Photos by Alec Burke
Ken and Roberta Williams didn’t set out to own a 90-foot boat with crew. They were actually trying to downsize from their 68-foot Nordhavn, Sans Souci, after running it about 60,000 miles through 27 countries as owner-operators.
But as tends to happen with boats, things did not go according to plan.
“We’re getting older, so we downsized to a Grand Banks 60, but it was just kind of too small,” Ken says. “We sold it and started looking for a boat big enough to have crew, and the number-one priority for us was the crew’s quarters. We’re used to cruising alone and wanted our privacy, so we wanted crew quarters with their own space and their own entrance to the boat.”
The couple found what Ken calls an “old boat” that was based in Sweden and cruising in London. It was a 2003 Moonen Doggersbank that, at 90 feet, was quite a bit bigger than their 60 and 68.
Again, they made a plan. And again, things went another way.
“The boat wasn’t in perfect shape. It needed a lot of work, but we figured we’d just do a refit,” Ken says. “The vision was that we could put $1 million into it and have a good boat, and we kind of blew past that $1 million pretty quickly.”
The yearlong refit of North Star was mostly completed at Westport Yachts in Port Angeles, Wash. The boat splashed in October 2025 and then headed to Seattle for some additional projects, with that work ending this past May. “We basically gutted it,” Ken says. “At the end, I figure we were at a third to half the price of what I would have paid for a new one, and I saved two years off getting new construction.”
North Star had a lot of work done, but adding a hot tub and changing out the stabilizers ended up being the biggest challenges.
A hot tub was something the couple had always enjoyed having on their previous boats. Ken thought it would be a cinch to add one on the Doggersbank, given all the open space up top. Roberta and designer Scott Cole of Ardeo Design, though, had a different idea.
“What I envisioned doing was going to a local hot tub store and getting a hot tub, loading it onto the boat and plugging it in,” Ken says. “But then my wife and Scott got together and said, ‘We can rip out the sunpad at the back of the boat and put it there,’ and I said, ‘That’s going to be expensive,’ but I got outvoted.”
He laughs and then adds: “It does look more natural, like the boat was built to be that way, and it freed up the space in the middle of the deck for toys or to lay out and tan.”
A similar thing happened with a 36-inch Lynx grill that Ken wanted to add forward and to starboard on the flybridge, Cole recalls: “I was saying, ‘That’s not a lot of space there.’ That took some back-and-forth and sketches. Now, I think anybody who would go on the boat would think it was original.”
Changing the boat’s stabilizers was on the refit list because Ken and Roberta thought the existing ones were too small to cross oceans with North Star. They wanted an ABT electric-fin system, which Ken also thought would be a pretty easy switch.
“Once again, I was wrong,” he says. “I really thought it would be a matter of unbolting the old fins and putting on the new ones, and I thought the electric motor would be simple, that I’d just replace the old actuators with the new. It wound up needing engineers getting involved to check things structurally because there’s much higher torque on the fins.
“They advocated cutting a big opening in the side of the boat,” he adds. “We had to make this huge hole that had all kinds of structural reinforcement with welders working on the boat for about a month. I had already bought the stabilizers, so I kind of got myself into that one.”
That change also contributed to replacing the 25-year-old monitoring system that Ken says was “basically the brains of the boat,” yet was running on an old personal computer. “We wanted to replace that with Maretron,” he says. “I wanted Furuno and Timezero. I wanted really good Furuno radars, so we ripped out all of the electronics.”
North Star also had an interior refurbishment with some significant updates, including making sure that Ken and Roberta—both well known in the video-game industry—each had a proper desk for their work. On the Grand Banks, Roberta’s workspace was the salon table, a setup that made mealtimes a hassle. She now has a real desk in the owners’ stateroom, while Ken has a desk with a wine chiller built in.
With everything set the way the couple wanted it, North Star headed north from Seattle. As of late July, the steel-hulled boat was in Nome, Alaska, with plans to cruise across the Northwest Passage as soon as the ice opened up.
“The Northwest Passage was on our bucket list,” Ken says. “We’ve never been there. We’ve done a lot of crazy stuff—we did go across the Aleutians to Japan and to Siberia—but this will be new.”
Capt. Garrett Davis says the post-refit shakedown revealed only a few small issues. “I think the benefit of having the captain on board for the entirety of the refit shows itself here,” Davis says. “I’ve worked on other Doggersbanks, so I knew what to look for right off the bat, and I’m technically minded and hands-on in my approach to things.”
Ken says the lack of post-refit problems has been unexpected, but of course welcome: “Everything has been fine, to our surprise. I really thought it was going to be a mess. When you do that much work to a boat, you expect problems, but we haven’t had any big ones.”
What comes after the Northwest Passage, Ken says, is an open question. North Star will likely voyage down the U.S. East Coast and head to the Caribbean. “From there, it depends on whether you ask Roberta or me,” he says. “I want to head back to Europe, but she wants to head south and go through the Panama Canal.”
There are pros and cons to each destination, he says, but the beauty of the choice is the ability the Doggersbank gives them to make it.
“We haven’t decided,” he says, “but we can go anywhere in the world.”
This article originally appeared in the October 2026 issue of Passagemaker magazine.
