I was so sad to learn late last week about the death of Edward B. “Ted” Rowe III. The 68-year-old was a former charter yacht captain, broker, consultant, and president of CYBA International. He was well known and well liked in the world of yacht charter, and he was, I am proud to say, my friend.

Many charter brokers reached out to me over the weekend to ensure that Rowe would be properly remembered. We’ll be publishing a formal obituary in the edition of CharterWave eNews that is scheduled to go online later today, but I thought that here on the blog this morning, I’d do something a bit more personal.

Back in 2006, I published the first edition of “Dream Cruises,” my book about the luxury charter industry. Chapter One is about the creation of the industry, an explanation of how it evolved as told by the people who knew it best. I interviewed more than 60 industry insiders to write that book, but the one who appears first, right there on Page 4, is Ted Rowe. I chose to let him tell readers the story of how the charter industry came to be out of respect for the fact that he was one of the guys who was there from the start.

Below is the section of Chapter One titled “Birth of an Industry”—a walk through the history of charter’s inception as remembered by Ted Rowe himself. I hope it conveys just how involved he was for so many years with so many things in the charter business, and how very knowledgeable he was about the people and business practices as they emerged and evolved. When I re-read this section over the weekend, after learning of Ted’s death, I felt as though I were taking a walk through the memories of some of the most interesting and exciting times of his life.

This is how I choose to remember him, in his heyday, helping to create something that shall live on even now that he has passed.

“In the old days, the way chartering worked back in the late 1950s and early ’60s was that people who were interested in boating would charter boats through their friends. Somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who was a member of a yacht club and had a sailboat somewhere. That was basically it.”

So says Rowe, now retired from his business, Ted Rowe Yacht Charters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and immediate past president of CYBA International, a leading worldwide professional group. The sixty-three-year-old Rowe has been around boating and charter his whole life, having started out working summers aboard a schooner on the Chesapeake Bay and in New England. By 1968 he was working aboard motoryachts, and he eventually earned the rank of captain.

His promotion happened to come right around the time the real excitement in charter was beginning.

“In the late ’60s, there were some tax incentives that made owning yachts quite lucrative—especially if you put them into charter, because it then became a business,” Rowe recalls. More and more wealthy people started buying more and more expensive boats, and they all wanted to rent them out for charter in order to reap the tax benefits.

All too quickly, charter was no longer about a single member of a yacht club who had a sailboat somewhere and was willing to let his friends use it. There were hundreds of wealthy men looking to get into the charter game so they could offset the costs of owning yachts of their own.

“That’s when Bill Whittamore and Robin Diston formed a company,” Rowe recalls. “Bill was one of the young, up-and-coming, smartest guys on Madison Avenue, and one day he just went home to Darien [Connecticut] and said he’d had enough. He took all his suits, put them in the backyard, threw a can of gasoline on them, set them on fire, and decided to go boating. He was independently wealthy by then, and he could afford to do something a little different.”

The different concept Whittamore and Diston envisioned was a company called Yacht Management, a firm that oversaw everything that needed overseeing aboard yachts—from hiring crew to stocking spare parts to helping the chefs get provisions such as food and wine in various ports. These were things that wealthy men buying yachts for tax breaks didn’t know about, things for which they would be willing to pay a flat, monthly fee to a company like Yacht Management. And with more and more wealthy men buying yachts, Whittamore and Diston figured, it was a niche that was bound to grow.

It was a watershed, as Rowe sees the evolution of the charter industry, for two reasons.

First, people who had until that moment made their livings as yacht brokers—taking a commission for selling one or two sailing yachts a year—suddenly could become part of a business plan that included collecting monthly fees from yacht owners whether their boats were for sale or not. These brokers wanted steadier incomes, which meant that they wanted more companies like Yacht Management to be created, which of course happened as other businessmen saw the same potential windfall.

Second, the more private yachts that signed on with the new companies, the more those companies became centralized locations where someone looking to charter a yacht could find available boats. A broker who had been helping a client book charters from time to time aboard one or two boats he knew at a yacht club could all of a sudden call a company like Yacht Management and ask about a dozen or more charter boats that were all seeking customers simultaneously.

A broker with at kind of access to information suddenly had an inventory of charter yachts that was much bigger than whatever handful of yacht club members’ boats he’d known in the past. This meant he could serve more charter clients, like a travel agent serves clients needing airfares and hotels today. The yacht broker didn’t even have to sell boats anymore to earn a living. He could focus exclusively on chartering them and have a steady income.

“This was the beginning of the charter broker, the specialist,” Rowe says. “There were people like Jo Bliss in those days. She was one of the Fearsome Foursome: four ladies who created and ran this industry for some time. Lynn Jachney, Lenore Muncie, and Evelyn Whitney were the others. They were the first ones who sort of moved into the industry and said, ‘We are charter brokers, we are not yacht brokers.’ They didn’t care about selling boats. They saw the handwriting on the wall.”

These women who led the charge in the 1970s realized—after working, in some cases, as secretaries for yacht sales brokers in the newly created management companies—that selling yachts once or twice a year wasn’t the best way to make a steady income. They decided to focus exclusively on chartering the yachts month after month after month, and they gave rise to the title “charter broker” as opposed to “yacht broker.” These charter brokers soon left the management companies to become independent businesspeople of their own.

“The management companies were looked down on by the charter brokers,” Rowe says. “’Oh, they’re going to steal our clients.’ I cannot tell you how many times I heard that story. ‘I’m not going to book a boat through Bill Whittamore—he’ll know my client’s name, telephone number, address.’ Then they discovered it was a lot easier to pick up the phone and call one place and say, ‘I’ve got a client with six people on these dates in the Caribbean. What boats have you got?”

There were, of course, other developments along the way—other people who played key roles in giving rise to the charter industry worldwide. Desmond Nicholson, for one, started offering charters around the Caribbean island of Antigua in the 1950s onboard his father’s schooner, later helping to rebuild and old naval fort into what is today a major charter hub called Nelson’s Dockyard. In the Mediterranean, too, there have been countless individuals who started small businesses that have since grown.

All of these people’s efforts soon coalesced with the emerging marketplace of yacht management companies and the newly defined role of charter brokers.

An industry was born, and it was about to explode.

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