August 3, 2003

Upstairs, Downstairs on the High Seas
By WARREN ST. JOHN

FOR crew members of superyachts there are some basic rules: no hooking up
with the guests, for example, and no drinking the boss’s liquor without
permission. But as any old salt will tell you, a couple of precepts trump all
others: no matter how much you’re enjoying yourself and no matter how
exhilarating the exotic ports of call, never let it show.

And never, ever let the owners think you’re having as much fun as they are.

Occasionally, though, something blows a crew’s cover. A few weeks back, two
crew members in their 20′s from Barry Diller’s 120-foot yacht, Arriva, were
returning after an evening of partying in Sag Harbor, N.Y., when they ran their
tender onto a rocky breakwater. One of the yachties was thrown over the
breakwater into the sea, and the other ended up splayed on the rocks. Both were
hurt, one punctured a lung, and one was charged with boating while
intoxicated. To experienced hands in the marina, it was a classic mistake.

“If you’re in it for a long time, you stay out of the bars,” said William
Coldwell, 56, the captain of the 105-foot motor yacht William I, based in Sag
Harbor, who has bailed crew members out of jails in Spain, North Africa and
Greece. “Eventually,” said Mr. Coldwell, who is known as Chappy, “it’ll get
you.”

For landlubbers and perhaps for yacht owners like Mr. Diller, the
incident lifted the veil, if briefly, on the curious world of those who live
below deck. There are some 25,000 professional yacht crew members worldwide,
according to Greg Mullen, the publisher of Dockwalk, a magazine about crew
life, and typically they spend the winter in the Caribbean and the summer in
Northeastern ports like Sag Harbor, Newport, Nantucket and Bar Harbor, Me., or
in the Mediterranean. Their movements are controlled not by wind or currents
but by the whims of their gazillionaire bosses.

Wherever they are, yacht crews live in a peculiar limbo. They often spend time
elbow to elbow with gorgeous and glamorous guests and have unsupervised access
to the trappings and toys of the superrich helicopters, Jet Skis and cases
of Chateau Pactrus. “We live the millionaire’s lifestyle without being
millionaires,” said Ian Craddock, a Newport-based captain who spent nine years
working aboard the yacht of Nelson Doubleday, the former New York Mets
co-owner. “We have access to boats and airplanes and limousines, and they’re
not ours. It’s a real perk.”

But despite their proximity to wealth and glamour, yachties are not usually
rich themselves, and as anyone who has ever been awakened from a cramped bunk
in the middle of the night to fix an overflowing head will tell you, the life
is not exactly glamorous. Yachties rarely stay in one place long enough to call
it home. Having a family is next to impossible. And hovering over every
enjoyable moment in a yachtie’s life is a sense of dread: at any second, the
owner could arrive.

“You’re in the most beautiful places, and you’re dealing with millionaires and
kings and luminaries,” said Norma Trease, who ran a crew placement agency in
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for 25 years and writes frequently about superyacht
crews. “But the reality is, you’re a glorified servant. There’s a lot of stress
and anxiety between an owner and a crew. It can be intense. The No. 1 goal of
every yacht crew is to never say no to an owner.”

Superyacht owners, of course, are far from easy to please. They have spent
millions for their yachts. Greg Norman’s new 228-foot boat Aussie Rules, for
example, cost about $45 million, and yachts over 120 feet easily cost more than
$100,000 a week just to charter  and have high expectations, sometimes with
harrowing consequences.

Michael Eudenbach, 33, a yachtie and a nautical photographer from Newport, once
helped deliver the Netscape co-founder James H. Clark’s 155-foot sailing yacht
Hyperion from San Francisco to Tahiti. The passage was slowed by tropical
storms in the Pacific, Mr. Eudenbach said, but Mr. Clark, fearing his yacht
might not get to Tahiti in time for his vacation, demanded from California that
his crew forge on.

“We ended up dodging and weaving through three storms,” Mr. Eudenbach said. “It
was the first time I felt really uncomfortable at sea.” Noting that Mr. Clark’s
yacht cost $30 million and carried millions in artwork, he added, “I thought if
I go down, I’m grabbing a Picasso.”

Sometimes it’s not the rich guy on board who causes the trouble, but the rich
guy next door. Mr. Eudenbach said that one night in St. Barts aboard the
classic yacht Endeavor, owned by L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former Tyco chairman,
he was sent to keep watch with a hose because revelers on a yacht chartered by
Sean Combs were tossing burning cigar butts onto Endeavor’s wooden decks.

Relations between owners and crews, perhaps always difficult, are growing more
complex. Under the traditional European model, strict boundaries separated
them. The crew entered at the forward hatch and the owners, who spoke only with
the captain, entered aft. Yachts had parapets around the sides, so crews could
walk the length of the boat without disturbing the owners inside.

In the last decade, though, the number of superyachts, boats over 80 feet, has doubled, to around 8,000, according to Mr. Mullen, many of them built
by younger Americans who made quick fortunes in technology. The boats have
wider cabins with no balconies, and the crews, who are increasingly educated
to handle the high-tech systems on board, are in closer contact with the
owners, many of whom share their backgrounds. With boundaries blurred, crews of
American-owned yachts often don’t know where they stand.

“The Europeans don’t know your name,” said Betsy Millson, a former yachtie.
“You’re just there to serve them. Americans want to be your friend, they want
to know where you went to college and they want to buy you drinks. Then they
want you to work 18 hours a day and tend to their six kids.”

Another result of blurred social boundaries: more romance between crews and
owners. The phenomenon has even inspired a phrase, “Move my things to the
master” to describe stewardesses who move up from the crew quarters to the
owner’s master suite and order former colleagues to fetch their belongings.

Yacht crews work grueling schedules. They wake early to prepare breakfast and
ready the yacht for either a day at sea or one of resort-style leisure. Colin
Kearney, now the captain of a 64-foot sailboat in Newport, said his duties as
watersports coordinator on a 325-foot yacht in the Mediterranean included
tending to 15 motorcycles, 10 jet watercraft, 2 cars and a fleet of
Windsurfers, kayaks and small sailboats. He got up at 6 and worked until late
evening.

Sleeping can be made harder by the partying of guests, especially those who
insist on being tended into the wee hours. While guests sleep off their
hangovers, the crew is up at dawn. “Sometimes you’re lucky if you get to bed,”
Mr. Kearney said.

On the Northeast circuit, owners usually leave their yachts on Sunday night and
return on Thursday. Crews tend to let off steam on Monday nights in dank
seaside taverns like Murf’s in Sag Harbor and the I.Y.A.C. in Newport,
mingling with and pursuing the locals. But getting lucky on shore poses another
problem: finding a place to go. One yachtie in Newport last week said that if
he wrote a memoir, he would call it “Nowhere to Snog.”

Modern yachties are compensated for their troubles. Crew quarters on American
yachts are bigger than on European vessels, and more extravagant. Captains
typically make $1,000 a foot a year. As one of 18 deckhands aboard Limitless,
the 315-foot yacht of Leslie Wexner, the founder of the Limited, 23-year-old
Aaron Kelly had a stateroom complete with entertainment center; he made $26,000
a year, with benefits.

Patrick E. Malloy, a commodities trader who owns the 195-foot yacht Intuition,
based in Sag Harbor (he owns the marina, too), said that keeping a good crew is
the secret to enjoying a superyacht. “If you don’t have a good captain and a
good crew, it’s a nightmare,” he said.

Certain boats, though, are well known for churning through crews. One such
vessel from Maryland has routinely lost crew members thanks to an owner who
screams and who has a wife known as a “microbiology fetishist” for her
obsession about germs on countertops.

Yachties say that when looking at crew job postings, they can easily spot
difficult yachts because the owners have to pay markedly higher rates for crew
members.

On some yachts, relations between fellow crew members can be as fraught as
those between crew and owner. They live in tight quarters and under stress, and
tensions occasionally boil over.

“You might hate some of those people, but you’re always within 120 feet of
them,” said Aime Lord, a former yacht stewardess from Newport. She once saw
an engineer and a mate in a fistfight on deck. Ms. Trease, the crew expert,
said a yacht chef was fired recently for pulling a knife on a fellow crew
member.

When it all gets too much, yachties “go on land,” a change as momentous as
marrying or having children. (Land to yachties is a faraway place, like the
moon.) After five years on yachts,  which she calls “boat jail,” Ms. Lord
had saved $400,000 with her husband, and was happy to settle on dry ground. She
said she had worked for an arms smuggler, a Saudi prince with a fondness for
Western women, an executive who was sent to jail for fraud and a Manhattan
physician who got drunk and vomited all over his stateroom.

But what really got her, she said, was the boredom. “All the talk is of boats,”
she said. “Imagine if you were an accountant and all your friends were
accountants, and when you got together all you talked about was accounting.”

As for the owners, Ms. Lord said she found one thing particularly curious: “I
assumed if someone spent a few million bucks on a yacht, they knew something
about boats. That was not the case. You won’t encounter many nautical types.”

And she had this advice for anyone considering a career on a big boat: “Don’t
take the treatment that you might receive personally. It’s a service industry,
and you have to be prepared to serve.”