yacht stories

8 superyacht crew members share the most extreme requests they've had to deal with on the job

Superyacht crew members have to meet every expectation of superyacht owners and guests.
Business Insider recently polled superyacht crew members to find out some of the most extreme requests they've received.
From last-minute helicopter trips to flying in soda to a remote island, here's what they had to say.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

Working on a superyacht is grueling.

There are long hours, lots of cleaning, and demanding guests and owners.

Business Insider recently polled superyacht crew members to get an inside look at life on board. When asked for the strangest request they've ever received from a guest or owner, some didn't have much to say. As one electronic technical officer on a 223-foot yacht put it, "Guests can be really boring."

But others had several stories to share.

Read more : 9 superyacht crew members share what it's really like working for a billionaire on board

When people are paying millions to run the yacht or hundreds of thousands to charter it out for a week, they expect to get their money's worth — and everything they want.

That leaves many superyacht crew members running around trying to meet the highest expectations. From the funny to the ridiculous to the tedious, here are some of the strangest requests they've received on the job.

Note: Business Insider was able to verify each crew member's identity, but we refrained from publishing their full names to protect their privacy.

Some owners are really dedicated to the sports teams they own.

Michael, a former yacht captain who worked on yachts ranging from 130 to 170 feet, recalled a time when a superyacht owner wanted to watch the NBA basketball team he owned play in the semifinals or finals. At the time, the yacht was anchored near a reef off of eastern Honduras, where there was terrible satellite coverage, he said.

"He also owned a small network that broadcast the game and paid to have the satellite footprint moved to cover our area which was tens of thousands of dollars," he said. "Still did not get the game. The only image that came across of the game was his mother (who loved the team) sitting next to Stevie Wonder."

And beach toys are very important — even if it means getting them in the middle of the night.

Water time isn't complete without some good floats. At least, that is, for some of the guests that chief stewardess Nic has had on board.

At 8 p.m., her guests requested inflatable crocodile and baby water floats — and they wanted them for the next morning. "One hire car and six hours later, we arrived back at the boat with the items," she said.

Sometimes yachts aren't the only trips involved.

Just like the average Joe, superyacht owners can be forgetful. But unlike the average Joe, they always have a way of getting what they need — no matter where they are.

Mark, the captain of a 114-foot yacht, said his superyacht owner once needed a crew member to fly 4,000 miles round trip in 34 hours via business class to pick up a small bag of clothes for the boss' wife.

But some requests can be more mind-blowingly tedious than anything else.

Some requests aren't even extravagant, but tedious and meticulous. A stewardess on a 112-foot sailing yacht told Business Insider that she was once asked to pick out all the broken candies in the candy bowls.

Guests make sure they can get anywhere they want.

One crew member was working on a motor yacht anchored in Greece, and a guest wondered why they weren't playing golf; the crew member told him the nearest course was three hours away.

"Without hesitation, he asked, 'Was there no helicopter available?'" the crew member said. "I was a bit taken back and let him know I hadn't considered that option. He politely let me know he would be happy to pay for one if the situation arises in the future. Sure enough, several residents took the option for private airlift via helicopter or jet to play a round of golf." He said they've also stopped the yacht for a guest to play his guitar on an iceberg while cruising the Arctic.

Chefs are expected to work around the clock — even if they're sleeping.

Yacht chefs can deal with especially demanding requests — they're always at the whim of someone else's appetite and cravings.

After being in bed for 2 1/2 hours, one chef on a 150-foot motor yacht said he was asked to whip up a small-plate buffet — at 3 a.m.

Some crew members are asked to keep quiet and get dirty.

One crew member who has worked on yachts ranging from 100 to 130 feet as both a mate and a junior engineer has seen it all.

"On the deck side, [the most extreme request has] been to purposely keep my eyes down and not address the topless prostitutes on board," he said. "On the engineering side, it's been to get in murky canal water to dig the ocean floor deeper and scrub the bottom of the boat."

And some guests get very thirsty.

A second stewardess who works on a 200-foot yacht said an owner once asked if they could fly Fanta (the soda) to an island in the middle of nowhere.

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Dec 22, 2020

2020 Editor's Choice: The Best Boating Stories of the Year

By: Scott Way

I was only going to pick 10 stories for this list, but I was quickly reminded that a) we have too many talented writers on staff to deny you such good content, and b) I'm longwinded and 10 was never realistic anyway. As such, you get 15 of the best boating stories of the year.

We just finished compiling our 10 Biggest Boating Stories of 2020 , so if you'd like to see what was popular by readership be sure to check that out. We now bring you 15 of the 'best' stories, as selected by the editorial staff, our team of writers, and my whimsy. Best is a loose term, its entirely subjective and is based on neither facts nor data, but I think we made some good choices. We have so many great writers here at BoatBlurb that picking the 'best' of anything is nearly impossible. It's a great problem to have. 2020 saw us dive into some of boating's biggest mysteries, discuss its most problematic issues, offer advice to new and old boaters alike, and interview some pretty fascinating people. Here are the 15 best stories on BoatBlurb this year:

1) The Definitive Answer to Outboard vs. Sterndrive

Which boat drive system is better-- an outboard motor or a motor with a sterndrive?? This debate has been around for too long. It is time to finally put this question to rest. I believe that when it comes to today’s general pleasure boating, we can now examine the pros and cons of each drive system and identify a winner. Read more .

2) Why the V-Bottom Hull is One of Boating's Most Revered Designs

You have probably heard the boating term “deadrise." You will be glad to know its meaning is not as ominous as it sounds. It refers to the amount of angle that forms between the boat bottom and a horizontal plane on either side of the center keel, measured at the transom. This angle usually runs between 16 and 24 degrees and comprises what we refer to as a V-bottom hull design. The trademark of such designs is that the contours of the hull travel in a straight line to the keel. It’s easiest to picture if you imagine looking at the craft from behind. This is the story of how and why the V-bottom became the norm for today’s pleasure boats. Read more .

3) Famous Boats: The Strange Saga of the 'Orca' from JAWS

Jaws was released on June 20th, 1975, and to celebrate its 45th anniversary as one of cinema's best aquatic thrillers we dove into the fascinating backstory behind what became of Quint's disheveled but beloved boat: the Orca . Read more .

4) Before Fibreglass- World War II & The Fairmile (Part 11)

Even though the Fairmile is not exactly a wooden pleasure boat, it was so significant to the financial strength of the boat builders, to the history of wooden boat building in Canada, to its success during the war, and to Canada’s world renown, that we thought it appropriate that its history not be forgotten in today’s world of sleek, modern, fibreglass and aluminum designs. Read more .

5) Inside Formula Boats- Past, Present, and 2021 Preview

Even from the pre-Formula days with Thunderbird Boats (which is a story unto itself), to their enduring position as industry stalwarts, suffice to say, Formula knows what they're doing. T hey reside firmly among the leaders in boating with respect to product quality and reputation. This puts them in a position of being, through some welcome fault of their own, partially responsible for identifying trends to advance the industry. As it stands, 2021 will show their keen eye for consumer needs is still sharp. Read more .

6) The Wild World of Boats: 8 Designs that Changed Boating (for Better or for Worse)

Ever watched a waterbug (aka a 'waterstrider’) scoot along and wonder how it's so efficient with those long legs standing like posts out of the water? The Proteus is the answer. Designed by Silicon Valley bigwigs as a prototype for a Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel-type (WAM-V… or WHAM! every time you excitedly burst through a wave), the Proteus will wake you up before you go-go. Read more .

7) The Great Loop - North America’s Biggest Boating Adventure with Kurt & Leanne Penfold

The Great Loop is everything its name implies- a circular journey through the eastern half of North America that takes boaters on an adventure befitting the ‘Great’ in its name. The route involves navigating the Great Lakes, making passage through the Illinois and Mississippi rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, along the eastern seaboard of the United States, and back to the Great Lakes waterway. You can of course start at any point along the way, or run it in reverse, but no matter you begin crossing your wake upon your return solidifies your success at one of boating’s best adventures. Read more .

8) The Cat is Back! Legendary Pantera Powerboats Relaunches Under New Ownership

The legendary Pantera Boats brand is back. Today, a new ownership group announced that through a series of business transactions and agreements endorsed by the Miami-Dade County Circuit Court, they have acquired the molds, intellectual property, trademarks, designs, and copyrights to one of racing's most recognizable names. With the legal hurdles now cleared, the iconic Pantera brand is being relaunched. Read more .

9) #WeirdBoats - Daredevil Evel Knievel's Custom Yacht Now a Floating Shrine in Canada

A recent story from CBC News Atlantic revealed that Evel Knievel's custom 70's yacht has turned up in Canada. It is a saga that gleefully taps into our affinity for #weirdboats , so naturally we dug into the strange story behind a floating shrine to an iconic stuntman. Read more .

10) Iconic Canadian Brand Limestone Boat Company Relaunches

One of Canada's most recognizable brands is back. Once a common sight around the Great Lakes region of Canada and the northeast U.S. coast, the Limestone Boat Company is back with new ownership and a new outlook for 2021. While the company never truly ceased production, under the new arrangement Limestone will expand its production capability in Tennessee while still maintaining their foundation as an iconic Canadian brand. Read more .

11) Tom Brady Adjusting to Florida Life with Custom Wajer 55S Yacht

After signing a bloated $50 million contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the off-season, the QB first cozied up at Derek Jeter's shack to get his bearings in the Sunshine State. With the rent clearly paid, Tom has now gotten a little spendy and dropped multiple seven figures on a 53-foot custom Wajer 55S yacht. Or as the folks at TMZ call it, a 'sleek watercraft.' Read more .

12) #QuickTips - 10 Things to Avoid as a Good Boater

Because you are reading this article, you are probably an excellent boater. You may already know that Rule #2 of Inland Regulations states that "The person in charge of the boat must do everything necessary to avoid a collision." To accomplish this, you must be able to spot and steer clear of inexperienced and dangerous boaters. You should also practice good habits yourself. Read more .

13) Boating Common Sense, Common Courtesies, and Common No-No’s

Pleasure boating is meant to be a relaxing, enjoyable past-time and recreation. It can only remain so when annoyances and frustrations are kept to a minimum. The essence of pleasure boating is the mutual enjoyment of the vast and varied waterways of this great country. A few reckless and thoughtless individuals can ruin the enjoyment of many in a very short time. Often these individual’s actions are unintentional and they don’t even realize they are causing frustration, resentment, and anger. Read more .

14) Innovators in Boating- Christopher Columbus Smith & Chris-Craft

It is appropriate we begin this unveiling of the builders of dreams with a name that is synonymous around the world with pleasure boating – Christopher Columbus Smith (1861-1939). What a beautiful and almost too perfect a name to be associated with a boat builder. He is of course the founder of world-famous Chris-Craft boats. As a young boy growing up in Algonac, Michigan, Chris Smith, like many boys his age, and with the opportunity right at his doorstep, became smitten with the outdoors, and specifically with duck hunting. Read more .

15) Interview with 'Supercar Blondie': Test Driving the World's Fastest Police Boat

The blonde car celeb recently test drove what's been declared the 'World's Fastest Police Boat.' We caught up with her to hear how driving a speedboat differs from a sportscar, what boating culture is like in Dubai and the UAE, and what other aquatic adventures might be in store. Read more .

#news #culture

The Haves and the Have-Yachts

By Evan Osnos

In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking.

For the small, tight-lipped community around the world’s biggest yachts, the Palm Beach show has the promising air of spring training. On the cusp of the summer season, it affords brokers and builders and owners (or attendants from their family offices) a chance to huddle over the latest merchandise and to gather intelligence: Who’s getting in? Who’s getting out? And, most pressingly, who’s ogling a bigger boat?

On the docks, brokers parse the crowd according to a taxonomy of potential. Guests asking for tours face a gantlet of greeters, trained to distinguish “superrich clients” from “ineligible visitors,” in the words of Emma Spence, a former greeter at the Palm Beach show. Spence looked for promising clues (the right shoes, jewelry, pets) as well as for red flags (cameras, ornate business cards, clothes with pop-culture references). For greeters from elsewhere, Palm Beach is a challenging assignment. Unlike in Europe, where money can still produce some visible tells—Hunter Wellies, a Barbour jacket—the habits of wealth in Florida offer little that’s reliable. One colleague resorted to binoculars, to spot a passerby with a hundred-thousand-dollar watch. According to Spence, people judged to have insufficient buying power are quietly marked for “dissuasion.”

For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom.

At the Palm Beach show, I lingered in front of a gracious vessel called Namasté, until I was dissuaded by a wooden placard: “Private yacht, no boarding, no paparazzi.” In a nearby berth was a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot superyacht called Bold, which was styled like a warship, with its own helicopter hangar, three Sea-Doos, two sailboats, and a color scheme of gunmetal gray. The rugged look is a trend; “explorer” vessels, equipped to handle remote journeys, are the sport-utility vehicles of yachting.

If you hail from the realm of ineligible visitors, you may not be aware that we are living through the “greatest boom in the yacht business that’s ever existed,” as Bob Denison—whose firm, Denison Yachting, is one of the world’s largest brokers—told me. “Every broker, every builder, up and down the docks, is having some of the best years they’ve ever experienced.” In 2021, the industry sold a record eight hundred and eighty-seven superyachts worldwide, nearly twice the previous year’s total. With more than a thousand new superyachts on order, shipyards are so backed up that clients unaccustomed to being told no have been shunted to waiting lists.

One reason for the increased demand for yachts is the pandemic. Some buyers invoke social distancing; others, an existential awakening. John Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, who made a fortune from car dealerships, is looking to upgrade from his current, sixty-million-dollar yacht. “When you’re forty or fifty years old, you say, ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ ” he told me. But, at seventy-five, he is ready to throw in an extra fifteen million if it will spare him three years of waiting. “Is your life worth five million dollars a year? I think so,” he said. A deeper reason for the demand is the widening imbalance of wealth. Since 1990, the United States’ supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than seven hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only twenty per cent. In that time, the number of truly giant yachts—those longer than two hundred and fifty feet—has climbed from less than ten to more than a hundred and seventy. Raphael Sauleau, the C.E.O. of Fraser Yachts, told me bluntly, “ COVID and wealth—a perfect storm for us.”

And yet the marina in Palm Beach was thrumming with anxiety. Ever since the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, launched his assault on Ukraine, the superyacht world has come under scrutiny. At a port in Spain, a Ukrainian engineer named Taras Ostapchuk, working aboard a ship that he said was owned by a Russian arms dealer, threw open the sea valves and tried to sink it to the bottom of the harbor. Under arrest, he told a judge, “I would do it again.” Then he returned to Ukraine and joined the military. Western allies, in the hope of pressuring Putin to withdraw, have sought to cut off Russian oligarchs from businesses and luxuries abroad. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains,” President Joe Biden declared, in his State of the Union address.

Nobody can say precisely how many of Putin’s associates own superyachts—known to professionals as “white boats”—because the white-boat world is notoriously opaque. Owners tend to hide behind shell companies, registered in obscure tax havens, attended by private bankers and lawyers. But, with unusual alacrity, authorities have used subpoenas and police powers to freeze boats suspected of having links to the Russian élite. In Spain, the government detained a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar yacht associated with Sergei Chemezov, the head of the conglomerate Rostec, whose bond with Putin reaches back to their time as K.G.B. officers in East Germany. (As in many cases, the boat is not registered to Chemezov; the official owner is a shell company connected to his stepdaughter, a teacher whose salary is likely about twenty-two hundred dollars a month.) In Germany, authorities impounded the world’s most voluminous yacht, Dilbar, for its ties to the mining-and-telecom tycoon Alisher Usmanov. And in Italy police have grabbed a veritable armada, including a boat owned by one of Russia’s richest men, Alexei Mordashov, and a colossus suspected of belonging to Putin himself, the four-hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot Scheherazade.

In Palm Beach, the yachting community worried that the same scrutiny might be applied to them. “Say your superyacht is in Asia, and there’s some big conflict where China invades Taiwan,” Denison told me. “China could spin it as ‘Look at these American oligarchs!’ ” He wondered if the seizures of superyachts marked a growing political animus toward the very rich. “Whenever things are economically or politically disruptive,” he said, “it’s hard to justify taking an insane amount of money and just putting it into something that costs a lot to maintain, depreciates, and is only used for having a good time.”

Nobody pretends that a superyacht is a productive place to stash your wealth. In a column this spring headlined “ A SUPERYACHT IS A TERRIBLE ASSET ,” the Financial Times observed, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”

Not so long ago, status transactions among the élite were denominated in Old Masters and in the sculptures of the Italian Renaissance. Joseph Duveen, the dominant art dealer of the early twentieth century, kept the oligarchs of his day—Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache, J. P. Morgan—jockeying over Donatellos and Van Dycks. “When you pay high for the priceless,” he liked to say, “you’re getting it cheap.”

Man talking to woman who is holding a baby keeping the dog and another child entertained and cooking.

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In the nineteen-fifties, the height of aspirational style was fine French furniture—F.F.F., as it became known in certain precincts of Fifth Avenue and Palm Beach. Before long, more and more money was going airborne. Hugh Hefner, a pioneer in the private-jet era, decked out a plane he called Big Bunny, where he entertained Elvis Presley, Raquel Welch, and James Caan. The oil baron Armand Hammer circled the globe on his Boeing 727, paying bribes and recording evidence on microphones hidden in his cufflinks. But, once it seemed that every plutocrat had a plane, the thrill was gone.

In any case, an airplane is just transportation. A big ship is a floating manse, with a hierarchy written right into the nomenclature. If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht, and more than two hundred and ninety-five is a gigayacht. The world contains about fifty-four hundred superyachts, and about a hundred gigayachts.

For the moment, a gigayacht is the most expensive item that our species has figured out how to own. In 2019, the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin bought a quadruplex on Central Park South for two hundred and forty million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a home in America. In May, an unknown buyer spent about a hundred and ninety-five million on an Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe. In luxury-yacht terms, those are ordinary numbers. “There are a lot of boats in build well over two hundred and fifty million dollars,” Jamie Edmiston, a broker in Monaco and London, told me. His buyers are getting younger and more inclined to spend long stretches at sea. “High-speed Internet, telephony, modern communications have made working easier,” he said. “Plus, people made a lot more money earlier in life.”

A Silicon Valley C.E.O. told me that one appeal of boats is that they can “absorb the most excess capital.” He explained, “Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and then fifty million on the boat that they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred-thousand-square-foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half-billion-dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.” Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, is content to spend three or four times as much on his yachts as on his homes. Part of the appeal is flexibility. “If you’re on your boat and you don’t like your neighbor, you tell the captain, ‘Let’s go to a different place,’ ” he said. On land, escaping a bad neighbor requires more work: “You got to try and buy him out or make it uncomfortable or something.” The preference for sea-based investment has altered the proportions of taste. Until recently, the Silicon Valley C.E.O. said, “a fifty-metre boat was considered a good-sized boat. Now that would be a little bit embarrassing.” In the past twenty years, the length of the average luxury yacht has grown by a third, to a hundred and sixty feet.

Thorstein Veblen, the economist who published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in 1899, argued that the power of “conspicuous consumption” sprang not from artful finery but from sheer needlessness. “In order to be reputable,” he wrote, “it must be wasteful.” In the yachting world, stories circulate about exotic deliveries by helicopter or seaplane: Dom Pérignon, bagels from Zabar’s, sex workers, a rare melon from the island of Hokkaido. The industry excels at selling you things that you didn’t know you needed. When you flip through the yachting press, it’s easy to wonder how you’ve gone this long without a personal submarine, or a cryosauna that “blasts you with cold” down to minus one hundred and ten degrees Celsius, or the full menagerie of “exclusive leathers,” such as eel and stingray.

But these shrines to excess capital exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society—and all but unseen by everyone else. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the yachting community was straining to manage its reputation as a gusher of carbon emissions (one well-stocked diesel yacht is estimated to produce as much greenhouse gas as fifteen hundred passenger cars), not to mention the fact that the world of white boats is overwhelmingly white. In a candid aside to a French documentarian, the American yachtsman Bill Duker said, “If the rest of the world learns what it’s like to live on a yacht like this, they’re gonna bring back the guillotine.” The Dutch press recently reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was building a sailing yacht so tall that the city of Rotterdam might temporarily dismantle a bridge that had survived the Nazis in order to let the boat pass to the open sea. Rotterdammers were not pleased. On Facebook, a local man urged people to “take a box of rotten eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through.” At least thirteen thousand people expressed interest. Amid the uproar, a deputy mayor announced that the dismantling plan had been abandoned “for the time being.” (Bezos modelled his yacht partly on one owned by his friend Barry Diller, who has hosted him many times. The appreciation eventually extended to personnel, and Bezos hired one of Diller’s captains.)

As social media has heightened the scrutiny of extraordinary wealth, some of the very people who created those platforms have sought less observable places to spend it. But they occasionally indulge in some coded provocation. In 2006, when the venture capitalist Tom Perkins unveiled his boat in Istanbul, most passersby saw it adorned in colorful flags, but people who could read semaphore were able to make out a message: “Rarely does one have the privilege to witness vulgar ostentation displayed on such a scale.” As a longtime owner told me, “If you don’t have some guilt about it, you’re a rat.”

Alex Finley, a former C.I.A. officer who has seen yachts proliferate near her home in Barcelona, has weighed the superyacht era and its discontents in writings and on Twitter, using the hashtag #YachtWatch. “To me, the yachts are not just yachts,” she told me. “In Russia’s case, these are the embodiment of oligarchs helping a dictator destabilize our democracy while utilizing our democracy to their benefit.” But, Finley added, it’s a mistake to think the toxic symbolism applies only to Russia. “The yachts tell a whole story about a Faustian capitalism—this idea that we’re ready to sell democracy for short-term profit,” she said. “They’re registered offshore. They use every loophole that we’ve put in place for illicit money and tax havens. So they play a role in this battle, writ large, between autocracy and democracy.”

After a morning on the docks at the Palm Beach show, I headed to a more secluded marina nearby, which had been set aside for what an attendant called “the really big hardware.” It felt less like a trade show than like a boutique resort, with a swimming pool and a terrace restaurant. Kevin Merrigan, a relaxed Californian with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead pinked by the sun, was waiting for me at the stern of Unbridled, a superyacht with a brilliant blue hull that gave it the feel of a personal cruise ship. He invited me to the bridge deck, where a giant screen showed silent video of dolphins at play.

Merrigan is the chairman of the brokerage Northrop & Johnson, which has ridden the tide of growing boats and wealth since 1949. Lounging on a sofa mounded with throw pillows, he projected a nearly postcoital level of contentment. He had recently sold the boat we were on, accepted an offer for a behemoth beside us, and begun negotiating the sale of yet another. “This client owns three big yachts,” he said. “It’s a hobby for him. We’re at a hundred and ninety-one feet now, and last night he said, ‘You know, what do you think about getting a two hundred and fifty?’ ” Merrigan laughed. “And I was, like, ‘Can’t you just have dinner?’ ”

Among yacht owners, there are some unwritten rules of stratification: a Dutch-built boat will hold its value better than an Italian; a custom design will likely get more respect than a “series yacht”; and, if you want to disparage another man’s boat, say that it looks like a wedding cake. But, in the end, nothing says as much about a yacht, or its owner, as the delicate matter of L.O.A.—length over all.

The imperative is not usually length for length’s sake (though the longtime owner told me that at times there is an aspect of “phallic sizing”). “L.O.A.” is a byword for grandeur. In most cases, pleasure yachts are permitted to carry no more than twelve passengers, a rule set by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which was conceived after the sinking of the Titanic. But those limits do not apply to crew. “So, you might have anything between twelve and fifty crew looking after those twelve guests,” Edmiston, the broker, said. “It’s a level of service you cannot really contemplate until you’ve been fortunate enough to experience it.”

As yachts have grown more capacious, and the limits on passengers have not, more and more space on board has been devoted to staff and to novelties. The latest fashions include IMAX theatres, hospital equipment that tests for dozens of pathogens, and ski rooms where guests can suit up for a helicopter trip to a mountaintop. The longtime owner, who had returned the previous day from his yacht, told me, “No one today—except for assholes and ridiculous people—lives on land in what you would call a deep and broad luxe life. Yes, people have nice houses and all of that, but it’s unlikely that the ratio of staff to them is what it is on a boat.” After a moment, he added, “Boats are the last place that I think you can get away with it.”

Even among the truly rich, there is a gap between the haves and the have-yachts. One boating guest told me about a conversation with a famous friend who keeps one of the world’s largest yachts. “He said, ‘The boat is the last vestige of what real wealth can do.’ What he meant is, You have a chef, and I have a chef. You have a driver, and I have a driver. You can fly privately, and I fly privately. So, the one place where I can make clear to the world that I am in a different fucking category than you is the boat.”

After Merrigan and I took a tour of Unbridled, he led me out to a waiting tender, staffed by a crew member with an earpiece on a coil. The tender, Merrigan said, would ferry me back to the busy main dock of the Palm Beach show. We bounced across the waves under a pristine sky, and pulled into the marina, where my fellow-gawkers were still trying to talk their way past the greeters. As I walked back into the scrum, Namasté was still there, but it looked smaller than I remembered.

For owners and their guests, a white boat provides a discreet marketplace for the exchange of trust, patronage, and validation. To diagram the precise workings of that trade—the customs and anxieties, strategies and slights—I talked to Brendan O’Shannassy, a veteran captain who is a curator of white-boat lore. Raised in Western Australia, O’Shannassy joined the Navy as a young man, and eventually found his way to skippering some of the world’s biggest yachts. He has worked for Paul Allen, the late co-founder of Microsoft, along with a few other billionaires he declines to name. Now in his early fifties, with patient green eyes and tufts of curly brown hair, O’Shannassy has had a vantage from which to monitor the social traffic. “It’s all gracious, and everyone’s kiss-kiss,” he said. “But there’s a lot going on in the background.”

O’Shannassy once worked for an owner who limited the number of newspapers on board, so that he could watch his guests wait and squirm. “It was a mind game amongst the billionaires. There were six couples, and three newspapers,” he said, adding, “They were ranking themselves constantly.” On some boats, O’Shannassy has found himself playing host in the awkward minutes after guests arrive. “A lot of them are savants, but some are very un-socially aware,” he said. “They need someone to be social and charming for them.” Once everyone settles in, O’Shannassy has learned, there is often a subtle shift, when a mogul or a politician or a pop star starts to loosen up in ways that are rarely possible on land. “Your security is relaxed—they’re not on your hip,” he said. “You’re not worried about paparazzi. So you’ve got all this extra space, both mental and physical.”

O’Shannassy has come to see big boats as a space where powerful “solar systems” converge and combine. “It is implicit in every interaction that their sharing of information will benefit both parties; it is an obsession with billionaires to do favours for each other. A referral, an introduction, an insight—it all matters,” he wrote in “Superyacht Captain,” a new memoir. A guest told O’Shannassy that, after a lavish display of hospitality, he finally understood the business case for buying a boat. “One deal secured on board will pay it all back many times over,” the guest said, “and it is pretty hard to say no after your kids have been hosted so well for a week.”

Take the case of David Geffen, the former music and film executive. He is long retired, but he hosts friends (and potential friends) on the four-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot Rising Sun, which has a double-height cinema, a spa and salon, and a staff of fifty-seven. In 2017, shortly after Barack and Michelle Obama departed the White House, they were photographed on Geffen’s boat in French Polynesia, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Rita Wilson. For Geffen, the boat keeps him connected to the upper echelons of power. There are wealthier Americans, but not many of them have a boat so delectable that it can induce both a Democratic President and the workingman’s crooner to risk the aroma of hypocrisy.

The binding effect pays dividends for guests, too. Once people reach a certain level of fame, they tend to conclude that its greatest advantage is access. Spend a week at sea together, lingering over meals, observing one another floundering on a paddleboard, and you have something of value for years to come. Call to ask for an investment, an introduction, an internship for a wayward nephew, and you’ll at least get the call returned. It’s a mutually reinforcing circle of validation: she’s here, I’m here, we’re here.

But, if you want to get invited back, you are wise to remember your part of the bargain. If you work with movie stars, bring fresh gossip. If you’re on Wall Street, bring an insight or two. Don’t make the transaction obvious, but don’t forget why you’re there. “When I see the guest list,” O’Shannassy wrote, “I am aware, even if not all names are familiar, that all have been chosen for a purpose.”

For O’Shannassy, there is something comforting about the status anxieties of people who have everything. He recalled a visit to the Italian island of Sardinia, where his employer asked him for a tour of the boats nearby. Riding together on a tender, they passed one colossus after another, some twice the size of the owner’s superyacht. Eventually, the man cut the excursion short. “Take me back to my yacht, please,” he said. They motored in silence for a while. “There was a time when my yacht was the most beautiful in the bay,” he said at last. “How do I keep up with this new money?”

The summer season in the Mediterranean cranks up in May, when the really big hardware heads east from Florida and the Caribbean to escape the coming hurricanes, and reconvenes along the coasts of France, Italy, and Spain. At the center is the Principality of Monaco, the sun-washed tax haven that calls itself the “world’s capital of advanced yachting.” In Monaco, which is among the richest countries on earth, superyachts bob in the marina like bath toys.

The nearest hotel room at a price that would not get me fired was an Airbnb over the border with France. But an acquaintance put me on the phone with the Yacht Club de Monaco, a members-only establishment created by the late monarch His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III, whom the Web site describes as “a true visionary in every respect.” The club occasionally rents rooms—“cabins,” as they’re called—to visitors in town on yacht-related matters. Claudia Batthyany, the elegant director of special projects, showed me to my cabin and later explained that the club does not aspire to be a hotel. “We are an association ,” she said. “Otherwise, it becomes”—she gave a gentle wince—“not that exclusive.”

Inside my cabin, I quickly came to understand that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again. The space was silent and aromatically upscale, bathed in soft sunlight that swept through a wall of glass overlooking the water. If I was getting a sudden rush of the onboard experience, that was no accident. The clubhouse was designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster to evoke the opulent indulgence of ocean liners of the interwar years, like the Queen Mary. I found a handwritten welcome note, on embossed club stationery, set alongside an orchid and an assemblage of chocolate truffles: “The whole team remains at your entire disposal to make your stay a wonderful experience. Yours sincerely, Service Members.” I saluted the nameless Service Members, toiling for the comfort of their guests. Looking out at the water, I thought, intrusively, of a line from Santiago, Hemingway’s old man of the sea. “Do not think about sin,” he told himself. “It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.”

I had been assured that the Service Members would cheerfully bring dinner, as they might on board, but I was eager to see more of my surroundings. I consulted the club’s summer dress code. It called for white trousers and a blue blazer, and it discouraged improvisation: “No pocket handkerchief is to be worn above the top breast-pocket bearing the Club’s coat of arms.” The handkerchief rule seemed navigable, but I did not possess white trousers, so I skirted the lobby and took refuge in the bar. At a table behind me, a man with flushed cheeks and a British accent had a head start. “You’re a shitty negotiator,” he told another man, with a laugh. “Maybe sales is not your game.” A few seats away, an American woman was explaining to a foreign friend how to talk with conservatives: “If they say, ‘The earth is flat,’ you say, ‘Well, I’ve sailed around it, so I’m not so sure about that.’ ”

In the morning, I had an appointment for coffee with Gaëlle Tallarida, the managing director of the Monaco Yacht Show, which the Daily Mail has called the “most shamelessly ostentatious display of yachts in the world.” Tallarida was not born to that milieu; she grew up on the French side of the border, swimming at public beaches with a view of boats sailing from the marina. But she had a knack for highly organized spectacle. While getting a business degree, she worked on a student theatre festival and found it thrilling. Afterward, she got a job in corporate events, and in 1998 she was hired at the yacht show as a trainee.

With this year’s show five months off, Tallarida was already getting calls about what she described as “the most complex part of my work”: deciding which owners get the most desirable spots in the marina. “As you can imagine, they’ve got very big egos,” she said. “On top of that, I’m a woman. They are sometimes arriving and saying”—she pointed into the distance, pantomiming a decree—“ ‘O.K., I want that! ’ ”

Just about everyone wants his superyacht to be viewed from the side, so that its full splendor is visible. Most harbors, however, have a limited number of berths with a side view; in Monaco, there are only twelve, with prime spots arrayed along a concrete dike across from the club. “We reserve the dike for the biggest yachts,” Tallarida said. But try telling that to a man who blew his fortune on a small superyacht.

Whenever possible, Tallarida presents her verdicts as a matter of safety: the layout must insure that “in case of an emergency, any boat can go out.” If owners insist on preferential placement, she encourages a yachting version of the Golden Rule: “What if, next year, I do that to you? Against you?”

Does that work? I asked. She shrugged. “They say, ‘Eh.’ ” Some would gladly risk being a victim next year in order to be a victor now. In the most awful moment of her career, she said, a man who was unhappy with his berth berated her face to face. “I was in the office, feeling like a little girl, with my daddy shouting at me. I said, ‘O.K., O.K., I’m going to give you the spot.’ ”

Securing just the right place, it must be said, carries value. Back at the yacht club, I was on my terrace, enjoying the latest delivery by the Service Members—an airy French omelette and a glass of preternaturally fresh orange juice. I thought guiltily of my wife, at home with our kids, who had sent a text overnight alerting me to a maintenance issue that she described as “a toilet debacle.”

Then I was distracted by the sight of a man on a yacht in the marina below. He was staring up at me. I went back to my brunch, but, when I looked again, there he was—a middle-aged man, on a mid-tier yacht, juiceless, on a greige banquette, staring up at my perfect terrace. A surprising sensation started in my chest and moved outward like a warm glow: the unmistakable pang of superiority.

That afternoon, I made my way to the bar, to meet the yacht club’s general secretary, Bernard d’Alessandri, for a history lesson. The general secretary was up to code: white trousers, blue blazer, club crest over the heart. He has silver hair, black eyebrows, and a tan that evokes high-end leather. “I was a sailing teacher before this,” he said, and gestured toward the marina. “It was not like this. It was a village.”

Before there were yacht clubs, there were jachten , from the Dutch word for “hunt.” In the seventeenth century, wealthy residents of Amsterdam created fast-moving boats to meet incoming cargo ships before they hit port, in order to check out the merchandise. Soon, the Dutch owners were racing one another, and yachting spread across Europe. After a visit to Holland in 1697, Peter the Great returned to Russia with a zeal for pleasure craft, and he later opened Nevsky Flot, one of the world’s first yacht clubs, in St. Petersburg.

For a while, many of the biggest yachts were symbols of state power. In 1863, the viceroy of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, ordered up a steel leviathan called El Mahrousa, which was the world’s longest yacht for a remarkable hundred and nineteen years, until the title was claimed by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt received guests aboard the U.S.S. Potomac, which had a false smokestack containing a hidden elevator, so that the President could move by wheelchair between decks.

But yachts were finding new patrons outside politics. In 1954, the Greek shipping baron Aristotle Onassis bought a Canadian Navy frigate and spent four million dollars turning it into Christina O, which served as his home for months on end—and, at various times, as a home to his companions Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Christina O had its flourishes—a Renoir in the master suite, a swimming pool with a mosaic bottom that rose to become a dance floor—but none were more distinctive than the appointments in the bar, which included whales’ teeth carved into pornographic scenes from the Odyssey and stools upholstered in whale foreskins.

For Onassis, the extraordinary investments in Christina O were part of an epic tit for tat with his archrival, Stavros Niarchos, a fellow shipping tycoon, which was so entrenched that it continued even after Onassis’s death, in 1975. Six years later, Niarchos launched a yacht fifty-five feet longer than Christina O: Atlantis II, which featured a swimming pool on a gyroscope so that the water would not slosh in heavy seas. Atlantis II, now moored in Monaco, sat before the general secretary and me as we talked.

Over the years, d’Alessandri had watched waves of new buyers arrive from one industry after another. “First, it was the oil. After, it was the telecommunications. Now, they are making money with crypto,” he said. “And, each time, it’s another size of the boat, another design.” What began as symbols of state power had come to represent more diffuse aristocracies—the fortunes built on carbon, capital, and data that migrated across borders. As early as 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”

Each iteration of fortune left its imprint on the industry. Sheikhs, who tend to cruise in the world’s hottest places, wanted baroque indoor spaces and were uninterested in sundecks. Silicon Valley favored acres of beige, more Sonoma than Saudi. And buyers from Eastern Europe became so abundant that shipyards perfected the onboard banya , a traditional Russian sauna stocked with birch and eucalyptus. The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, had minted a generation of new billionaires, whose approach to money inspired a popular Russian joke: One oligarch brags to another, “Look at this new tie. It cost me two hundred bucks!” To which the other replies, “You moron. You could’ve bought the same one for a thousand!”

In 1998, around the time that the Russian economy imploded, the young tycoon Roman Abramovich reportedly bought a secondhand yacht called Sussurro—Italian for “whisper”—which had been so carefully engineered for speed that each individual screw was weighed before installation. Soon, Russians were competing to own the costliest ships. “If the most expensive yacht in the world was small, they would still want it,” Maria Pevchikh, a Russian investigator who helps lead the Anti-Corruption Foundation, told me.

In 2008, a thirty-six-year-old industrialist named Andrey Melnichenko spent some three hundred million dollars on Motor Yacht A, a radical experiment conceived by the French designer Philippe Starck, with a dagger-shaped hull and a bulbous tower topped by a master bedroom set on a turntable that pivots to capture the best view. The shape was ridiculed as “a giant finger pointing at you” and “one of the most hideous vessels ever to sail,” but it marked a new prominence for Russian money at sea. Today, post-Soviet élites are thought to own a fifth of the world’s gigayachts.

Even Putin has signalled his appreciation, being photographed on yachts in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. In an explosive report in 2012, Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister, accused Putin of amassing a storehouse of outrageous luxuries, including four yachts, twenty homes, and dozens of private aircraft. Less than three years later, Nemtsov was fatally shot while crossing a bridge near the Kremlin. The Russian government, which officially reports that Putin collects a salary of about a hundred and forty thousand dollars and possesses a modest apartment in Moscow, denied any involvement.

Many of the largest, most flamboyant gigayachts are designed in Monaco, at a sleek waterfront studio occupied by the naval architect Espen Øino. At sixty, Øino has a boyish mop and the mild countenance of a country parson. He grew up in a small town in Norway, the heir to a humble maritime tradition. “My forefathers built wooden rowing boats for four generations,” he told me. In the late eighties, he was designing sailboats when his firm won a commission to design a megayacht for Emilio Azcárraga, the autocratic Mexican who built Televisa into the world’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster. Azcárraga was nicknamed El Tigre, for his streak of white hair and his comfort with confrontation; he kept a chair in his office that was unusually high off the ground, so that visitors’ feet dangled like children’s.

In early meetings, Øino recalled, Azcárraga grew frustrated that the ideas were not dazzling enough. “You must understand,” he said. “I don’t go to port very often with my boats, but, when I do, I want my presence to be felt.”

The final design was suitably arresting; after the boat was completed, Øino had no shortage of commissions. In 1998, he was approached by Paul Allen, of Microsoft, to build a yacht that opened the way for the Goliaths that followed. The result, called Octopus, was so large that it contained a submarine marina in its belly, as well as a helicopter hangar that could be converted into an outdoor performance space. Mick Jagger and Bono played on occasion. I asked Øino why owners obsessed with secrecy seem determined to build the world’s most conspicuous machines. He compared it to a luxury car with tinted windows. “People can’t see you, but you’re still in that expensive, impressive thing,” he said. “We all need to feel that we’re important in one way or another.”

Two people standing on city sidewalk on hot summer day.

In recent months, Øino has seen some of his creations detained by governments in the sanctions campaign. When we spoke, he condemned the news coverage. “Yacht equals Russian equals evil equals money,” he said disdainfully. “It’s a bit tragic, because the yachts have become synonymous with the bad guys in a James Bond movie.”

What about Scheherazade, the giant yacht that U.S. officials have alleged is held by a Russian businessman for Putin’s use? Øino, who designed the ship, rejected the idea. “We have designed two yachts for heads of state, and I can tell you that they’re completely different, in terms of the layout and everything, from Scheherazade.” He meant that the details said plutocrat, not autocrat.

For the time being, Scheherazade and other Øino creations under detention across Europe have entered a strange legal purgatory. As lawyers for the owners battle to keep the ships from being permanently confiscated, local governments are duty-bound to maintain them until a resolution is reached. In a comment recorded by a hot mike in June, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, marvelled that “people are basically being paid to maintain Russian superyachts on behalf of the United States government.” (It usually costs about ten per cent of a yacht’s construction price to keep it afloat each year. In May, officials in Fiji complained that a detained yacht was costing them more than a hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars a day.)

Stranger still are the Russian yachts on the lam. Among them is Melnichenko’s much maligned Motor Yacht A. On March 9th, Melnichenko was sanctioned by the European Union, and although he denied having close ties to Russia’s leadership, Italy seized one of his yachts—a six-hundred-million-dollar sailboat. But Motor Yacht A slipped away before anyone could grab it. Then the boat turned off the transponder required by international maritime rules, so that its location could no longer be tracked. The last ping was somewhere near the Maldives, before it went dark on the high seas.

The very largest yachts come from Dutch and German shipyards, which have experience in naval vessels, known as “gray boats.” But the majority of superyachts are built in Italy, partly because owners prefer to visit the Mediterranean during construction. (A British designer advises those who are weighing their choices to take the geography seriously, “unless you like schnitzel.”)

In the past twenty-two years, nobody has built more superyachts than the Vitellis, an Italian family whose patriarch, Paolo Vitelli, got his start in the seventies, manufacturing smaller boats near a lake in the mountains. By 1985, their company, Azimut, had grown large enough to buy the Benetti shipyards, which had been building enormous yachts since the nineteenth century. Today, the combined company builds its largest boats near the sea, but the family still works in the hill town of Avigliana, where a medieval monastery towers above a valley. When I visited in April, Giovanna Vitelli, the vice-president and the founder’s daughter, led me through the experience of customizing a yacht.

“We’re using more and more virtual reality,” she said, and a staffer fitted me with a headset. When the screen blinked on, I was inside a 3-D mockup of a yacht that is not yet on the market. I wandered around my suite for a while, checking out swivel chairs, a modish sideboard, blond wood panelling on the walls. It was convincing enough that I collided with a real-life desk.

After we finished with the headset, it was time to pick the décor. The industry encourages an introspective evaluation: What do you want your yacht to say about you? I was handed a vibrant selection of wood, marble, leather, and carpet. The choices felt suddenly grave. Was I cut out for the chiselled look of Cream Vesuvio, or should I accept that I’m a gray Cardoso Stone? For carpets, I liked the idea of Chablis Corn White—Paris and the prairie, together at last. But, for extra seating, was it worth splurging for the V.I.P. Vanity Pouf?

Some designs revolve around a single piece of art. The most expensive painting ever sold, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” reportedly was hung on the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-foot yacht Serene, after the Louvre rejected a Saudi demand that it hang next to the “Mona Lisa.” Art conservators blanched at the risks that excess humidity and fluctuating temperatures could pose to a five-hundred-year-old painting. Often, collectors who want to display masterpieces at sea commission replicas.

If you’ve just put half a billion dollars into a boat, you may have qualms about the truism that material things bring less happiness than experiences do. But this, too, can be finessed. Andrew Grant Super, a co-founder of the “experiential yachting” firm Berkeley Rand, told me that he served a uniquely overstimulated clientele: “We call them the bored billionaires.” He outlined a few of his experience products. “We can plot half of the Pacific Ocean with coördinates, to map out the Battle of Midway,” he said. “We re-create the full-blown battles of the giant ships from America and Japan. The kids have haptic guns and haptic vests. We put the smell of cordite and cannon fire on board, pumping around them.” For those who aren’t soothed by the scent of cordite, Super offered an alternative. “We fly 3-D-printed, architectural freestanding restaurants into the middle of the Maldives, on a sand shelf that can only last another eight hours before it disappears.”

For some, the thrill lies in the engineering. Staluppi, born in Brooklyn, was an auto mechanic who had no experience with the sea until his boss asked him to soup up a boat. “I took the six-cylinder engines out and put V-8 engines in,” he recalled. Once he started commissioning boats of his own, he built scale models to conduct tests in water tanks. “I knew I could never have the biggest boat in the world, so I says, ‘You know what? I want to build the fastest yacht in the world.’ The Aga Khan had the fastest yacht, and we just blew right by him.”

In Italy, after decking out my notional yacht, I headed south along the coast, to Tuscan shipyards that have evolved with each turn in the country’s history. Close to the Carrara quarries, which yielded the marble that Michelangelo turned into David, ships were constructed in the nineteenth century, to transport giant blocks of stone. Down the coast, the yards in Livorno made warships under the Fascists, until they were bombed by the Allies. Later, they began making and refitting luxury yachts. Inside the front gate of a Benetti shipyard in Livorno, a set of models depicted the firm’s famous modern creations. Most notable was the megayacht Nabila, built in 1980 for the high-living arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, with a hundred rooms and a disco that was the site of legendary decadence. (Khashoggi’s budget for prostitution was so extravagant that a French prosecutor later estimated he paid at least half a million dollars to a single madam in a single year.)

In 1987, shortly before Khashoggi was indicted for mail fraud and obstruction of justice (he was eventually acquitted), the yacht was sold to the real-estate developer Donald Trump, who renamed it Trump Princess. Trump was never comfortable on a boat—“Couldn’t get off fast enough,” he once said—but he liked to impress people with his yacht’s splendor. In 1991, while three billion dollars in debt, Trump ceded the vessel to creditors. Later in life, though, he discovered enthusiastic support among what he called “our beautiful boaters,” and he came to see quality watercraft as a mark of virtue—a way of beating the so-called élite. “We got better houses, apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are,” he told a crowd in Fargo, North Dakota. “Let’s call ourselves, from now on, the super-élite.”

In the age of oversharing, yachts are a final sanctum of secrecy, even for some of the world’s most inveterate talkers. Oprah, after returning from her sojourn with the Obamas, rebuffed questions from reporters. “What happens on the boat stays on the boat,” she said. “We talked, and everybody else did a lot of paddleboarding.”

I interviewed six American superyacht owners at length, and almost all insisted on anonymity or held forth with stupefying blandness. “Great family time,” one said. Another confessed, “It’s really hard to talk about it without being ridiculed.” None needed to be reminded of David Geffen’s misadventure during the early weeks of the pandemic, when he Instagrammed a photo of his yacht in the Grenadines and posted that he was “avoiding the virus” and “hoping everybody is staying safe.” It drew thousands of responses, many marked #EatTheRich, others summoning a range of nautical menaces: “At least the pirates have his location now.”

The yachts extend a tradition of seclusion as the ultimate luxury. The Medici, in sixteenth-century Florence, built elevated passageways, or corridoi , high over the city to escape what a scholar called the “clash of classes, the randomness, the smells and confusions” of pedestrian life below. More recently, owners of prized town houses in London have headed in the other direction, building three-story basements so vast that their construction can require mining engineers—a trend that researchers in the United Kingdom named “luxified troglodytism.”

Water conveys a particular autonomy, whether it’s ringing the foot of a castle or separating a private island from the mainland. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, gave startup funding to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit group co-founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson, which seeks to create floating mini-states—an endeavor that Thiel considered part of his libertarian project to “escape from politics in all its forms.” Until that fantasy is realized, a white boat can provide a start. A recent feature in Boat International , a glossy trade magazine, noted that the new hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar megayacht Victorious has four generators and “six months’ autonomy” at sea. The builder, Vural Ak, explained, “In case of emergency, god forbid, you can live in open water without going to shore and keep your food stored, make your water from the sea.”

Much of the time, superyachts dwell beyond the reach of ordinary law enforcement. They cruise in international waters, and, when they dock, local cops tend to give them a wide berth; the boats often have private security, and their owners may well be friends with the Prime Minister. According to leaked documents known as the Paradise Papers, handlers proposed that the Saudi crown prince take delivery of a four-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar yacht in “international waters in the western Mediterranean,” where the sale could avoid taxes.

Builders and designers rarely advertise beyond the trade press, and they scrupulously avoid leaks. At Lürssen, a German shipbuilding firm, projects are described internally strictly by reference number and code name. “We are not in the business for the glory,” Peter Lürssen, the C.E.O., told a reporter. The closest thing to an encyclopedia of yacht ownership is a site called SuperYachtFan, run by a longtime researcher who identifies himself only as Peter, with a disclaimer that he relies partly on “rumors” but makes efforts to confirm them. In an e-mail, he told me that he studies shell companies, navigation routes, paparazzi photos, and local media in various languages to maintain a database with more than thirteen hundred supposed owners. Some ask him to remove their names, but he thinks that members of that economic echelon should regard the attention as a “fact of life.”

To work in the industry, staff must adhere to the culture of secrecy, often enforced by N.D.A.s. On one yacht, O’Shannassy, the captain, learned to communicate in code with the helicopter pilot who regularly flew the owner from Switzerland to the Mediterranean. Before takeoff, the pilot would call with a cryptic report on whether the party included the presence of a Pomeranian. If any guest happened to overhear, their cover story was that a customs declaration required details about pets. In fact, the lapdog was a constant companion of the owner’s wife; if the Pomeranian was in the helicopter, so was she. “If no dog was in the helicopter,” O’Shannassy recalled, the owner was bringing “somebody else.” It was the captain’s duty to rebroadcast the news across the yacht’s internal radio: “Helicopter launched, no dog, I repeat no dog today”—the signal for the crew to ready the main cabin for the mistress, instead of the wife. They swapped out dresses, family photos, bathroom supplies, favored drinks in the fridge. On one occasion, the code got garbled, and the helicopter landed with an unanticipated Pomeranian. Afterward, the owner summoned O’Shannassy and said, “Brendan, I hope you never have such a situation, but if you do I recommend making sure the correct dresses are hanging when your wife comes into your room.”

In the hierarchy on board a yacht, the most delicate duties tend to trickle down to the least powerful. Yacht crew—yachties, as they’re known—trade manual labor and obedience for cash and adventure. On a well-staffed boat, the “interior team” operates at a forensic level of detail: they’ll use Q-tips to polish the rim of your toilet, tweezers to lift your fried-chicken crumbs from the teak, a toothbrush to clean the treads of your staircase.

Many are English-speaking twentysomethings, who find work by doing the “dock walk,” passing out résumés at marinas. The deals can be alluring: thirty-five hundred dollars a month for deckhands; fifty thousand dollars in tips for a decent summer in the Med. For captains, the size of the boat matters—they tend to earn about a thousand dollars per foot per year.

Yachties are an attractive lot, a community of the toned and chipper, which does not happen by chance; their résumés circulate with head shots. Before Andy Cohen was a talk-show host, he was the head of production and development at Bravo, where he green-lighted a reality show about a yacht crew: “It’s a total pressure cooker, and they’re actually living together while they’re working. Oh, and by the way, half of them are having sex with each other. What’s not going to be a hit about that?” The result, the gleefully seamy “Below Deck,” has been among the network’s top-rated shows for nearly a decade.

Billboard that resembles on for an injury lawyer but is actually of a woman saying I told you so.

To stay in the business, captains and crew must absorb varying degrees of petty tyranny. An owner once gave O’Shannassy “a verbal beating” for failing to negotiate a lower price on champagne flutes etched with the yacht’s logo. In such moments, the captain responds with a deferential mantra: “There is no excuse. Your instruction was clear. I can only endeavor to make it better for next time.”

The job comes with perilously little protection. A big yacht is effectively a corporation with a rigid hierarchy and no H.R. department. In recent years, the industry has fielded increasingly outspoken complaints about sexual abuse, toxic impunity, and a disregard for mental health. A 2018 survey by the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network found that more than half of the women who work as yacht crew had experienced harassment, discrimination, or bullying on board. More than four-fifths of the men and women surveyed reported low morale.

Karine Rayson worked on yachts for four years, rising to the position of “chief stew,” or stewardess. Eventually, she found herself “thinking of business ideas while vacuuming,” and tiring of the culture of entitlement. She recalled an episode in the Maldives when “a guest took a Jet Ski and smashed into a marine reserve. That damaged the coral, and broke his Jet Ski, so he had to clamber over the rocks and find his way to the shore. It was a private hotel, and the security got him and said, ‘Look, there’s a large fine, you have to pay.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, the boat will pay for it.’ ” Rayson went back to school and became a psychotherapist. After a period of counselling inmates in maximum-security prisons, she now works with yacht crew, who meet with her online from around the world.

Rayson’s clients report a range of scenarios beyond the boundaries of ordinary employment: guests who did so much cocaine that they had no appetite for a chef’s meals; armed men who raided a boat offshore and threatened to take crew members to another country; owners who vowed that if a young stew told anyone about abuse she suffered on board they’d call in the Mafia and “skin me alive.” Bound by N.D.A.s, crew at sea have little recourse.“We were paranoid that our e-mails were being reviewed, or we were getting bugged,” Rayson said.

She runs an “exit strategy” course to help crew find jobs when they’re back on land. The adjustment isn’t easy, she said: “You’re getting paid good money to clean a toilet. So, when you take your C.V. to land-based employers, they might question your skill set.” Despite the stresses of yachting work, Rayson said, “a lot of them struggle with integration into land-based life, because they have all their bills paid for them, so they don’t pay for food. They don’t pay for rent. It’s a huge shock.”

It doesn’t take long at sea to learn that nothing is too rich to rust. The ocean air tarnishes metal ten times as fast as on land; saltwater infiltrates from below. Left untouched, a single corroding ulcer will puncture tanks, seize a motor, even collapse a hull. There are tricks, of course—shield sensitive parts with resin, have your staff buff away blemishes—but you can insulate a machine from its surroundings for only so long.

Hang around the superyacht world for a while and you see the metaphor everywhere. Four months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war had eaten a hole in his myths of competence. The Western campaign to isolate him and his oligarchs was proving more durable than most had predicted. Even if the seizures of yachts were mired in legal disputes, Finley, the former C.I.A. officer, saw them as a vital “pressure point.” She said, “The oligarchs supported Putin because he provided stable authoritarianism, and he can no longer guarantee that stability. And that’s when you start to have cracks.”

For all its profits from Russian clients, the yachting industry was unsentimental. Brokers stripped photos of Russian yachts from their Web sites; Lürssen, the German builder, sent questionnaires to clients asking who, exactly, they were. Business was roaring, and, if some Russians were cast out of the have-yachts, other buyers would replace them.

On a cloudless morning in Viareggio, a Tuscan town that builds almost a fifth of the world’s superyachts, a family of first-time owners from Tel Aviv made the final, fraught preparations. Down by the docks, their new boat was suspended above the water on slings, ready to be lowered for its official launch. The scene was set for a ceremony: white flags in the wind, a plexiglass lectern. It felt like the obverse of the dockside scrum at the Palm Beach show; by this point in the buying process, nobody was getting vetted through binoculars. Waitresses handed out glasses of wine. The yacht venders were in suits, but the new owners were in upscale Euro casual: untucked linen, tight jeans, twelve-hundred-dollar Prada sneakers. The family declined to speak to me (and the company declined to identify them). They had come asking for a smaller boat, but the sales staff had talked them up to a hundred and eleven feet. The Victorians would have been impressed.

The C.E.O. of Azimut Benetti, Marco Valle, was in a buoyant mood. “Sun. Breeze. Perfect day to launch a boat, right?” he told the owners. He applauded them for taking the “first step up the big staircase.” The selling of the next vessel had already begun.

Hanging aloft, their yacht looked like an artifact in the making; it was easy to imagine a future civilization sifting the sediment and discovering that an earlier society had engaged in a building spree of sumptuous arks, with accommodations for dozens of servants but only a few lucky passengers, plus the occasional Pomeranian.

We approached the hull, where a bottle of spumante hung from a ribbon in Italian colors. Two members of the family pulled back the bottle and slung it against the yacht. It bounced off and failed to shatter. “Oh, that’s bad luck,” a woman murmured beside me. Tales of that unhappy omen abound. In one memorable case, the bottle failed to break on Zaca, a schooner that belonged to Errol Flynn. In the years that followed, the crew mutinied and the boat sank; after being re-floated, it became the setting for Flynn’s descent into cocaine, alcohol, orgies, and drug smuggling. When Flynn died, new owners brought in an archdeacon for an onboard exorcism.

In the present case, the bottle broke on the second hit, and confetti rained down. As the family crowded around their yacht for photos, I asked Valle, the C.E.O., about the shortage of new boats. “Twenty-six years I’ve been in the nautical business—never been like this,” he said. He couldn’t hire enough welders and carpenters. “I don’t know for how long it will last, but we’ll try to get the profits right now.”

Whatever comes, the white-boat world is preparing to insure future profits, too. In recent years, big builders and brokers have sponsored a rebranding campaign dedicated to “improving the perception of superyachting.” (Among its recommendations: fewer ads with girls in bikinis and high heels.) The goal is partly to defuse #EatTheRich, but mostly it is to soothe skittish buyers. Even the dramatic increase in yacht ownership has not kept up with forecasts of the global growth in billionaires—a disparity that represents the “one dark cloud we can see on the horizon,” as Øino, the naval architect, said during an industry talk in Norway. He warned his colleagues that they needed to reach those “potential yacht owners who, for some reason, have decided not to step up to the plate.”

But, to a certain kind of yacht buyer, even aggressive scrutiny can feel like an advertisement—a reminder that, with enough access and cash, you can ride out almost any storm. In April, weeks after the fugitive Motor Yacht A went silent, it was rediscovered in physical form, buffed to a shine and moored along a creek in the United Arab Emirates. The owner, Melnichenko, had been sanctioned by the E.U., Switzerland, Australia, and the U.K. Yet the Emirates had rejected requests to join those sanctions and had become a favored wartime haven for Russian money. Motor Yacht A was once again arrayed in almost plain sight, like semaphore flags in the wind. ♦

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The spookiest ghost ship stories from around the world

To get you in the mood for Halloween 2021, BOAT rounds up the best spooky stories of haunted ghost ships through the years, from the disappearing crew of Carroll A. Deering to the mystery of Mary Celeste ...

Although the earth's warming temperatures mean that the Northwest Passage is now free (albeit not easy) to sail through, this was not always the case. The search for the elusive passage claimed the lives of many ambitious sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; keen to find an alternate trade route to Asia, their ships would become lodged in Arctic ice, sealing their fate in the Great White North. The Octavius was one of many to meet such a fate, but the grim scenes found on board was what made the story of this ghost ship particularly terrifying.

The three-masted schooner departed from England in 1761, but was found off the coast of Greenland in 1775. Her captain had, unluckily decided to try and use the then nonexistent Northwest Passage (which superyacht Rosehearty has since cleared) to return home. The five men who boarded the derelict ship in 1775 were confronted with a ghostly sight; the entire 28-man crew was below deck, but frozen to death. The icy figure of the ship's captain was discovered sitting at his desk, writing in his logbook, pen still in hand. The last logbook entry was in 1762 - the ghost ship and her crew had been lost at sea for 13 years before being found.

SS Ourang Medan

One of the most notorious ghost ship stories, the tale of the SS Ourang Medan is shrouded in mystery. The legend goes that in 1947 a cargo ship off the coast of Indonesia put out a distress call with the words: “All officers including captain are dead lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead.” Before help could arrive, a second message was radioed in with just two words: “I die.”

Rescue workers who boarded the ship discovered to their horror that the crew members were indeed deceased with their bodies contorted and arms outstretched as if fending off an attacker, but without any signs of injury. An engine room fire then caused the ship to be abandoned and eventually sink, taking its ghastly secret, and any chance of an autopsy investigation, to Davy Jones’ locker.

Later reports contradicted this supernatural tale, however, with a 1948 newspaper article citing a survivor who blamed the deaths on a leak of its deadly cargo — sulphuric acid. What’s more, there is no record of the SS Orang Medan in Lloyd’s Registry, leading some to conclude that this ghost story is pure fabrication.

Mary Celeste

No ghost ship compendium would be complete without the tale of the brigantine Mary Celeste . Her fate has passed into maritime myth thanks in large part to a short story by Dr Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer and creator of Sherlock Holmes . What we do know is that the Mary Celeste had sailed from New York on November 7, 1872 bound for Genoa with a cargo of alcohol. Almost a month later on the afternoon of December 5, she was spotted drifting somewhere between the Azores and Portugal by Dei Gratia , another brigantine on an Atlantic crossing.

Captain Morehouse of the Dei Gratia knew Captain Briggs of the Mary Celeste to be a capable sailor and was suspicious. He ordered a boarding party to the Mary Celeste and his crew found a deserted ship in seaworthy condition. Captain Morehouse split his crew and sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar. To this date, the fate of Captain Briggs, his wife, child and crew of seven remains unsolved. Whether Briggs abandoned ship because of bad weather or whether there is a more sinister reason for their disappearance, will never be known.

This more recent tale concerns the catamaran Kaz II , which was found deserted off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The 9.75 metre yacht was seen drifting by a helicopter on April 18, 2007 a few days after she had set off from Airlie Beach, Queensland. When she was boarded on April 20 the maritime authorities found everything normal but no crew. Food was on the table, a laptop was on and the engine was running. The only indication of something out of the ordinary was a ripped sail.

Conspiracy theories as to the fate of the three men, inexperienced sailors in their 50s and 60s, abounded, ranging from pirates, insurance fraud and even paranormal activity. A coroner’s court found something far more prosaic – that the three friends had drowned after falling overboard as a result of their lack of nautical nous, though one cannot say for certain as their bodies have never been found.

The body of German sailor Manfred Fritz Bajorat was found slumped over the desk of his yacht Sajo in early 2016. The grim discovery was made by fishermen when they boarded the drifting yacht off Barabo in Surigeo del Sur province. After a post-mortem was carried out, local police said there were no signs of foul play and it was believed Bajorat died of natural causes, possibly a heart attack. It is thought his yacht had been adrift for many months before it was discovered and the dry, salty conditions on board had caused his body to mummify.

The Flying Dutchman

The most iconic ghost ship in maritime culture is certainly The Flying Dutchman . The legend tells that this haunted ship is unable to make port and is cursed to sail the seas forevermore. The fable of this Dutch man-of-war ship first appeared in the seventeenth century. The supposed captain of the ghost ship was apparently inspired by stories of Barend Fokke, whose exceptionally fast trips from the Netherlands to Java were presumed to be aided by the devil.

Sightings of the phantom ship, which apparently occur in bad weather, are supposed to be bad omens for those who pass her. The most famous report of The Flying Dutchman was by King George V, who apparently saw her all aglow along the coast of Australia as they were sailing in the Bass straight. The ship has become a famous trope in literature, art and movies since; she inspired Richard Wagner's opera of the same name, and more recently made an appearance in the 2006 film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest .

Carroll A Deering

The fate of the crew of five-masted schooner Carroll A Deering , which ran aground off North Carolina in January 1921, was investigated by no less than five US government departments. In the process, it became one of the most infamous maritime mysteries of all time. The ship was returning to Norfolk, Virginia after delivering a consignment of coal to Rio de Janeiro. The captain, W B Wormwell, had been drafted in on the first leg of the journey due to the illness of the original captain and was said to have an uneasy relationship with the crew. Thus, mutiny was suspected as the most likely reason when the Carroll A Deering was found deserted after being boarded by rescuers on February 4, 1921. The ship’s navigation equipment and lifeboats had gone but, to add the mystery, food had been prepared for the next meal.

Japanese ghost ships

The Japanese Coast Guard has reported around 200 instances of ghost ships over the last few years. However, unlike the Bermuda Triangle, the boats have been found, and with human cargo on board. One such recent incident happened off Fukui, a port city on the main Honshu island. The decomposing corpses of seven people were found on a drifting wooden fishing vessel in mid-December last year. The Japanese authorities are said to be puzzled by the fate of the ‘fishermen’ but one theory for this and the other floating ghost ships is they were defectors from the totalitarian North Korean regime across the treacherous sea to the west.

Auspiciously timed, this ghost ship was last seen leaving a port in Tawain on Halloween, 2002. The 20-metre boat was then found abandoned in the Timor Sea, within an 80 nautical mile range of Australia's Rowley Shoals. The fishing boat's owner had last been in touch with the captain in December of that year, but by January 2003, High Aim 6 was discovered unmanned. Strangely, the vessel was found with its engines fully fuelled and running, with all of the crew's personal belongings and provisions on board. There were also no apparent signs of struggle or damage above or below deck. The mystery remains unsolved; the only information the authorities received was from a single crew member they had managed to track down and take into custody. He claimed that the crew of High Aim 6 had mutinied, but no reason was given as to why.

HMS Resolute

HMS Resolute was a British Royal Navy ship found in 1854, abandoned and adrift, off the coast of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic . She had originally been sent to find the remains of another lost expedition, that of Sir John Franklin's to locate the then frozen Northwest Passage, but met a similar fate. HMS Resolute had become lodged in an ice floe and abandoned by the crew, of whom no trace was ever found.

An eerie scene met those who had discovered the ghostly ship in 1855; the captain's cabin remained undisturbed with a teapot, bible and glasses full of liquor on the desk. A British Flag had been left draped over the chair of the ships's commander, Captain Kellett. HMS Resolute was eventually retrieved and retired in 1879. Her timbers were used to construct the Resolute desk, which has been used by almost every American president in the Oval Office since the 19th century.

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Boat Story from Fleabag producers Harry and Jack Williams will air on Freevee on March 12. It landed well critically in the UK and secured around 5M viewers per episode. Alongside Haggard and Joseph, the series ensemble includes Tcheky Karyo ( The Missing, Baptiste ), BAFTA-winner Joanna Scanlan ( After Love, Notes on A Scandal ), Craig Fairbrass (One Piece, Villain and Muscle) , Phil Daniels ( House of the Dragon, Quadrophenia ) and Ethan Lawrence (Bad Education).

Jury Duty streamer Freevee came on board early to land the show a U.S. co-producer (it also has rights in Germany and will launch in the nation on April 18) and Jack Williams recently told Deadline the SVoD was “always supportive of our tone” on Boat Story. It was the Williams’ first attempt at directing.

The series is EP’d by Christopher Aird ( Baptiste, Liar, The Tourist ), Sarah Hammond ( Back to Life, Fleabag, The Tourist ) and Daniel Walker (The Tourist ), with Tommy Bulfin and Nawfal Faizullah as executive producers for the BBC . Boat Story is produced by the Williams’ All3Media-backed Two Brothers Pictures in association with distributor All3 Media International.

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The True Story Behind ‘The Boys in the Boat’

The Boys in the Boat shows that rowing is not just for the elite, but for those who are determined to overcome adversity.
The film illustrates the toughness of the sport and the grueling training that the rowers had to endure.
Against the backdrop of fascism's rise in Germany, the University of Washington crew team's victory at the Olympics was a triumph of will and determination.

After nearly a decade since the rights to the story were first sold , and thanks to George Clooney for directing and co-producing, The Boys in the Boat is becoming a well-deserved film adaptation. The film stars Callum Turner as Joe Rantz, a freshman at the University of Washington and a new recruit to their rowing program, as well as Joel Edgerton as the head coach of the rowing team, Al Ulbrickson.

Based on a book of the same name by Daniel James Brown , The Boys In The Boat is about the rise of the men’s eight-man rowing crew from the University of Washington that went on to compete and win in the Summer Olympics in Berlin of 1936. Guided by head coach Al Ulbrickson, and with the help of legendary boat maker George Pocock, the team had all the components for success, as long as they could become truly one with each other and the boat they were racing in. The true story is one of struggle, determination, and finding one’s swing in life.

The Boys in the Boat

A 1930s-set story centered on the University of Washington's rowing team, from their Depression-era beginnings to winning gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Release Date 2023-12-25

Director George Clooney

Cast Peter Guinness, Joel Edgerton, Callum Turner, Sam Strike

Genres Biography, Drama, Sports

The Boys in the Boat Shows Us Rowing Isn’t Just for the Elites

Depression-era America saw struggles the likes of which were unprecedented at the time. Many working-class and lower-income families lost everything and had to make tough choices to make ends meet. One family in particular, that of Joe Rantz, is in such desperate straights that his father and stepmother outright abandon him in his early teens. Rantz had to work several different odd jobs throughout high school just to support himself, and was still able to maintain good grades in school. According to the book, Rantz learns that The University of Washington offers those on the rowing team the ability to take a part-time job to pay for tuition. With this in mind, Rantz, along with roughly 180 other boys, show up to try out for a spot, despite the stigma that the sport is reserved for those from elite families.

The Boys in the Boat spends a good deal of time outlining what it was like to live and work back then as a young person trying to educate themselves. Rantz is no exception as he, along with several of his teammates, have to work labor-intensive jobs in between school years to feed themselves and afford tuition. This helps the team to feel more connected to each other and eventually allows Rantz to feel part of a whole—something his coaches proclaim is essential to develop a synchronization that is paramount to a competitive racing lineup. As the lineup for the varsity boat comes together, this increase in connection between the team helps develop their ability to row in perfect harmony, referred to by some in the sport as having ‘swing.’

‘The Boys in the Boat’ Illustrates How Tough the Sport Can Be

Just because one makes the team—which Joe Rantz along with eight other first-year students after nearly a year of trying out eventually did—doesn’t mean it's smooth sailing from there. Ulbrickson already had a reputation for being a tough coach, and was going to make sure these boys were ready for competition, no matter how many pass out in the process. There are grueling practice sessions that ultimately pay off, as the new freshman boat surpasses all expectations and crushes its rival from U.C. Berkley. They even defeat East Coast teams at the coveted Poughkeepsie Regatta in New York. Along with the mastercraft of George Pocock making the racing shells, it is at this point that Ulbrickson realizes he has a team that could be trained to compete at the international level.

'The Boys in the Boat' Review: George Clooney Should Stick To Acting

Joe Rantz’s story takes a series of ups and downs following his freshman year at college. He is switched onto and off of the varsity boat several times as Ulbrickson attempts to figure out the perfect combination of rowers to make a boat that would be able to compete at an international level. Rantz’s family life continues to be one of isolation as his stepmother and father forbid him from seeing the rest of the family even though they lived not far from his school. By the fall of 1935, Rantz is working harder than ever to attempt to make the final lineup in his boat, and feels that connection to his team, and something bigger than himself, that he has wanted his whole life. By January 1936, after a summer of working alongside more of his team at the Grand Coulee Dam, Joe finally gets into ‘swing’ with his team and a competitive boat comes together. Joe Rantz officially made the boat to compete for an Olympic spot. The team ends up destroying the competition during their regular season and the boat goes on to win the Princeton Olympic trials. The University of Washington's eight-man crew was officially headed to the Berlin Olympics.

‘Boys in the Boat’ is Set Against the Backdrop Fascism’s Rise

As Rantz and the rest of his team develop their skills as rowers, the story sets the stage for the importance of the Olympics of 1936. Hitler had been in power since ’33 and the world was watching with careful eyes the state of Germany as a big player on the world stage. The book details the lengths Hitler went to in order to show the world that Germany was a major power, throwing tons of government funds towards the Olympics to make Berlin a city that exemplified his vision of the country . This included removing antisemitic signs, and forcibly removing Romani families from the city. The Third Reich even commissioned new propaganda films to be made that glorified fascist ideals. This led to widespread unease among world nations that were slated to send athletes to the games.

By 1935, there was an all-out international movement calling for the boycott of the upcoming Olympics in Germany . Although many opposed, the Amateur Athletic Union committee ultimately decided that they would still send athletes to Berlin to compete. When the University of Washington’s Crew team did get to Berlin, they were in awe of the way the city presented itself as tolerant and modern. There was even a new Olympic stadium built just for the games. It is important to note that immediately following the Olympic Games, all antisemitic literature and signs were back in print and circulation. Even with all its self-perceived might and misplaced superiority, it was the Fascists that would end up on the losing end of the Olympic Games, at least where rowing was concerned.

The Odds Were Stacked Against ‘The Boys in the Boat’

Upon arriving for their ultimate race, several factors pointed to disadvantages for the boys. For one, their stroke seat, or rower that sits in front of all the others and sets the pace, falls sick on the journey over. This would carry into race day, but nonetheless, he would still compete. All members had gained weight due to the boat ride to Berlin offering a food buffet. The Washington crew team was placed in the outermost lane for the race. This was more exposed to the elements, impacting how the boat would perform. Spirits were low even after qualifying for the final race after beating the U.K. in the preliminary heat. When the starting gun went off, there was a delay in the U.S. boat as they didn’t hear the shot, putting them at a distance disadvantage as well.

When the University of Washington crew did finally get the boat moving, they were already behind. The sick stroke seat had his eyes closed and was barely holding a pace throughout much of the race. Thankfully, the coxswain kept calling to him and within the last six hundred meters, he snapped out of it. At this point, the U.S. is a boat length behind and had only the last quarter or so of the race left. Somehow, they were able to reach a stroke rate they had never hit before and achieve that ‘swing’ while doing so. It was a nail-biting finish but ultimately, they surpassed Germany and Italy, winning the race by just over half a second . A victory that perhaps foreshadowed the following war years in the boys’ eyes and one well-earned.

After the Olympics, the members of the Varsity Crew from the University of Washington would graduate and go on to live the rest of their lives. Joe Rantz passed away in 2007 and his story, as well as that of the crew that went to the 1936 Olympics, was largely left behind in the mainstream until "The Boys in the Boat" book came out. Now with the film adaptation, more people will be aware of the story of Joe Rantz and the rest of the crew. Hard beginnings and odds stacked, the story behind The Boys in the Boat is one of triumphs of will and determination.

The Boys in the Boat is now in theaters in the U.S.

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The True Story Behind ‘The Boys in the Boat’

JILL ZWAANS

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Jill Zwaans is the proud founder of YACHT STORY with over 20 years of experience in the yacht charter business. The passion for yachting runs in her family as her grandfather built the first Carlo Riva yacht in 1973 and she spent all holidays on her family's sailing yacht. Sailing is part of her life and after collecting several sailing certificates, she became a sailing instructor herself. Today, she is still active in Snipe sailing and Superyacht regattas. Jill started her career as a charter assistant in Monaco for a reputable broker house and she hasn’t missed a Yacht Show since. She completed a Masters degree in Maritime Science and moved to Australia as the Sales & Marketing director for a shipyard, traveling frequently between Australia, North-America and Europe, facilitating luxury motor yacht sales. After spending a summer in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, working for the dealer of the shipyard, she shifted her focus to yacht charters. Jill continued developing her charter broking skills between the French Riviera and London. In 2010 she returned to Belgium with the strong ambition to set-up a charter business in the Benelux for yachts based worldwide. In 2021 she founded Yacht Story with the mission to guide you and shape your travel expectations into unique private yachting escapes to make memories at sea!

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Axel's grandfather had owned a shipyard in Flanders, which meant that Axel started learning the fundamentals of boat building from a young age. As a passionate sailor he obtained all the certificates necessary allowing him to discover the best sailing holiday locations through his own experience. Axel completed a degree at the De Ruyter Maritime Institute in Vlissingen - Netherlands, which he followed up with a career as a marine officer. After several years aboard cruise vessels and yachts, he traded in the sea for land and joined the YACHT STORY team in Spring 2022. His on-board experience combined with yacht management skills made hiring him as Charter Executive and Central Agent (CA) an obvious decision.

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As an experienced and popular yacht charter captain, Maurits is the ideal expansion of the YACHT STORY team. With his nautical knowledge and positive 'Can Do' attitude, he has the perfect feel of what yacht owners want and how he can convert their asset into a popular charter vessel. Maurits grew up in Antwerp, Belgium, where a passion for ‘competitive’ sailing and yachting has started. Other than this sailing career, all water sports like windsurfing, kitesurfing, (free) diving, spearfishing, wakeboarding and mono-skiing have always been a yearly activity. Like all of us, Maurits’ job is his passion! This is clear in the personal touch he brings to his work, in his confident manner and meticulous eye to detail when preparing a charter. His technical background drives him to his additional position as Marketing Planner to boost the promotion side of the Yacht Story worldwide fleet.

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The Bahamas Pigs: How Did They Get There?

Have you heard the fascinating and mysterious story of the Bahamas pigs? These non-native animals inhabit a small island that lies south of Nassau. Nobody knows how they ended up on this sandy spit of land, but theories are plentiful. This arti....

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Discover the Wonders of Seychelles by Yacht

Tucked away in the middle of the Indian Ocean lies the Seychelles archipelago, A hidden gem that turns yachting dreams into reality. The incredible beauty and calmness, crystal clear turquoise waters and untouched sandy beaches create a one-of-a-kin....

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Caribbean Delight: From the Grenadines to the BVI - ...

The Caribbean islands from the idyllic Grenadines to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) are a paradise on Earth. With their pristine beaches, crystal-clear waters, and vibrant cultures, these tropical havens offer something for everyone, making them a ....

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5 things to know about North Palm Beach mega-yacht owner, billionaire Michael Bozzuto

Billionaire Michael Bozzuto is fighting for the right to moor his 164-foot mega-yacht behind a waterfront house he owns at 932 Shore Dr. in North Palm Beach.

But the Village of North Palm Beach has told Bozzuto he doesn't have this right.

It's the latest example of how big money landing in Florida is running up against Old Florida residents who want their communities to stay low-key.

After years of disputes over the yacht, Bozzuto recently filed a lawsuit against the municipality, asking a judge to agree that he has the right to the use of his house and his dock.

Who is Michael Bozzuto, and why is he suing the Village of North Palm Beach?

Here are five things to know:

1. Billionaire Michael Bozzuto is a longtime North Palm Beach resident

Bozzuto is the billionaire owner of a privately held, family-owned supermarket wholesaler in Connecticut called Bozzuto's Inc. The company is a distributor of food and household products to retailers in New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Bozzuto's was founded by Michael's late father, Adam.

Even though Bozzuto's Inc. is based in Connecticut, Bozzuto has lived in the Village of North Palm Beach, population 13,000, for 20 years.

2. Besides owning a yacht, what are Michael Bozzuto's hobbies?

In addition to being a businessman, Bozzuto is an investor and philanthropist. He is a longtime supporter of the Special Olympics.

He is also an under-the-radar resident who likes to collect houses and yachts, said his lawyer, former Florida Bar president Gregory Coleman.

Bozzuto bought the motor yacht, Honey, about 10 years ago for an undisclosed sum. The Westport mega-yacht was built in 2007 and is the largest of several yachts Bozzuto owns.

More: Cannonsport Marina sells for $58.5 million in big deal for tiny Palm Beach Shores

Bozzuto also owns four houses in the Village of North Palm Beach. This includes the house at 932 Shore Dr., where he wants to dock Honey. In 2014, Bozzuto paid $840,247 for the house, which was built in 1961, according to Palm Beach County property records.

The property is on a rare corner bordered on the north and east by navigable waters that provide access to the Atlantic Ocean via the Lake Worth Inlet. The east-facing dock is large enough to accommodate Honey.

Bozzuto's residence is in another part of North Palm Beach, on Harbour Isles Court.

More: Illegal boat slips are popping near Palm Beach Gardens. Residents want regulators to act

3. Michael Bozzuto's net worth isn't known but billionaire owns property outside of North Palm Beach, too

Bozzuto made waves recently when in January he paid $31.1 million for a waterfront house in nearby Palm Beach Shores.

The Singer Island house with two docks stretches into the Intracoastal Waterway just north of the Palm Beach/Lake Worth Inlet. The three-lot parcel on 1.5 acres has about 200 feet of waterfront.

The property was bought from an owner whose family had owned it for decades. It's unclear if Bozzuto will make any changes to the property.

In a brief interview in February, Bozzuto said: “It’s a house, and it will probably be a house."

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4. Why can't Bozzuto park his yacht behind his North Palm Beach house?

The Village of North Palm Beach rules say that a private dock or pier can only be used by the occupant of the house. But the village doesn't define the word "occupant."

Bozzuto's lawsuit said while the village has discussed whether to define an occupant as a resident, it never has done so.

Hundreds of other property owners dock a boat behind their North Palm Beach house but do not live there year-round.

Therefore Bozzuto said he's being singled out because neighbors just don't like his boat's big size. This selective enforcement is wrong, his lawsuit said.

Show me the money? Here it is: West Palm and Palm Beach rank in top 5 as cities with fastest growth in millionaires

5. What does North Palm Beach think about the lawsuit?

Unfortunately, this is a mystery until the village responds to Bozzuto's lawsuit in public court records.

The village's longtime lawyer, Lenard Rubin, who knows the municipality's history with boats and houses, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the village's manager, Chuck Huff.

Alexandra Clough is a business writer and columnist at The Palm Beach Post . You can reach her at [email protected] . Twitter: @acloughpbp . Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

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3 Men Rescued from Pacific Island After Writing ‘Help’ With Palm Leaves

American rescuers found the lost sailors on a tiny uninhabited island in Micronesia with a damaged boat and the word spelled out on the beach.

The word “help” is spelled out in palm fronds on a beach.

By John Yoon

Three men who were stranded on a remote Pacific island for more than a week were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after spelling out “HELP” on a beach using palm leaves.

The lost men were found on Pikelot, an uninhabited island about 100 miles northwest of their home, alongside their damaged boat on Sunday by an American military aircraft, the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Guam said in a statement .

The men, who were experienced mariners in their 40s, set sail on March 31 from Polowat Atoll, an island that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia, in a 20-foot open skiff powered by an outboard motor. After their unintended delay, the Coast Guard said, the men had been safely returned home Tuesday evening.

The search began on Saturday when a woman sent out a distress call to the Coast Guard, reporting that her three uncles had not returned home after almost a week away. The Coast Guard embarked on the search with a U.S. Navy aircraft crew.

Pikelot is a tiny dot in the Pacific Ocean covered in palm trees and bushes, measuring less than 2,000 feet in length. The Micronesian island was part of a search area that the Coast Guard said spanned more than 100,000 square miles.

This week’s rescue was not the first from Pikelot involving huge letters spelled in the sand. In 2020, three other men whose boat ran out of fuel wrote “SOS” in the sand , allowing them to be spotted by American rescuers.

In this week’s search, a breakthrough came when a Navy reconnaissance aircraft that was dispatched from Okinawa, Japan, spotted the men from the air.

“In a remarkable testament to their will to be found, the mariners spelled out ‘HELP’ on the beach using palm leaves, a crucial factor in their discovery,” Lt. Chelsea Garcia, who coordinated the search and rescue mission on Sunday, said in the statement.

The aircraft crew deployed survival packages to help the men before the Coast Guard dropped them a radio a day later from a military aircraft sent from Hawaii, establishing a line of communication.

“They expressed a desire for assistance in returning to Polowat,” the Coast Guard said, adding that the men had said they were in good health and had access to food and water, but that their skiff had been damaged and its engine was not functional.

On Tuesday, a Coast Guard ship, the USCGC Oliver Henry, arrived at the island and picked up the men to bring them home.

“It’s incredibly rewarding to see the faces of those we’ve helped,” said Lt. Ray Cerrato, the commanding officer of the ship.

A similar rescue also took place in Micronesian waters in 2016 when three men whose boat was overturned swam two miles to reach a tiny island, on which they wrote “HELP” in the sand . The Coast Guard rescued them.

Two other people who went missing later that year were saved from a Micronesian island after writing “SOS ” in the sand.

John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news. More about John Yoon

DEVELOPING: Israel carries out strike in Iran

Luxury yachts and other myths: How Republican lawmakers echo Russian propaganda

A woman examines the rubble of a destroyed building

Two senior Republican lawmakers, the chairs of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees, say their colleagues are echoing Russian state propaganda against Ukraine.

Researchers who study disinformation say Reps. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and Michael McCaul, R-Texas, are merely acknowledging what has been clear for some time: Russian propaganda aimed at undermining U.S. and European support for Ukraine has steadily seeped into America’s political conversation over the past decade, taking on a life of its own.

McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Puck News he thinks “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”

Turner, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told CNN that anti-Ukraine messages from Russia are “being uttered on the House floor.”

Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Mike Turner, R-Ohio, leave a House Republican Conference candidate forum

For the past decade, since Russia’s first military incursion into Ukraine in 2014, Moscow has spread propaganda and disinformation in a bid to undercut U.S. and European military support for Ukraine, according to U.S. and Western officials.

Some of the arguments, distortions and falsehoods spread by Russia have taken root, mostly among right-wing pro-Trump outlets and Republican politicians, researchers say, including that Ukraine’s government is too corrupt to benefit from Western aid and that the Biden family has alleged corrupt ties to Ukraine.

Russia, in keeping with traditional propaganda techniques, seeks to make its case and tarnish Ukraine through a mixture of outright falsehoods, half-truths, inferences or simply amplifying and promoting arguments already being made by American or European commentators and politicians, researchers say.

The propaganda is sometimes spread covertly, through fake online accounts, or openly by Russian officials and state media. As a result, the origin of some allegations or criticisms is often opaque, especially when a certain accusation or perception has gained wide acceptance, leaving no clear fingerprints.

Early in the war, a false story boosted by Russian propaganda — that the U.S. had helped Ukraine build biological weapons labs — gained traction on right-wing social media and was touted by then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Russia also is conducting a parallel propaganda campaign in Europe. Belgium’s prime minister said Thursday that his government is investigating alleged Russian bribes to members of the European Parliament as part of Moscow’s campaign to undermine support for Ukraine. Czech law enforcement officials last month alleged that a former pro-Russian member of Ukraine’s parliament, Viktor Medvedchuk, was behind a Prague-based Russian propaganda network designed to promote opposition to aiding Ukraine.

Here are some examples of Republican lawmakers using arguments often promoted by Russian propaganda:

Buying yachts

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with members of Congress behind closed doors in December to appeal for more U.S. help for his country’s troops, some lawmakers raised questions about Ukraine allegedly buying yachts with American aid money.

Zelenskyy made clear that was not the case, according to Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a strong supporter of arming Ukraine. “I think the notion of corruption came up because some have said we can’t do it, because people will buy yachts with the money,” Tillis told CNN. “[Zelenskyy] disabused people of those notions.”

Where did the yacht rumor come from?

Pro-Russian actors and websites promoted a narrative alleging Zelenskyy bought two superyachts with U.S. aid dollars. One Russia-based propaganda site, DC Weekly , published a story last November that included photos of two luxury yachts, called Lucky Me and My Legacy , which it alleged were bought for $75 million.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a vocal opponent of military aid to Ukraine, in November retweeted a post about the alleged yacht purchase from the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Russian-based propaganda outlet directed by Russia’s intelligence services, according to the Treasury Department. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on the organization, accusing it of spreading disinformation and interfering in U.S. elections.

Another outspoken critic of aid to Ukraine, Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, also made a similar claim.

In a December interview with former President Donald Trump’s White House adviser Steve Bannon, Vance claimed that members of Congress wanted to cut Social Security benefits to provide more aid to Ukraine, and that money would allegedly be used for Zelenskyy’s ministers to “buy a bigger yacht.”

“There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelenskyy’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?” Vance said. “Kiss my ass, Steve. It’s not happening.”

Donald Trump looks as J.D. Vance speaks.

The tale of Zelenskyy’s luxury yacht, however, turned out to be totally false . The yachts cited in the DC Weekly article remain up for sale , the owners told The Associated Press.

Two academics at Clemson University, disinformation researchers Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, found that DC Weekly ran numerous stories copied from other sites that were rewritten by artificial intelligence engines. The articles had bylines with fake names along with headshots copied from other online sites. DC Weekly appeared to be a Russian effort to launder false information through a seemingly legitimate news site as part of an attempt to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine, according to the researchers .

Asked by reporters about Vance’s comments, Tillis said: “I think it’s bullshit. ...If you’re talking about giving money to Ukrainian ministers — total and unmitigated bullshit.”

Greene’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Vance’s spokesperson said the senator was making a rhetorical point about how he opposed sending U.S. assistance to what he sees as a corrupt country, but was not asserting the yacht stories online were accurate.

Vance’s office referred NBC News to an earlier response to the BBC on the same topic:

“For years, everyone in the West recognized that Ukraine was one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Somehow everyone forgot that just as we started sending them billions of dollars in foreign aid.”

Enabling ‘corruption’

Russian state media for years has painted Ukraine as deeply corrupt, and has argued that the U.S. and its allies are wasting money and military hardware by assisting such an allegedly corrupt government.

“This is absolutely a line that they have pushed, and then once it appears in the Western ecosystem, other [Russian] media picks it up and it gets recycled back,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

This line of argument has gained traction partly because Ukraine does face a genuine corruption problem.

Russia’s effort to focus attention on corruption in Ukraine reflects a long-established propaganda method of using facts or partial truths to anchor a broader assertion or accusation, sometimes making a leap in logic, Schafer and other researchers said. Russia’s message amounts to: Ukraine is corrupt, therefore U.S. and Western aid will be stolen and wasted.

Schafer said it was ironic for Russia, a country mired in corruption and kleptocracy, to be leveling accusations about corruption.

Republican Rep. Mary Miller has said she strongly opposes more assistance for Ukraine because it amounts to sending cash to “corrupt oligarchs.”

“With Zelensky coming to DC this week to ask for more money, I will continue to vote AGAINST sending your tax $$ to corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine for a proxy war that could have ended in ‘22,” Miller wrote in a post on X in December.

The Illinois lawmaker also echoed another assertion that often appears in Russian media, that the Biden administration allegedly undermined efforts by Russia to avoid war with Ukraine.

“A peace deal was on the table that [Ukraine] and [Russia] were both ready to sign, but Biden said NO,” she wrote.

There was in fact no proposed peace agreement that Russia and Ukraine were prepared to sign before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to U.S. and European officials. As Russian troops massed on the border of Ukraine, Western governments urged Russia not to invade and warned there would be economic and diplomatic consequences.

Reuters has reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected a possible deal to avert a war that had been discussed with Kyiv by Russia’s envoy to Ukraine. The Kremlin said the report was inaccurate and has said Russia tried for years to arrive at an understanding with Ukraine.

As for corruption in Ukraine, Zelenskyy has vowed to tackle the problem, sacking senior officials in some recent cases. But some civil society groups have criticized his approach and Ukrainians say corruption is the country’s second-most serious problem, after the Russian invasion, according to a poll conducted last year.

In an annual survey, Transparency International said Ukraine made progress toward addressing the issue and now ranks 104th out of 180 countries on its Corruption Perceptions Index , climbing 12 places up from its previous ranking.

Ukraine is not alone among countries that receive U.S. and other foreign aid but struggle with corruption. Supporters of assisting Ukraine argue it would undermine America’s influence in the world and its humanitarian efforts if Washington withheld foreign aid from every country where there were reports of corruption.

Miller’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The Biden family and Ukraine

Republicans have repeatedly alleged that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have corrupt ties to Ukraine, and that they sought $5 million in bribes from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma to protect the firm from an investigation by Ukraine’s prosecutor general.

There is no credible evidence for the allegations. A key source for the accusations against the Bidens is a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, who was arrested in February on federal charges of fabricating the bribery claims. Smirnov says he was fed information by Russian intelligence.

Republicans had heavily promoted Smirnov’s allegations against the Bidens, seeing them as crucial to a planned impeachment effort against the president that has since fizzled .

“In my estimation, that is probably the clearest example of Russian propaganda working its way into the American political system,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council.

GOP Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona cited the false bribery allegations in expressing his opposition to providing assistance to Ukraine.

“In exchange for … bribe money from Ukraine, Joe Biden has dished out over $100 billion in taxpayer money to fund the war in Ukraine. I will not assist this corruption by sending more money to the authoritarian Ukrainian regime,” Gosar said in a statement in October.

Gosar’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Dan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Syedah Asghar is a Capitol Hill researcher for NBC News and is based in Washington, D.C.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

NEWMAC Boat of the Week-WPI Women's Varsity Eight-2024

Women’s Rowing Varsity Eight Repeats as NEWMAC Boat of the Week

was not found

Body found in search for teenager missing in Torres Strait waters

An aerial shot of a stretch of tropical coastline.

A body has been found in the search for a teenager missing in Torres Strait waters after a dinghy broke down overnight.

Queensland police said a 13-year-old boy swam about 500 metres to shore at Saibai Island, about four kilometres south of Papua New Guinea, and raised the alarm.

The boy told police his 16-year-old crewmate attempted to swim but failed to make it to shore in rainy weather.

Police said the identification of the body was underway.

Earlier today, Queensland Police Torres Strait Acting Inspector Anthony Moynihan said the younger boy swam ashore near the airport and went home.

"He's in a bit of shock at the moment," he said.

"He's talking with police up there."

Acting Inspector Moynihan believes the boys were about 500m north of the island when they abandoned the 5m fibreglass "banana boat" – a popular design in the area – after the engine broke down.

Acting Inspector Moynihan, based on Thursday Island, was unsure whether the boat had been found or if there was alternative propulsion aboard.

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Felim Hanniffy said conditions on the water in the region were far from ideal after a tropical low formed within a very active trough in the are over the last few days.

He said it looked as if the worst of the storms had now contracted to the west after several days of bad weather.

"We had quite a bit of squally thunderstorm activity moving across the area," Mr Hanniffy said.

He said winds were not too strong but the area was still hazardous.

"Across the northern parts of the Torres Strait we've got light to moderate north- to north-easterlies in play up here," Mr Hanniffy said.

"Certainly for the rest of the day that risk remains, given that proximity of that low, though it has moved away.

"There's still a risk of some potentially squally shower and thunderstorm activity related to that system."

X (formerly Twitter)
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A recent story from CBC News Atlantic revealed that Evel Knievel's custom 70's yacht has turned up in Canada. It is a saga that gleefully taps into our affinity for #weirdboats, so naturally we dug into the strange story behind a floating shrine to an iconic stuntman. Read more.
SuperYacht Times
At the time of her sale, Worthy's last known asking price was $2,450,000. All the latest news and information from across the superyacht industry, with reports from SYT's editorial team, up-to-date market information, insights into the latest superyacht concepts and features on upcoming events and technical innovations.
August 10-14: the top 8 yachting stories you can't afford to miss
A new sale and a new name: 39.6 metre motor yacht Centium has been sold and renamed Silentworld II. 28.3 metre Benetti yacht Maca, listed by Camper & Nicholsons, is sold. Sojourn, a 25.97 metre motor yacht, has been sold. One sale came in under a million dollars: 24.3 metre motor yacht Libro d'Oro was sold, asking $895,000.
People in the World of Yachting
Jimmy Carroll on Creating out of this World Experiences with Pelorus Yacht Expeditions. As co-founder of Pelorus, the yacht expedition company that facilitates trips to the most remote corners of the globe, ex British Army captain Jimmy Carroll knows all about adventure, and he sure has some experiences to tell.
Superyacht Stories
More than the boat - Superyacht Stories brings you the inside track on superyachts for charter shining a light on the experience and the people who make it happen.
The biggest yachting and superyacht news stories of 2023
Abeking & Rasmussen crowns new flagship. One of the most exciting yachts to be delivered in 2023 was Liva O, Abeking 's new flagship. At 118.2 metres, the inky black yacht underwent specialised laser welding to create her smooth, unbroken, high-gloss finish. Her designer described her as a "monolith" on the water.
The biggest yacht news stories of 2022
The yacht hit the water in February 2022, showing off a Terence Disdale exterior and a number of standout features, including a pair of helipads and a generous swim platform with twin staircases leading up to the deck above. In a statement, the yard has said that an enhanced environmental focus was a key driver behind the build of Blue.
The Age of the Superyacht
"The yachts tell a whole story about a Faustian capitalism—this idea that we're ready to sell democracy for short-term profit," she said. "They're registered offshore. They use every ...
Confessions of a superyacht stewardess
Story highlights. Most chartered yachts cost between $300,000 to over $1 million per week ... Nielsen recalls hearing of another boat whose owners would also give stewardess' extra cash for ...
Ten inspirational boating adventure stories
John and Paulette Lee. John and Paulette Lee. Krogen 5816 Seamantha , currently lying in Chaguaramas, Trinidad. Richard Bost. Richard Bost. Krogen 42 Dauntless , currently lying in Huatulco, Mexico. Ron and Nancy Goldberg. Nordhavn 50 Duet , currently lying in Tahiti, French Polynesia. Paul Hawran.
The spookiest ghost ship stories from around the world
One of the most notorious ghost ship stories, the tale of the SS Ourang Medan is shrouded in mystery. The legend goes that in 1947 a cargo ship off the coast of Indonesia put out a distress call with the words: "All officers including captain are dead lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead.". Before help could arrive, a ...
Luxury Brands
Shipyard Stories: Discovering Sunreef Yachts. Sunreef Yachts is a shipyard that has defied all the odds. Opening its doors in 2002 in the historic port city of Gdansk in Poland, the first few years of business saw more than its fair share of skepticism thrown at the burgeoning builder of luxury catamarans. READ MORE.
Boat Story
Boat Story is a British thriller television series made for BBC One and Amazon Freevee by the All3Media production company, Two Brothers Pictures. Written and co-directed by Harry and Jack Williams, it stars Daisy Haggard, Paterson Joseph, Tchéky Karyo, Joanna Scanlan, Craig Fairbrass and Phil Daniels.
world-wide yacht charters
YACHT STORY was established in May 2021 in Antwerp - Belgium, inspired by the need for a professional partner in yacht charter services for the BENELUX (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg) market.The increasing demand for travel and private yachting escapes, organized from A to Z by a single contact person, was the key factor in creating this boutique charter company.
'Boat Story': Amazon Freevee Drops U.S. Trailer & Launch Date
Boat Story from Fleabag producers Harry and Jack Williams will air on Freevee on March 12. It landed well critically in the UK and secured around 5M viewers per episode. Alongside Haggard and ...
yacht chartering services
YACHT STORY is written in May 2021 in Antwerp, Belgium, encouraged by the need in the Benelux for a professional Partner for yacht charter services. The increasing demand of travelling and private escapes on a yacht organized from a to z by one contact person was an important stimulation to create this boutique charter company with a personal ...
The True Story Behind 'The Boys in the Boat'
Joe Rantz passed away in 2007 and his story, as well as that of the crew that went to the 1936 Olympics, was largely left behind in the mainstream until "The Boys in the Boat" book came out.
meet our team
Founder and Charter Director. [email protected]. +32-478-350-763. Jill Zwaans is the proud founder of YACHT STORY with over 20 years of experience in the yacht charter business. The passion for yachting runs in her family as her grandfather built the first Carlo Riva yacht in 1973 and she spent all holidays on her family's sailing yacht.
5 things to know about Florida billionaire yacht owner Michael Bozzuto
Bozzuto bought the motor yacht, Honey, about 10 years ago for an undisclosed sum. The Westport mega-yacht was built in 2007 and is the largest of several yachts Bozzuto owns.
3 Men Rescued from Pacific Island After Writing 'Help' With Palm Leaves
In 2020, three other men whose boat ran out of fuel wrote "SOS" in the sand, allowing them to be spotted by American rescuers. In this week's search, a breakthrough came when a Navy ...
20 decomposed bodies found in boat off coast of Brazil
Police officers and rescue workers tow a boat with decomposed bodies found by fishermen, near the Vila do Castelo port in Braganca, Para state, Brazil, on April 14.
Luxury yachts and other myths: How Republican lawmakers echo Russian
One Russia-based propaganda site, DC Weekly, published a story last November that included photos of two luxury yachts, called Lucky Me and My Legacy, which it alleged were bought for $75 million.
Women's Rowing Varsity Eight Repeats as NEWMAC Boat of the Week
Story Links Westwood, MA --- WPI women's rowing varsity eight was selected as the New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) Boat of the Week for the week ending on April 14th. In a regatta featuring eight of the top 14 crews in NCAA Division III, the Engineers finished second in its heat and third in the grand final in Sunday ...
Body found in search for teenager missing in Torres Strait waters
A 16-year-old boy went missing after his boat broke down in the ocean near Papua New Guinea. ... Top Stories. Caitlin Clark is this year's number one draft pick in the WNBA. Her salary has sparked ...

8 superyacht crew members share the most extreme requests they've had to deal with on the job

Some owners are really dedicated to the sports teams they own.

And beach toys are very important — even if it means getting them in the middle of the night.

Sometimes yachts aren't the only trips involved.

But some requests can be more mind-blowingly tedious than anything else.

Guests make sure they can get anywhere they want.

Chefs are expected to work around the clock — even if they're sleeping.

Some crew members are asked to keep quiet and get dirty.

And some guests get very thirsty.

A day in the life of a naval architect

A helping hand for a more eco-aware crew

Superyachting’s teak solution

A zero fossil fuel superyacht

Matthijs Rhee aka MrSuperyachts

Captain Mattia Djaza

How to find the right superyacht crew

Carving a career out of woodwork and superyachts

Valentina Zannier

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2020 Editor's Choice: The Best Boating Stories of the Year

1) The Definitive Answer to Outboard vs. Sterndrive

2) Why the V-Bottom Hull is One of Boating's Most Revered Designs

3) Famous Boats: The Strange Saga of the 'Orca' from JAWS

4) Before Fibreglass- World War II & The Fairmile (Part 11)

5) Inside Formula Boats- Past, Present, and 2021 Preview

6) The Wild World of Boats: 8 Designs that Changed Boating (for Better or for Worse)

7) The Great Loop - North America’s Biggest Boating Adventure with Kurt & Leanne Penfold

8) The Cat is Back! Legendary Pantera Powerboats Relaunches Under New Ownership

9) #WeirdBoats - Daredevil Evel Knievel's Custom Yacht Now a Floating Shrine in Canada

10) Iconic Canadian Brand Limestone Boat Company Relaunches

11) Tom Brady Adjusting to Florida Life with Custom Wajer 55S Yacht

12) #QuickTips - 10 Things to Avoid as a Good Boater

13) Boating Common Sense, Common Courtesies, and Common No-No’s

14) Innovators in Boating- Christopher Columbus Smith & Chris-Craft

15) Interview with 'Supercar Blondie': Test Driving the World's Fastest Police Boat

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