Do you have any idea about what it is like on the yachts?

A conversation overheard from the next yacht in Turkish!

-Whazup dude?

-Darling, is the water cold?

-Have fun bro! – Oh yeah buddy!

-How about going to a night club tonight?

-Where’s my whiskey captain?

 

As was obvious, we turned out to be neighbors with a Turkish boat on Mykonos. It might be a bit critical but the Turkish well-offs (except for a few exceptions with proper manners) can’t survive without make a noisy show of their wealth. With this langage of theirs, they live among the other boats without caring about the outsiders.

The proportion of such ‘provincials’ on the boats are at least as much as the proportion of their counterparts on land. At sea, it is possible to witness the despicable manners of people from all over the world, usually disproportionate to their pockets. This appears more conspicuous in super yacht-life where distance lends enchantment.

Yacht equals to money. Super-yacht means super money. Mega-yacht obviously means cream de la cream. That’s why, the limits of shame can be displayed as unforeseeable on such yachts. Of course there are billionaires of taste at sea; at the same time, there are those who are in some sort of a rivalry to build a longer boat every year. And I’m talking about the latter, that is, Russian billionaires, Arab sheikhs or some tycoons. For instance, Roman Abromovich who is on the news at least once a year. And such people with boat worthy of hundreds of millions of Dollars are reluctant to draw the line to what they can do with their money.

I wrote about it before. Some even import mozzarella from Italy to Pacific via private jets for the dinner, order flowers from Monaco to Caribbean just for the sake of their lovers, or sending the clothes of the spouse of the yacht’s owner of the yacht to a Parisian dry cleaner, and what not. These all sound too normal.

It was a similar story that I heard from my captain: on the owner’s whim for strawberries, a helicopter took off from the boat to the nearest place just to bring two packets of strawberries. Then, the Heli returned to the coasts where the yacht was sailing, and it landed on the boat..with only two packets of strawberries!

Although they are subject to the conditions of pages-long confidentiality contracts, the crew usually doesn’t conceal the abnormal and sometimes even absurd stories very much. Yacht charters, which are rented for short periods (e.g. € 1 million per week), seem above all to be quite rich in stories of such sort.

An Italian, I heard, installed a snow machine on his yacht in Caribbean to have some fun and to kill the annoyance of the hot sun.

The story I was told by the owner of the yatch agency in Mykonos begins with a private party organization on a non-residential Greek island where there is no soul in sight. Although it sounds quite fine until this point, when the import of camels was requested for the party, it turns out to be a bit weird. Let alone the hard task of finding a camel in Greece, the transportation there of became another issue.

I saw it myself that they post job postings in search of stewardesses with the capabilities of singing and dancing. That means that they intend to have a dance show with the snap of a finger in the middle of the service. It is also not an unusual story to hear that the hatch owner wakes up on the wrong side and sacks every one of the crew. You can’t guess how many stewardesses were sacked just because the boss didn’t like her new hair-cut. There is even one who was sacked with a shoe thrown into the face just because she dropped the dress of the owner’s wife while hanging in the wardrobe.

And what happens if the hatch owner’s little sweet daughter’s hamster happens to pass away, 300 miles away from the coast at sea? An identical mouse with the same fur color and shape is found and brought in 24 hours via a helicopter from the 300-mile-away coast, lest the little girl be sad.

As you see, the yacht sector involves countless stories: some out of provinciality, some about nouveau riches, some out of despicableness, some out of the urge to test the limits of the power of money, some out of cruelty, but many that are as absurd as to appear in Hangover 4-5-6 movies or one of the Wolf of the Wall Street movie scenes.

So, compared to these stories, the spoiled behavior of our Turkish neighbors’, next yacht sounds pretty innocent. Now with an awful arabesque melody coming from our neighbors in my ears in Mykonos, I will try to sleep. Stay tuned… See you next week.