I was peeking around the Nigel Burgess website yesterday and came across a secret–a 200-foot Secret built by the venerable Dutch yard Feadship, that is.

There’s no official publicity happening for this luxury crewed yacht yet, but the marketing folks at Nigel Burgess confirmed exclusively for us here at CharterWave that that this brand-new motoryacht will enter the charter market this summer, fresh out of the shipyard. The base rate for 12 guests will be $476,000 a week, or about $50,000 cool ones per person with typical 25-percent expenses included.

That certainly would put SECRET in the top echelon of motoryachts available for charter in the world today. And, according to Nigel Burgess, the boat features a 10-foot retractable cinema screen–nice feature we haven’t heard of elsewhere.

For the limited details that are available now, check out Secret on the Nigel Burgess website.

A couple of posts back, I introduced you to the motoryacht Marathon, a brand-new launch that is booking an amazing number of charters before even being seen by a single broker. True to my word, I made a point of following up with management company Fraser Yachts Worldwide and giving Marathon a look at last week’s Miami boat show–to try to determine exactly what all the fuss is about.

I toured the yacht with the marketing manager from Christensen Yachts, the company that built the boat. He and I know each other well, as I have written feature articles for magazines about Marathon’s two recently launched sisterships, Privacy (not available for charter) and Barchetta (click here to read my First Impression).

Marathon is certainly a gorgeous yacht (you can read my First Impression starting in March) but not so different from her sisterships, I thought, that she should be getting so much attention so quickly from the charter market. She also wasn’t chartering in any exotic location, but rather in places where there are other established charter yachts available.

As beautiful as the boat itself was, I was still scratching my head about her stunning popularity for charter as my tour came to an end.

That’s when the marketing director asked me, “Oh, before you go, would you like to meet Capt. Knox?”

“Paul Knox?” I replied.

“Yes,” the marketing director said, surprised. “Why, do you know him?”

Mystery solved: Everybody in the industry knows Capt. Paul Knox, one of the finest crewed yacht captains around. I last saw him when he was running the motoryacht Dream, which, just like Marathon, had brokers beating down its door to book charters for their clients. Paul and his crew are just that good.

This little tale highlights something well-known in the industry, but that anyone looking to book a charter for the first time might not realize: It is the crew, more than anything, in which reputable brokers place their trust when helping you to book a charter. Crew literally make or break your trip, no matter how nice a brand-new yacht may be.

Keep this in mind the next time your broker suggests a boat you haven’t heard of, or that’s too new to have so much as a brochure available. If the crew are coming from another boat with an excellent reputation, then the odds are high that you’ll have a fabulous vacation, no matter what.

So, I spent two days last week flying back and forth to Mexico to interview the owner of a new boat for one of my regular magazine gigs, at Power & Motoryacht. I can’t tell you what boat it was–that might tip off competing magazines about what we’re planning to feature in our next issue–but I can tell you that what I saw onboard this motoryacht left me drooling for the time when somebody buys one just like it and puts it into charter.

The boat had a master suite on the main deck plus a VIP cabin on the bridge deck. The VIP connects to the sky lounge, but instead of leaving that space for guest use, these owners had converted the whole area into a VIP suite.

In essence, that means the boat has two full-on “master suites”–something hard to find in the charter industry. It’s a great feature because it means two couples can split the bill on a charter without either couple feeling like they got a lesser stateroom.

But wait, there’s more! This particular boat also has two guest cabins on the bottom deck with king-size beds, plus a third guest cabin on the bottom deck that has twin beds that convert into a king. So if you wanted to, you could have two full-on suites plus three king-size cabins for a charter–an ideal setup for five couples, without anybody sleeping in “a kiddie cabin.”

I’ll link from this blog to my review of this boat as soon as it’s up on the Power & Motoryacht website, so you can see which boat I’m talking about and just how cool the arrangement plans are for charter.

And then we can all hope that the next guy who buys the same model will make the boat available for charter bookings. It would be great to have a yacht like this filling the king-size (bed) hole that exists in the crewed charter market today.