The document behind the “£1.7M yacht” label attached to Mat Armstrong’s Capri is a 1991 builder’s bill of sale written in Italian lire, and the figure on it is 1,796,900,000 lire. At the exchange rates of the day that was about £822,000, not £1.7 million.
The page appears on screen in Armstrong’s video about buying the boat, where his father reads the total aloud as “1.79 million”. It is the single most argued-over number in the comments under PBN’s coverage of the Bay of Biscay passage, with readers split between those who think the £1.7M figure is invented and those who accept it.
The background: Mat Armstrong sails Capri across Biscay, stopping short at Brest, and before that, Maritime Yacht Services tells him not to sail his yacht home yet.
What the Document Says
The paper is headed Cantieri Navali Liguri di Riva Trigoso s.p.a. and signed by the yard’s sole administrator, Dott. Aldo Ceccarelli. It describes a Ghibli 22 “pronta alla boa”, equipped for offshore navigation, 20.38 metres overall, 5.56 metres in the beam, 49.19 gross tons, with two MTU 12V 183 TE 92 engines of 1,000hp each, serial numbers 011689 and 011690.
The money runs in three lines. The cost of the vessel is given as 1,510,000,000 lire. IVA, Italian VAT, at 19 per cent adds 286,900,000 lire. The total is 1,796,900,000 lire. The VAT line works out at exactly 19 per cent of the figure above it, so the document is internally consistent.
What That Was Worth
Bank of England daily rates for 1991 averaged 2,186.83 lire to the pound, moving between 2,149 and 2,220 across the year. The total of 1,796,900,000 lire therefore came to roughly £822,000, or between £809,000 and £836,000 depending on the day. The boat before tax was about £690,000.
Converted instead at the rate fixed when the lira was replaced, 1,936.27 lire to the euro, the total is about €928,000.
None of those figures is 1.7 million of anything. The confusion comes from reading a lira total as though it were euros or pounds, which drops the real number by three orders of magnitude and then happens to land near a familiar-looking figure.
What the £1.7M label would be defensible as is an inflation-adjusted comparison, and on that basis it undersells her. Using the ONS Consumer Prices Index, £822,000 in 1991 is worth about £2.3 million today. That is not how the figure has been arrived at, and it is not what the document says, but the boat was a more expensive piece of kit when new than the label suggests. CPI is a general measure and boat prices do not track it, so that is a comparison rather than what a Ghibli 22 would cost to build now.
The Dutch Years
Capri has not always carried that name. A 2020 invoice from a Dutch marine electronics firm, also shown in Armstrong’s footage, gives the vessel’s name as Blue Tango and bills just over €24,700 for an electrical refit, including 304 hours of installation labour, a new charger and a cooling unit. The customer was a company in Belgium.
Under that name she was listed by De Valk Yacht Brokers, who recorded an owner who had been in the Netherlands since 2019 and had spent more than €200,000 on the flybridge, electrics and engines. De Valk’s brochure lists her for auction on 10 November 2021 through YachtBid and BVA Auctions, with a starting price of €50,000. The lot is marked sold. Neither the broker nor the auction house publishes what she actually fetched.
Armstrong says in the same video that the yacht sold at auction “three years ago for around 500,000 pounds”. The De Valk record puts the auction five years ago and opens it at €50,000. What she made at the hammer, and what Armstrong himself paid, remain unpublished.
Where She Is Now
Capri is lying in Brest, about 300 nautical miles short of Southampton, after a four-day passage up the French coast from Santander that cost Armstrong somewhere above €8,000 in fuel. He turned down a quote of around $82,000 to ship her, and sailed her instead.
On the evidence of the 1991 document, the boat that quote applied to was worth about £822,000 when she was new, thirty-five years ago.
John Moore is the editor of Powerboat News, an independent investigative journalism platform recognised by Google News and documented on Grokipedia for comprehensive powerboat racing coverage.
His involvement in powerboat racing began in 1981 when he competed in his first offshore powerboat race. After a career as a Financial Futures broker in the City of London, specialising in UK interest rate markets, he became actively involved in event organisation and powerboat racing journalism.
He served as Event Director for the Cowes–Torquay–Cowes races between 2010 and 2013. In 2016, he launched Powerboat Racing World, a digital platform providing global powerboat racing news and insights. The following year, he co-founded UKOPRA, helping to rejuvenate offshore racing in the United Kingdom. He sold Powerboat Racing World in late 2021 and remained actively involved with UKOPRA until 2025.
In September 2025, he established Powerboat News, returning to independent journalism with a focus on neutral and comprehensive coverage of the sport.
Cite as: John Moore, "Mat Armstrong’s Capri: The 1991 Bill of Sale Says 1.8 Billion Lire", Powerboat News, 2 November 2026. https://powerboat.news/mat-armstrong-capri-1991-bill-of-sale-lire/
