I attended a luncheon buffet today sponsored by the boatbuilder Hargrave, and I ended up sitting with the owners of the 97-foot charter motoryacht Gigi, which is part of the charter fleet at Merrill-Stevens. I haven’t been onboard the yacht yet personally, but its connection to both Hargrave and Merrill-Stevens tells me it’s more than likely a well-built, reputably run charter yacht.

The family was explaining to me how frustrated they have been in trying to promote all the little details that they believe make Gigi such a great charter yacht in her price range. For instance, the adult daughter of the owners said, “this boat has huge bathrooms. The kind of bathrooms you should expect on a luxury vacation.”

They went on to tell me the yacht also has well-sized and nicely outfitted crew quarters, which means crew are happy to live onboard. (Happy crew makes for good service during any charter, I agreed.) And, the family added, Gigi has super-big refrigeration for holding as much food as any charter party might ever consume in a week. “Especially for [the remote areas of] the Bahamas,” the daughter said, “you don’t have to keep going back to Nassau [to re-provision], and you don’t have to pay for a ton of shipping. We can just provision big in Nassau and hold all the food onboard.”

Big bathrooms, nice crew quarters, substantial refrigeration: These are not the kinds of details you see in most charter yacht brochures, or that most charter brokers bring up. But the real truth is that they do affect your charter vacation, and I’m happy to share them here as an example of just how in-depth you can–and perhaps should–get when deciding among charter yachts in any price range.

In the case of Gigi, that’s the $35,000-a-week base rate range for eight guests and five crew. The yacht is headed to the Bahamas after the Fort Lauderdale show ends, and will be cruising in New England in the summer of 2007.

If you’d like to learn more, go to the management company’s website, www.merrill-stevens.com.

In my wanderings around the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show today, I saw three or four giant advertisements for fractional ownership programs. The idea is similar to timeshares: You buy a share of an entire boat, to use during the fraction of the year when you have vacation days to go cruising.

I checked out the prices, and I have to say that I still can’t understand why anyone would choose fractional ownership over chartering those same few weeks each year. By my math, fractional ownership costs more than chartering, involves more headaches than chartering (like dealing with maintenance issues), and forces you to go back to the same cruising area (wherever the boat is) again and again and again. Yes, you do own a share of the boat, but they depreciate over time just like cars, and I simply don’t think the small refund is worth the added aggravation.

For my money, I’d much rather charter a few different charter yachts in a few different locations whenever I had a few vacation weeks to enjoy, then walk away at the end of each cruise without a single responsibility in the world.

I suppose that’s why I’ll never be a boat owner. I just can’t see passing up all the terrific charter opportunities out there.

A few more details on Carnival Cruise Corp. honcho Mickey Arison’s personal yacht, for those of you keeping track of where the REAL relaxation can be found while cruising on vacation at sea:

It’s a 200-foot-long motoryacht, making it one of the biggest personal yachts in the entire world.

It’s called Mylin IV, should you want to keep an eye out for it the next time you’re out yachting yourself.

It was built by Feadship, one of the world’s premier yacht companies, over in Holland. (Which means it was expensive.)

It has a “celestial heaven” above the dining table made up of 450 miniature lights, designed to look like stars.

There’s a marble spa in the owner’s bathroom, right in front of a mural.

Betcha don’t find that level of glamour or luxury onboard any of the cruise ships that Carnival–or any cruise ship company–promotes as being so glamorous or exclusive!