Why would a 94-meter (310-foot) yacht try to squeeze through urban canals? It's because Dutch shipyard Feadship, the boat's manufacturer, is quite far from the North Sea. This is a newly-built yacht, called Project 817, although it will be christened Viva when it goes to sea. The journey took around four days for this ship, which was designed with the canals in mind. It couldn't have been a centimeter larger than it is.
During the first stage of the operation, Viva was moved from the Kaag Island shipyard to Lake Braassemermeer, where it was fitted with pontoons to raise it up, thus ensuring it wasn't too deep to maneuver through the canals.
Tug boats were then attached to the pontoons on either side of the superyacht, which was also wrapped with protective foil, in order to guide the vessel through the water with precision.
By this point, it was ready to be pushed and pulled along the canals, making its way across a small bridge in the tiny village of Woubrugge, as well as Alphen aan den Rijn, a town in the west of Holland, before reaching the Dutch city Gouda, located south of Amsterdam, a few days later.
Feadship will be able to make even bigger ships in the future, as they are building a new factory near the sea, which they should have done in the first place. Read about the painstaking journey and see more pictures at CNN. -via Digg