The theme night, as it were, actually started just after lunch for the youngest guests aboard Princess Marcie. First mate Raul Valdivia cruised by the 85-foot motoryacht’s aft deck, where the children were trying to decide what watersports to enjoy that afternoon.

“They saw some pirates over there!” Valdivia exclaimed to the youngsters, pointing toward the horizon as he pulled the tender up to the swim platform. “That other boat, up there, the crew told me they just saw some pirates!”

Eyes wide and hearts pounding, the children ran inside to tell their parents. For the Princess Marcie crew, the stage for that evening’s Pirate Night theme was set.
 
Theme nights have always been a part of the luxury charter experience, but nowadays, crew members are going to extra lengths to entertain guests. Creating different themes has always been a good way of jazzing up the dinnertime experience—especially aboard yachts with only a single dining area—but in recent years, theme nights have become about far more than simply decorating the table.

Aboard some charter yachts, there are costumes, scripted lines, and even all-day activities that take place on and off the boat. And while the chief stewardess usually is tasked with coordinating the themes, entire crews are now responsible for helping to create ever-more-elaborate experiences for their guests.

Take the Pirate Night that followed that afternoon aboard Princess Marcie. Valdivia, the first mate, announced a few more “sightings” throughout the day, really revving the kids’ imaginations before dinner. When it came time for the family to sit down and dine, Chief Stewardess Soni Ricci had decorated not just the table, but the entire main deck with treasure chests, skulls and crossbones, and the like. Each crew member was dressed in tattered T-shirts, black eye patches, and pirate bandanas; music straight out of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean was playing over the sound system; and Ricci had even painted “tattoos” on every crew member’s biceps and faces (she later offered to paint tattoos on the kids, as well).

The scene was so realistic that it even got the attention of children aboard another yacht. “We were stem-to-stern at the marina with another boat, and it had four or five kids on it, and they were all on their aft deck, gripping the rail and looking over here,” Valdivia recalls. “You could see the want in their eyes. They were running to their parents screaming, ‘There are pirates on that boat! Real pirates!’”

Pirate themes are actually the most common, as they make contextual sense in the Caribbean and beyond. Capt. Russ White and Chief Stewardess Lisa Reedy, for instance, put together an all-day pirate theme aboard the 120-foot motoryacht Kayana when they ran her during summers in Alaska.

They painted an old wine box so that it looked like a treasure chest, then took the dinghy and hid the box in a cave on one of the local islands. Next, they drew a map complete with a red X to mark the spot of the hidden loot, used a match to burn the edges of the map and make it look old, and tucked it into a bottle that just happened to float up to the aft deck when their young guests were preparing to go for a swim. 

Needless to say, the afternoon’s watersports were canceled in favor of going on a hunt for the treasure chest—which the crew had filled with candy and keepsake Kayana T-shirts.
“When you’re 4 or 5, you don’t remember a lot of your life,” White recalls with a satisfied smile. “They’ll remember that.”

One crew member who gained worldwide recognition for her themes was Betsy Millson-Anderson. She served as chef aboard the 138-foot Heesen Blue Harem for four years, doing everything from theme events focusing on the movies Chicago and Castaway, to Japanese cuisine nights complete with stewardesses dressed in kimonos, to 1970s themes that saw the crew decked out in polyester dresses and afro wigs.

For Chicago movie night, Millson-Anderson offered the yacht’s female guests feather boas and headdresses to wear as they accepted hors d’oeuvres from the flapper-wearing stewardesses and took drinks from a champagne fountain. For Castaway movie night, she and the rest of the crew wore torn-up T-shirts and used a handprint-stained volleyball a la the character “Wilson” as a table centerpiece. “It was always fun because it was a lot of seafood,” she recalls of Castaway night. 
 
The one theme Millson-Anderson never did aboard Blue Harem was pirate night, but the yacht’s next chief stewardess, Carolyn Galleymore, brought that theme to life.

“From the menus to the table settings to the costumes to the drapes that we put up to create the atmosphere, it’s very much a pirate theme,” explains her husband and Blue Harem’s captain, Sean Galleymore. “The menus are placed on the placemats in beer bottles that have been washed in sand, and we’ve taken tea-stained paper that we print the menus on. We wax them, roll them into the bottles, and stuff corks atop them. It’s very authentic. We’ve got a treasure box on the table, too, and another that goes in the saloon. Lots of chocolate gold coins spilling out. Then, on their beds at turndown, we put little treasure chests on their beds with gold coin chocolates.”

The crew all dress their parts, too. The men are pirates in lace-up, V-neck shirts and torn-off Bermuda shorts, with the requisite bandana around the head and large gold hoop earring dangling from a lobe. The women are damsels in distress, in big flared skirts and tight corset tops.

“We’ve got these net drapes, too, just to add to the atmosphere. They’re different colors, and you can see through them, and they hang off the aft deck to close it up a little bit.” Inside of that, Galleymore uses live palm trees for decoration. He keeps them on a beach in the Caribbean that the crew know will always be the setting for Pirate Night.

The Galleymores and their crew mates also do a 1960s theme aboard Blue Harem that includes not just dressing up in the fashion of the times, but printing the menus on tie-dyed paper and having a disco ball spinning on the aft deck. They also leave “surprise packages” on guests’ beds between the cocktail hour and dinner time, and they insist that guests wear what they find inside: afro wigs, polyester shirts, and the like.

“They are so, so, so, so, so up for it, it’s unbelievable,” Sean Galleymore says. “With some clients, it’s more appropriate for the stews to remain formal, typically in the Mediterranean, but in the Caribbean, often, the stews will dress up, too, and we have a big party.”

Pirate Night is also among the themes that charter guests enjoy when they’re aboard the 157-foot Trinity Janie, where the crew also put together Asian, luau, safari, Medieval themes, and more. Chief Stewardess Jane Bond agrees that it is a group effort that makes great themes possible, and she credits chef Dee Lynch and fellow stews Karine Lautru and Alison O’Carroll with much of the hard work.

Continually trying to make the same theme nights better is not so much a competition among Janie’s crew as it is a way of life, Bond explains. During one Asian night, for instance, as two of the stews worked on setting the table, the third stew twisted her hair into buns, stuffed pillows under a T-shirt, and challenged the charter client’s young children to a sumo wrestling contest.

“All three of us see what the other is doing, and we want to go one better,” Bond says. “The fantastic thing about having three stewardesses is that you can have the same [decorative] stuff, but three different people will put it together three different ways.”

The stews and chef work together to ensure that everything from the appetizers to the cocktails to the main dishes and desserts are part of the theme, no matter what it is. “If she’s serving fish with mango salsa, I’ll say, ‘Okay, it sounds like a good night to do Aloha night,’” Bond says. “If I’m hanging the butterflies, she will incorporate that into the food, maybe with chocolate-syrup butterflies on the plates at dessert.”--Kim Kavin