Good Things, Small Packages
Larry Ellison, the gazillionaire who runs Oracle software, was recently quoted as saying he thinks he went a little too big when he built his yacht, Rising Sun, at 452 feet long. Perhaps what helped him draw this conclusion was having no room to anchor in a Caribbean harbor, or having to fork over $100-per-foot for dockage fees in the Med. (Then again, when the boat itself is worth $200 million, what’s a mere $45,000 for a night’s stay at a marina?)
No matter what brought Mr. Ellison to the realization that 45 stories long is perhaps a wee bit too big for one person’s boat, he has finally joined the rest of us who believe that boating vacations are all about scaling back. There’s a reason that we choose trawlers instead of cruise ships, sailing cats instead of luxury liners. The intimacy of boating—of arriving in a tiny harbor and being able to go ashore without gobs and gobs of other people around—proves that good things do come in small packages. Often, the smaller the package, the better.
I was reminded of this recently not only by Mr. Ellison’s pronouncement, but also by a brand-new 100-foot motoryacht I saw at the Newport Charter Show. Now, I know that to bareboaters a 100-foot yacht is pretty big, but in the world of crewed charter, a 100-foot motoryacht is on the smaller side. And this 100-footer—a Hargrave called Cocktails—sure packed a lot of big-boat punch into her relatively small charter boat hull.
Cocktails, you see, is owned by one of Florida’s pre-eminent builders, a guy who’s done houses for everybody from Oprah to Sly Stallone, not to mention Donald Trump’s hotel and a few other towering pinnacles of consumerism on the Miami’s South Beach. The yacht’s owner took a lot of the high-end interior design ideas from those plush palaces and packed them into Cocktails, things like hand-woven, seamless wool carpeting that feels like it actually massages the soles of your feet when you walk on it. I squished my toes deep into the $63,000 pile as I made my way across the main saloon to the lighted onyx bar, a spot I think many charter guests will favor while enjoying a white wine cocktail after a day of snorkeling in the sun.
My point, of course, is that if you’re in the market for a crewed charter yacht and want to get as much big-boat luxury as you can, don’t necessarily limit yourself to the biggest fully crewed boats out there. Cocktails, part of The Sacks Group fleet, is proof that you can have a lot of the most indulgent décor afloat at a base rate of $35,000 per week for eight guests (about $5,500 per person for the week with 25-percent expenses included).
That just might be a deal Mr. Ellison’s accountant should have him consider.