Sure enough, she is a yacht with a history. She was designed and built by Abeking and Rasmussen in 1935, a 58-footer with steel frames, one of a number of German Square Metre class yachts ordered by the Third Reich at that time, to be used in The Baltic for training Luftwaffe pilots in navigation. In 1944 Marabu was among the 200 or so 'Windfall' yachts taken over by the Allies and assembled in Kiel. After the war most of these yachts were brought back to the UK and allocated to different branches of the British Armed Forces, often based at Portsmouth or Dartmouth. Some of the bigger yachts were used for adventure training.

Marabu went to the Navy in Gosport, and had an illustrious career with the Royal Naval Sailing Association and the Royal Ocean Racing Club, winning Class 1 of the Fastnet Race and crossing the Atlantic to compete in the Bermuda and Transatlantic races in the 1950s, on occasion with Erroll Bruce as navigator. There is a fine black and white photograph of her in Frank and Keith Beken's book The Glory of Sail, published in 1952.

In the 1980s she went to Brighton where she was owned and raced by a syndicate from Sussex Yacht Club, but what became of her after that and how she has ended up in a forlorn state ashore in Ipswich is a mystery. It is to be hoped that she will soon find a new owner, with plenty of money, who could restore this once elegant yacht to her former glory.