Charter guests and owners will use, touch and sleep in the linens on board. They will notice and appreciate luxurious softness, but will also remark on scratchy towels or bed linen. The interior of the cabins need to make a great ...
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Mission impossible. On pain of dismissal, engineer Mel Thunderbolt must fly to MTU headquarters in Germany and carry a 37kg turbocharger back to Sardinia...all in 24 hours.
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10 years ago, choice in yacht uniforms was limited. The fit mattered, but not how uniforms matched the yacht or the personality of the crew. Fortunately, as the industry evolves, suppliers are pushing the boundaries, with fashion...
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Tired of serving the same old cocktails? Ever thought of garnishing a cocktail with a sprig of lavender and a macaron? Do sherbet, olive oil and pink peppercorns feature in your cocktail repertoire? In the first of his series fo...
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Engineer Mel Thunderbolt loves boats. Sailing them, working on them and fixing them (although she could happily do without the shore power cable system.) Join her as she describes her sheer love of yachting, a lucky escape from an...
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Charity for charter, or charter for charity? It may be totally legal but, on some level, it doesn't feel quite right to me. Call me old fashioned..
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Odd socks, whingeing crew and mugs left in the sink...it's clearly time for a mid-season hissy fit.Jo Morgan on what drives us batty when life in the crew mess gets messy.
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In an industry where ‘attention to detail’ needs to be ‘obsession to detail’, it is perhaps no surprise that yacht crew have a bewildering array of ‘pet hates’ and phobias.
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We engineers have to have ‘know-how’ on every little thing, but I'd take a pair of overalls and the hot sweaty heartbeat of the engine room over a chamois any day.One day I will find myself doing an oil change on the main engines ...
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There's an excellent chance that you'll travel over water this month. The forecast is for blue skies, except for when it will be raining, or gloomy. Or nighttime.
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Not everyone who grows up in South Florida ends up the better for it. But Mike Wilson seems to be one of the few to have bucked that trend by taking advantage of the most visible industry in the region.
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Today, the concept of sustainability is both a ubiquitous and welcome concept that has affected not only modern industry but also most aspects of life in the 21st century. Businesswise, doing more with (much) less is now not so mu...
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Mex has pretty much seen and done it all in yachting as well as the wider maritime industry. That’s why he’s known to most people simply as ‘Mex’. Over the years he’s served as a captain, a chief and sole engineer, a program manag...
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Imagine if you found out that half the generous tip you gave to the waitress last night for outstanding service had been confiscated by her manager and was being held ransom for a year, in a bid to coerce the waitress into staying...
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I love being at sea, more a seadog than an hotelier, but the service aspect aboard has become one of the driving factors in the yachting industry.
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Over the years, we have all worked on yachts with overall programs that vary from the very best to the very worst. The right overall package can be a very tough thing to find and is not something you just walk into either; it tak...
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The wines of Europe in general, and those of France in particular, can seem very confusing. This is especially true for people who may have grown up with more familiarly labelled New World wines. In essence the difference for this...
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Captain Pascal Pellat-Finet career began in the familiar waters of the Mediterranean where he was involved in the construction of the first Maxi in the Med, S/Y Halisara, and learned from the likes of Dennis Conner and Gary Jobson...
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Adam Laithwaite had always sailed. And when his career as head of “arty farty marketing bollocks” ended prematurely, he had to decide what to do next.
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Nowadays, before guests sip their first cocktail, the first and most common question seems to be: ‘Do you have internet?’ Internet has become a lifeline for some, and rather than surfing the waves, many spend hours surfing the Net...
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This year marks the 120th anniversary of the ingenious inception of Dr. Rudolf Diesel’s eponymous creation, and few inventions of similar vintage can claim credit for markedly improving the quality of life of the globe’s populatio...
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The act, or ‘art,’ of filling a space which is half the required size with twice the required amount of supplies, with the added psychic ability of the provisioner to ascertain with no prior knowledge whatsoever which particular s...
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The 52-year-old captain has been with the 42m (138 ft) ketch sailing catamaran almost since it was built in 1998. To this day, it is one of the largest sailing catamarans on the water, and blisteringly fast – sailing at up to 18 k...
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The water was sparkling like a thousand diamonds in the early morning sun rising over the quiet anchorage. The guests were arriving up on deck, enjoying their first coffee while starting another day in paradise. The deck crew ju...
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Anyone working as an engineer in the marine industry, whether it be on yachts, commercial vessels, or anything in between, knows that organization, orders and tracking, spare parts and inventory are integral to a successful engine...
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Better known among her peers as "German Anni", this 15-year veteran of the superyacht industry got into it by accident. It started when Anni Riedel moved from Germany to the Caribbean, where she worked on land for a while. But the...
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What drives you can be the route to success, and there are many ways to gauge that success. Sure, money is one of them. So is position, size, program, type of yacht. But for the yacht crew I’ve known to be the happiest, the greate...
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Wine is becoming an increasingly important part of many superyacht trips, whether they are for charter or owner. An understanding of wine is often de-rigueur for many crew nowadays as a result of wine-knowledgeable guests, and the...
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The 25-year-old South Africa native left his hometown of Cape Town, South Africa, in May of 2011 and moved to Antibes. After a lot of dockwalking, he eventually landed his current position: second engineer on M/Y Shooting Star. He...
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Although perhaps not as exciting as a new delivery or christening, there are few events more satisfying to owners, captains, and crews than an uneventful return to their vessel’s home port; as the boat approaches its mooring, the ...
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