been asked before. The hull would be built the traditional way, by eye and by hand, planks first and frames after, in tropical hardwood. But the finished vessel would also meet the standards of Germanischer Lloyd, the German classification society, for structure, stability and safety at sea. A boat built without drawings would be held to a rulebook written for ships.

Silolona under dark sails pushing through blue water

Four Years

The build took about four years. When the keel, a single great length of timber, was loaded onto a flatbed truck for delivery, its weight tipped the truck's front wheels off the ground. The story has been told many times since, and it tells you most of what you need to know about the scale of the thing she had started.

Her goal, she wrote in her journal, was a hand-built vessel that spoke of the history of the spice trade and the spirit of the archipelago, while meeting the highest standards of safety and comfort.

Silolona was launched in Bali in 2004. Her name comes from a legend of the Tanimbar Islands, in which a man named Atuf builds a boat to sail to the sun in memory of his beloved wife, Silolona.

An Interior That Was Collected

Most yacht interiors are designed. Silolona's was gathered. By the time she launched, Patti had spent two decades in the archipelago, collecting textiles and carvings, championing the art of the Asmat and Dani of Papua, and building friendships across the islands. The yacht became the home for that life.

Her five cabins are named Asmat, Bali, Java, Sumba and Borneo, and each is furnished from its namesake: carvings from the Asmat, hand-dyed textiles from Sumba, objects chosen for their craft and their story. Harper's Bazaar wrote that the beauty aboard is never merely decorative. The cabins feel less like hotel rooms than rooms in a house owned by someone who has spent a lifetime in these islands, which is what they are.

A Silolona cabin with carved panels and island textiles

Silolona's saloon with collected carvings and art

The First

Silolona was the first luxury phinisi. In the years that followed, through the late 2000s and into the early 2010s, as families in Europe and the United States began commissioning their own, every new boat was measured against her. The charter fleet that sails Komodo and Raja Ampat today grew up around the idea she proved: that a hand-built Indonesian schooner could carry discerning guests in comfort and safety to the most remote places in the country.

In 2017 UNESCO inscribed the art of boatbuilding in South Sulawesi on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The craft Patti asked so much of had been recognized by the world.

Silolona's aft deck lounge with red cushions and the Indonesian flag

Still Exploring

The company passed to Patti's son, Tresno, in 2020. Silolona is still sailing, still owned and run by the family that built her, with a crew many of whom have been aboard for well over a decade. She carries ten guests in her five cabins, with seventeen crew, three tenders and her own PADI dive center.

The truck, the keel and the four years are history now. The boat is not. She is the reason the rest of the fleet exists, and she is still the most direct way to understand what Patti Seery set out to build.

Silolona is available for private charter through Indo Yachts. Her yacht page has her suites, seasons and itineraries.