The folks in the above photo are Sandy and Tom Taylor, who announced this week that they are officially opening a booking agency called Taylor’d Yacht Charters.

I’ve known Sandy for quite some time now, most recently in her capacity as the head of retail charter and crew placement for Northrop & Johnson. She left that job last year to join her husband Tom, former executive director of Northrop & Johnson, in starting their own business booking charter vacations for clients worldwide.

The Taylors have a combined 20 years’ experience in the marine industry, working at everything from yacht support to charter management at firms as large as Camper & Nicholsons International. They now plan to combine their big-company expertise with the personal service that a boutique company can provide.

They’re based in Natchez, Mississippi, and are members of the Florida Yacht Brokers Association. Plus, I can personally attest, they’re darn nice people.

For more information, check out their newly launched website.

The photograph above is of the recently renovated (look at that gorgeous wood!) galley onboard the 115-foot Trinity motoryacht Watercolours. She’s currently in the British Virgin Islands, as are a good number of charter yachts, but I’ve learned from management company Northrop & Johnson that Watercolours is heading to the unusual destination of the Turks and Caicos Islands beginning in mid-May.

I absolutely love the Turks and Caicos Islands, which are south of the Bahamas, so close on a map that they look as though they’re an extension of them. I’ve been back to the Turks and Caicos twice for personal vacations, since I’m a scuba fan and the islands are well-known for having some of the best reef diving on the planet.

It’s rare to find charter yachts in the Turks and Caicos, though, because marina infrastructure is still developing. Typically, charter yachts that don’t go to the Mediterranean each May will move from the Virgins in the winter up to the Bahamas or New England for the summer, skipping the Turks and Caicos completely. That Watercolours is going to offer a few weeks of charters there is unusual, an opportunity that doesn’t come around too often on this size motoryacht.

It’s also worth noting that Watercolours is outfitted to help guests enjoy the underwater environment that makes the Turks and Caicos so special. The yacht tows a 32-foot Intrepid center-console tender to get you to the best snorkeling grounds, has an eight-person Brownie’s Third Lung for pseudo-scuba diving, and even has a fighting chair on the aft deck for fishing straight from the main yacht.

I’m jonesing to go back to the Turks and Caicos and meet the boat as I write this. If you’re interested, too, contact any reputable charter broker. Watercolours takes eight guests at a weekly base rate of $49,500 (which includes use of the Intrepid).

There’s a heck of a lot of buzz on the Internet right now about the new 951-foot-long cruise ship Ventura, which P&O Cruise Lines launched this weekend in England–proudly hailing her as “the largest superliner ever built for the British market.” This is a whopper of a cruise ship, taking more than 3,000 passengers at a time. She’s currently on her maiden voyage in the Mediterranean.

A review of the new ship in London’s Sunday Times caught my attention, not because of all the activities and food it describes as being available onboard, but because at the end of the story, the writer quotes the price for a family of four to take a two-week cruise: 8,060 pounds, or the equivalent of $16,000 at today’s conversion rate.

I immediately hopped over to the website of CharterWave sponsor Virgin Island Sailing, which I know to have a regularly updated list of crewed yacht prices in the Virgin Islands–and where, just as I expected, I found several private charter yachts that would cost a family of four the exact same amount of money for a two-week vacation. If two families wanted to get together and double the overall budget to $32,000 for two weeks, there are a good number of well-kept charter yachts they could enjoy a vacation onboard.

It never ceases to amaze me that people would choose to cram their family onto a floating city at sea when they could relax onboard their own private yacht (with a captain and a chef!) for nary an extra cent.

I continually chalk such decisions up to ignorance–that people simply don’t know they have another,similarly priced option in yacht charter. I plan to keep pounding that message home here on CharterWave, like a person throwing a defiant pebble into the ocean of cruise ship media coverage.