A Look at Today’s Yachting Lifestyle
By Roman Elsener
Primafila New York Bureau Chief
Every time I visit Miami, it seems bigger than before. New skyscrapers line the beaches, even higher than the ones built just a year earlier. Whole new skylines appear. The city is constantly expanding onto its surrounding islands – there are more people, more taxis, more boats.
This is certainly the case when I visit the city from New York during this year’s Miami Yacht Show in February, where a grand new marina on Watson Island was inaugurated. It boasts of being the only marina in North America designed exclusively for super-yachts, and can accommodate up to 50 of these luxurious floating villages.
Standing next to the giant transatlantic cruisers like the SilverFast or the Steel, you could feel rather intimidated, but the yachting folks are an exceptionally friendly crowd, ever ready to help or simply to chat.
Moreover, the Primafila-team has the good fortune to call Bob McKeage our guide on a tour of the big boats for a story about today’s yachting lifestyle for American Express Switzerland’s magazine Centurion Preview. A native New Yorker, the yachting expert has seen almost every tip of land from the bow of a yacht over the last 40 years. “The large yachts can only be described as some of the most magical creations on the planet,” Bob tells me. “Also, their owners have shaped the world we live in.”
Expensive ships are no longer just showpieces, but functional and practical, and they also offer a unique setting for business meetings. My discussions with Bob, and Jim Clark, a former Captain of the British Royal Navy, and other friendly brokers quickly produce more than enough material for my story.
As so often when on an assignment, not all the interesting interview partners make it into the final text. For Centurion Preview, I listened transfixed as Rudolf Berglehner, a broker for the Fipa Group, who knows the business inside out, detailed some of the stories that showed that not everything is gold that shines – not even in the boating industry. But that would make a different article altogether.
