The boat was engineered by a yacht designer Dudley Dix as a steel 2-masts schooner with Marconi rig, and built in 1990's in South Africa by
an entrepreneur Alan O'Gorman. She was named Perola do Mar and never changed her name since her first launch.
After several years of sailing in the area of Durban port and Cape Town, she travelled extensively from Cape Horn to Caribbean and up to Greenland. Being owned by Greeks and then Italians, she moved to the Mediterranean, and ended up her first big chapter near Rome, where she was staying in the river to Tiber while desperately needing major repairment.