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In Dubai, luxury is not only measured by where a client goes, but by who knows how to make the right experience happen before the request has even fully taken shape. Dubai has a particular way of making luxury feel immediate. A private dinner, a corporate gathering, a destination request or a yacht charter enquiry can move from idea to execution with a speed that feels almost impossible elsewhere. Yet what makes the city so compelling is not simply the pace, the architecture, the hotels or the polished surface of its hospitality. It is the network behind it all: the people who know who to call, which venue can genuinely deliver, which experience suits the client, and which recommendation can be trusted when the margin for error is very small. For Sian Myburgh, Head of Business Development at Miss Jones Group Dubai, that world is not theoretical. It is the landscape she works within every day, connecting EAs, PAs and corporate event bookers with the venues, suppliers, partners and experiences that allow them to deliver at a high level for the people they support. In the most refined corners of the luxury market, the person arranging the experience is often invisible to the guest, yet the success of the entire occasion may rest on their judgement. That is where the idea of a Dubai luxury network becomes so powerful. It is not a list of impressive locations or a directory of suppliers. It is a living ecosystem of relationships, personal knowledge, service standards and trust. It is built quietly, through meetings, site visits, hosted experiences, tested recommendations and the confidence that comes from knowing what a client can expect before they arrive. Sian describes Miss Jones as the “PA behind the PA,” a phrase that captures the elegance of the role immediately. This is not about taking credit. It is about helping someone else look composed, prepared and beautifully informed. It is about removing the noise from an overwhelming market and presenting options that feel considered rather than merely available. In luxury, that distinction matters. A good recommendation is not just attractive. It is accurate, reliable and appropriate to the client in front of it. Dubai Luxury Network And The People Behind Private Access The people who arrange luxury experiences often operate in the space before the visible moment. Before the guest walks into the room, steps aboard the yacht or arrives at the hotel, someone has already interpreted the brief, filtered the options and made the decision about what is worthy of trust. That process is rarely seen, but in private client service it is everything. Dubai intensifies that responsibility because the market moves quickly and expectations are high. Clients are used to immediacy. Assistants are expected to solve complex requests with grace. Venues, hotels, restaurants, suppliers and experience providers must be able to respond with precision, not only with beautiful imagery or polished language. When someone is planning on behalf of a principal, a senior executive, a family office or an ultra-high-net-worth client, the recommendation carries weight. If it succeeds, the experience feels seamless. If it fails, trust can be damaged quickly. This is where Sian’s work with Miss Jones becomes especially relevant. The requests passing through that world can range from private dinners and large-scale conferences to unusual personal requests, weddings, corporate events and experiences that demand both imagination and discretion. Dubai is a city where possibility is part of the culture, but possibility on its own is not enough. The luxury client does not simply need an answer. They need the right answer, delivered with confidence, speed and care. Sian’s view of trust is practical. A venue, supplier or partner earns its place through quality, service, responsiveness and accuracy. It is not enough to look good on paper. If the information provided at enquiry stage does not match the reality experienced by the client, the relationship is weakened. In a market built on recommendations, that matters. The person passing the suggestion forward is not only arranging an experience; they are putting their own reputation behind it. That is why first-hand knowledge is central to the Miss Jones approach. When a venue is recommended, it has usually been visited, experienced and understood. The team has seen the space, tasted the food, observed the atmosphere and built a relationship with the people responsible for delivering the service. That kind of knowledge cannot be replaced by a search result. It has texture. It has memory. It has the quiet authority of having been there. For a luxury market, that is invaluable. The difference between good and exceptional is often found in the details that cannot be fully captured online: how quickly a team responds, how a room feels when it is full, whether the service holds under pressure, whether the staff understand discretion, and whether the experience promised is the experience delivered. Dubai Service Culture And The Meaning Of Luxury Dubai is often described through spectacle: the skyline, the hotels, the beach clubs, the restaurants, the scale of ambition and the sense that almost anything can be arranged. Yet Sian’s understanding of luxury in the city is more precise. For her, what sets Dubai apart is service. That point matters because luxury without service is only decoration. The most beautiful room can fall flat if communication is slow, if the team does not listen or if the guest feels managed rather than understood. In Dubai, the standard is different. There is an expectation of attentiveness, speed and hospitality that runs through the city’s best venues, from the doorman to reception, from the floor team to the general manager. It is not only about solving problems. It is about making the guest feel that the solution was already in motion before the problem had time to settle. This kind of service culture shapes the expectations of everyone who works around private clients. When clients are used to Dubai-level responsiveness, other markets can feel slower, more formal or less fluid. A request outside the region may take longer to confirm. Communication may be more fragmented. Timelines may stretch in a way that feels uncomfortable to an assistant working under pressure. That is where someone who understands both Dubai and the wider international market becomes valuable. Sian’s experience across South Africa, London and Dubai gives her a useful perspective on those differences. She understands the pace of Dubai, but also the reality that not every market works the same way. For EAs and PAs, that bridge matters. They need someone who can manage expectations, apply pressure when needed and still keep the experience polished from beginning to end. Luxury, in this sense, becomes less about excess and more about control. Not control in a cold way, but the kind of quiet control that reassures a client everything has been thought through. The right room has been chosen. The timing works. The supplier understands the brief. The service will match the expectation. The person making the recommendation has not guessed. They know. Yacht Charter Inside The Private Client World Yachting sits naturally within this wider luxury conversation because yacht charter is also built on access, trust and interpretation. A yacht is not simply a vessel. It can be a private dining room, a corporate venue, a family retreat, a celebration space, a destination experience or a way to see the Mediterranean, Dubai or the Arabian Gulf from a completely different perspective. For many clients, however, yacht charter can still feel intimidating from the outside. Some imagine only the largest superyachts and the highest price points, when the reality is more nuanced. The market includes many different kinds of experiences, from a Dubai sunset cruise to a corporate yacht event, from an intimate gathering on board to a longer Mediterranean charter with family or guests. The opportunity lies in helping the right people understand what is possible. This is particularly important for EAs, PAs and event bookers. They are often the people a client relies on first, but they may not always have the yacht charter knowledge needed to present the option confidently. If yacht charter is explained clearly, with the right level of service, suitability and expectation, it can become part of the private client conversation more naturally. It does not have to feel distant or opaque. It can be positioned as another form of exceptional hospitality, provided the experience is matched correctly to the client. The education piece is important. An assistant arranging a corporate event may not immediately think of a yacht as a suitable venue. A client planning a family trip may not fully understand the difference between a day charter and a week-long Mediterranean itinerary. Someone considering an experience in Dubai may not realise how flexible the yacht market can be for smaller, more intimate gatherings. The right advisor can make those distinctions clear. That is where the relationship between yachting and a trusted luxury network becomes so valuable. Yacht charter is rarely at its best when treated as a transaction. It requires questions, listening, guidance and an understanding of what the client is really trying to achieve. Is the priority privacy, celebration, scenery, corporate hosting, family time, status, relaxation or access to a destination? The yacht matters, of course, but so does the thinking behind the recommendation. For the yachting industry, there is a lesson in that. If yacht charter is to sit confidently alongside the wider world of luxury hospitality, it needs to be understood by the people who influence private client decisions before the client ever reaches the broker. The more informed those trusted intermediaries become, the more naturally yacht experiences can enter the conversation. The Quiet Value Of Trust The strongest luxury networks are rarely loud. They do not need to announce themselves. They work because the people inside them have earned confidence over time. A venue delivers what it promised. A supplier responds quickly. A recommendation proves accurate. A client is looked after. An assistant feels supported. The experience happens smoothly, and the guest may never know how many people were involved in making it feel effortless. That discretion is part of the elegance. In the world Sian represents, success often means allowing someone else to take the credit. The assistant looks prepared. The principal is satisfied. The venue shines. The yacht charter feels seamless. The guest enjoys the moment without ever seeing the structure behind it. That is the real architecture of luxury in Dubai. It is not only built from towers, hotels, yachts and restaurants. It is built from trust, memory, judgement and access. It is built from people who know how to read a brief, protect a client’s time and choose well. In the end, the Dubai luxury network is not a collection of places. It is a living web of relationships. And in that world, access is everything. ──────────────────────────── PRESENTED BY INTERNATIONAL YACHT REGISTER ──────────────────────────── International Yacht Register provides luxury yacht charter, ownership and advisory services for clients seeking trusted guidance, exceptional yachts, discreet support, market knowledge and access to the global yachting lifestyle. https://iyr.net/ Luxury in Dubai depends on more than an impressive address or a yacht waiting at the dock, because the quality of an experience often rests with the people who know how to make it happen. Sian Myburgh of Miss Jones Group Dubai offers an inside perspective on the trusted relationships, first-hand recommendations and attentive service connecting private clients with exceptional experiences, both ashore and afloat.

On a superyacht, maintenance is never a task that can be considered finished. Salt, sunlight, oxidation, heavy use and demanding schedules continually work against the vessel, while captains and crew are expected to preserve the appearance, performance and reliability associated with one of the world’s most valuable classes of assets. Behind that expectation is a difficult balance between maintenance standards, available budgets, crew experience and the time required to complete work properly. When any one of those elements is missing, decisions that appear economical in the short term can create significantly greater costs later. Sam Powell, Toy Shop Sales Director at National Marine Suppliers, has spent more than a decade working across yacht support, including deck and engineering supplies, new builds, yacht toys, logistics and urgent operational requests. That experience has given him a broad view of what happens when maintenance is properly planned, but also what happens when crews are stretched, purchasing decisions are made without sufficient technical knowledge and preventative work is repeatedly postponed. For Powell, the real cost of cutting corners is not limited to the price of repairing a damaged surface or replacing a piece of equipment. It can also be measured in additional labour, operational delays, disrupted charters, pressure on crew and the gradual loss of trust between the yacht and those supporting it. Superyacht Maintenance Requires More Than a Product A bottle may contain an effective cleaning or protective solution, but the result still depends upon the knowledge of the person using it. Different surfaces require different preparation, application and maintenance processes. A product designed for one material may cause permanent damage when used on another, while an aggressive approach intended to produce an immediate visual improvement may reduce the life of the surface being treated. PVC, teak, painted finishes, gelcoat, stainless steel, upholstery and coated surfaces each respond differently to chemicals, tools and environmental exposure. Understanding those differences is part of protecting the vessel. One of the recurring problems Powell has observed is the assumption that maintenance products are self-explanatory. A crew member may be handed a bottle and asked to complete a task without being told why that product was selected, how the surface should be prepared, how much should be applied or what warning signs indicate that something is going wrong. The crew member may be capable and conscientious, but still lack the experience required to identify the risks. If damage occurs, responsibility is often placed on the person carrying out the work, even when the larger failure was an absence of training. Using the wrong chemical on PVC can cause deterioration or discolouration. Incorrect treatment can damage teak rather than preserve it. Repeated polishing may temporarily improve a surface while gradually removing material and failing to address the underlying cause of the problem. These are not merely cosmetic concerns. The finishes and materials used throughout a superyacht can be extremely expensive to repair or replace, particularly when specialist contractors, shipyard time or custom materials are required. Product knowledge therefore needs to be treated as part of vessel protection. Suppliers and manufacturers have a responsibility to provide clear guidance, while senior crew need to ensure that those carrying out the work understand both the product and the material beneath it. The Difference Between Saving Money and Delaying the Cost Every yacht has a budget, and controlling expenditure is an essential part of responsible operation. The difficulty begins when maintenance requests are assessed only according to their immediate price. A cheaper product may require more frequent application. Delaying preventative maintenance may create more extensive corrective work. Reducing an order may leave crew without the supplies required to complete a process properly, while choosing a familiar product without checking its suitability may cause damage that costs far more than the original saving. This does not mean that the most expensive option is always the correct one. Price alone is not evidence of quality or suitability. The best decision comes from understanding the condition of the vessel, its operating schedule, the material being treated and the long-term consequences of each option. Powell’s experience across different areas of yacht supply has shown him how easily this context can disappear between the vessel and those approving expenditure. A captain or department head may understand why a particular product, replacement or maintenance programme is necessary, while someone reviewing the cost from ashore may see only a figure that appears too high. When communication is limited, the cheaper decision may win without anyone fully examining what it will cost in labour, repetition, deterioration or future repairs. Effective budgeting requires more than reducing individual purchases. It requires a realistic understanding of the vessel as a complete operating environment. Crew Training Protects the Vessel and the Crew The level of experience onboard can vary considerably, particularly when yachts are operating with new crew, seasonal employees or departments affected by high turnover. A new crew member may arrive with the required certificates but limited exposure to the specialist surfaces, systems and products found onboard a particular yacht. Even experienced crew cannot be expected to understand every new formulation, coating or piece of equipment without guidance. Training does not need to become unnecessarily complicated, but it must be practical. Crew should understand what a product is intended to do, where it can be used, what preparation is required and how to recognise an unsuitable reaction before permanent damage occurs. The same principle applies to equipment. Yacht toys, tenders and specialist systems require maintenance, storage and handling procedures that cannot safely be learned through assumption. When training is treated as optional, the yacht carries the risk. When it is built into purchasing and maintenance processes, it protects the asset while giving crew the confidence to perform their work properly. Powell sees knowledgeable suppliers as an important extension of the onboard team. A strong supplier should be able to answer questions, identify unsuitable choices and help crew understand the differences between products rather than simply processing an order. That relationship is particularly valuable when time is limited and the yacht is operating away from its usual support network. The Invisible Logistics Behind Yacht Operations A request from a yacht may sound straightforward. A product, replacement part or piece of equipment needs to reach the vessel before departure. Behind that request may be a complicated chain involving freight companies, customs requirements, local agents, island infrastructure, aircraft schedules and a deadline determined by the arrival of an owner or charter guest. National Marine Suppliers operates within that largely invisible support network. Powell’s work has taken him across deck and engineering requirements, new-build support, yacht toys and the urgent logistical problems that arise when a vessel needs something in a location where conventional delivery is not simple. The complexity becomes most apparent when something goes wrong. Powell recalls an occasion when a jet ski was accidentally sent to the wrong Caribbean island shortly before a charter. Correcting the mistake required far more than redirecting an ordinary parcel. An aircraft had to be chartered to move the jet ski to the yacht’s actual location before the guests arrived. The logistical response was extraordinary, but the more important part of the story was the communication surrounding it. Rather than attempting to conceal the mistake or redirect responsibility, Powell acknowledged what had happened and presented the owner with solutions. The jet ski reached the yacht, the charter proceeded and a situation that could have permanently damaged the relationship ultimately produced greater trust. Accountability Matters When Things Go Wrong No yacht, supplier or crew operates without mistakes. Equipment fails, deliveries are delayed, information is misunderstood and decisions occasionally produce unintended consequences. The standard of a professional operation is not determined by the complete absence of problems. It is revealed by the response when those problems occur. For Powell, accountability means communicating quickly, accepting responsibility where it belongs and arriving with a plan. An owner, captain or management company may be understandably frustrated by a mistake, but that frustration becomes significantly worse when information is withheld or blame is passed between those involved. Honesty does not remove the operational problem, but it creates the conditions required to solve it. This principle applies equally onboard. Crew need to be able to report mistakes, damage and uncertainty before a manageable problem becomes a serious one. A culture in which people are afraid to admit that they do not know how to use a product, or that something has gone wrong, places the vessel at greater risk. Clear communication, practical training and accountable leadership are therefore as important to maintenance as the products and tools being used. Strong Relationships Are Part of Preventative Maintenance A superyacht depends upon a wide network of people beyond those onboard. Suppliers, manufacturers, technicians, freight specialists, agents and shipyards all contribute to the vessel’s ability to operate safely and maintain the expected standard. The most effective relationships are not purely transactional. They develop when suppliers understand the yacht’s requirements, crew know whom they can contact for reliable guidance and both sides communicate honestly about costs, limitations and deadlines. Those relationships can prevent unsuitable purchases, accelerate problem-solving and provide crew with access to knowledge that may not exist onboard. They also help distinguish genuine savings from decisions that merely transfer the cost into the future. Cutting corners does not usually eliminate an expense. It delays it, relocates it or allows it to grow. The eventual cost may appear as damaged materials, additional labour, lost operating time, rushed freight, emergency technical support or a weakened professional relationship. Good superyacht maintenance is not about spending without restraint. It is about making informed decisions before small issues become expensive ones. That requires realistic budgets, trained crew, knowledgeable suppliers and a culture in which questions can be asked and mistakes can be addressed openly. The vessel may be the visible asset, but the people and relationships surrounding it are what keep it operational. ───────────────────────────────── PRESENTED BY VELLUTO PRODUCTS ─────────────────────────── High-performance ceramic marine care, freshly blended for yachts, tenders and personal watercraft. Engineered to protect against salt, UV exposure, oxidation and water spotting. Built for life on the water. vellutoproducts.com Cutting corners may ease immediate pressure on a yacht’s maintenance budget, but Sam Powell explains why limited product knowledge, inadequate crew training and short-term decisions often create far greater costs over time.

Near the end of his life, Buddy Haack wanted something beautifully ordinary. He wanted to walk again. He wanted to get into the car, ride the lift to his porch and watch the sun set over the lake. He remembered the therapist who had once taught him to walk after an earlier period of paralysis and hoped the same man might come to the house and help him do it again. “That would be all I need right now,” he said. By then, Buddy was paralysed on his left side and living with rapidly progressing glioblastoma. The disease had changed what his body could do and, at times, affected the course of his thinking and recollection. Yet even here, with his world reduced by illness, his instinct was to look for the remaining possibility. He had learned to walk again once. Perhaps he could do it twice. That small hope contains something essential about Buddy. Long before illness confined him, he had built a life by refusing to believe that his starting point had to determine where he would finish. His journey took him from a restless youth in Jacksonville Beach to yacht bridges in the Mediterranean, from shipyards and sea trials to an extraordinary arrival in Havana, and from a young man in need of direction to a mentor determined to pass on what he had learned. The sea did not simply give Buddy a career. It gave shape to a life that might otherwise have gone looking for trouble and found it. The opening he recognised Buddy never tried to polish the story of his youth. Growing up around Jacksonville Beach, he surfed, skipped school and became familiar with truant officers and other figures of authority. Conventional education did not hold him. The ocean did. Surfing asked for a different kind of intelligence. It rewarded balance, nerve, awareness and decisions made at precisely the right moment. Buddy understood that language long before he knew how far it might carry him. Then Captain Doug Hoogs brought the schooner Unicorn to Jacksonville. Buddy had seen the tall ship on television among the vessels sailing down the Hudson River. When he told friends that Unicorn was coming to his hometown, few believed him. But she eventually appeared beside the seawall in downtown Jacksonville, carrying a young crew that included juvenile offenders being offered structure, responsibility and a different future. Buddy recognised something of himself in them. He also saw in Doug a man who understood that young people sometimes needed useful work, firm expectations and someone prepared to see what they might become. There was no position waiting for Buddy that day, but he had already made one of the clearest decisions of his life. “I knew one thing. I wasn’t going to get too far away from him. He was onto something and I knew it.” Doug became his captain, teacher, advocate, mentor and lifelong friend. Buddy spent a year at sea aboard Unicorn, crossed the Atlantic as a watch captain and worked as both deckhand and engineer. Before he even held a captain’s licence, he was offered command of a chase boat supporting a large sailing yacht in the Mediterranean. Experience came first for Buddy. The credentials had to catch up. Learning what the classroom had failed to teach Doug knew that instinct and enthusiasm would only carry Buddy so far. A professional life at sea required discipline, technical knowledge and qualifications. When Buddy attended sea school, Doug gave him a place to stay on a houseboat and helped him work through the material. Rules of the road, navigation and safety were no longer abstract lessons. They were the means by which he could remain in the world he had chosen. Passing his 100-ton examination gave Buddy a sense of achievement he had rarely associated with education. Later, while pursuing his 500-ton licence, he encountered navigation problems so difficult that he nearly rose from his chair and walked away. He stayed, worked through them and passed. Buddy told such stories at his own expense, laughing at his lack of academic confidence and making failure part of the joke. Yet beneath the humour was something more important than easy brilliance. He was willing to study what intimidated him and remain with a problem after his confidence had deserted him. The young man who had once fled classrooms had found a reason to learn. From Jacksonville to the Mediterranean By 1987, Buddy and Doug were each overseeing fast yachts being built in Italy, with their sea trials falling on the same day. Buddy was aboard the Baglietto-built motor yacht Adler, carrying the responsibility of a new vessel and machinery being tested at speed. When he reached Cannes and found Doug’s yacht beside his own, there was reassurance in the sight. The mentor who had opened the first door was still there, but Buddy was no longer standing behind him. He had earned command of his own bridge. Adler carried Buddy into one of the most improbable chapters of his career. In March 1994, he took the yacht to Havana with the required authority from the United States. Fidel Castro came aboard with his security detail. Shoes were removed, drinks were served and photographs captured a scene few American yacht captains of that era would ever have encountered. The significance of the story was never only the famous name. Its real power lay in the distance travelled. A boy who had struggled to remain in school was now responsible for the yacht, the crew and the experience of one of the most recognisable figures in the world. Buddy’s working life continued far beyond the wheelhouse, through yacht construction, refit, shipyard management, sales and owner representation. He represented Lürssen, valuing its rigorous engineering and worldwide support. He also became an author, putting industry knowledge into a form that could outlast the immediate job. His relationships became part of yachting’s practical machinery. When someone needed an engineer, a crew member, a trusted connection or a way through a stubborn problem, Buddy knew whom to call. That network had been earned over decades of shared work and promises kept. Buddy Haack and the power of imagination For all the qualifications he earned and the expertise he accumulated, Buddy remained wary of being described as an intellectual. He preferred another quality. “I’ve never been one that has prided myself on intelligence, but I do think that every once in a while I startle myself with my imagination.” The line carries his natural self-mockery, but it also explains much of his life. Buddy’s imagination was a working skill. It allowed a surfer and reluctant student to see a route towards becoming a deckhand, engineer, licensed captain and trusted representative of leading yacht builders. It also allowed him to see ability in people who might not reveal it in a classroom. Someone could struggle academically and still possess mechanical insight, seamanship, leadership or the calm judgement required at sea. The industry, he believed, should make room for those forms of intelligence. Mentorship mattered because Doug had recognised capability before Buddy possessed the credentials to prove it. That faith did not excuse him from the work; it gave the work a purpose. Opportunity was not a lowering of standards, but an invitation to rise to them. He wanted more of that knowledge to remain in the United States. He imagined American yacht-building projects bringing experienced professionals, skilled trades and young workers together. The expertise already existed, he argued. It needed a “band conductor” able to draw separate talents into a working whole and keep hard-won knowledge from disappearing when one generation left the yard. Even as his health declined, his imagination kept reaching towards engineering problems. He considered propulsion systems built around sequential battery banks and wondered whether a hull moving through salt water might help generate power. The ideas were ambitious, unfinished and entirely characteristic. A life with all its edges Buddy cannot be understood through the milestones of his career alone. He was funny, candid and irreverent, quick to make himself the punchline and able to find humour even in moments that might have embarrassed someone else. He took genuine pride in the times persistence carried him further than confidence, and spoke of Doug with the affection reserved for someone who had changed not only the direction of his career, but the course of his life. Beneath that humour was a deep seriousness about what the industry owed the people coming next. He knew that lives can turn on a single person taking an interest. Doug had not handed him a career. He had offered access, standards, encouragement and the expectation that Buddy would do something with them. In time, the young man who needed someone to recognise his potential became an older man determined to recognise possibility in others. That may be the most meaningful part of what he left behind. Yachts, shipyards, books, photographs and extraordinary stories mark the visible path of his life, but legacy also lives in quieter places: in people encouraged, expertise shared without calculation, calls answered when somebody needed help and confidence given to a young person who could not yet see a future. Near the end, Buddy’s world had narrowed to the dimensions of his body and home, but his hopes retained their familiar structure. He believed he might walk because he had learned to walk again before. He believed exceptional yachts could be built in America because he knew the people capable of it. He believed a young person floundering at school could find a meaningful life at sea because he had once been that person. Possibility, for Buddy Haack, was never optimism in the abstract. It was memory put to work. The image that remains is the porch. Buddy wanted to reach it under his own power and sit before the lake as the day came to an end. After a life of Atlantic crossings, Mediterranean ports, high-speed sea trials and ideas that ranged far beyond the horizon, what mattered was the freedom to move through his own home and watch the light change over familiar water. Death has fixed the boundary of Buddy’s life, but not the reach of it. His influence remains tangible in the vessels, the books, the knowledge he shared, the people whose lives and careers he touched, and the example of a man who never mistook an unpromising beginning for a final destination. His own words provide the ending his story deserves. “The possibilities are unlimited.” This special Yachting USA tribute is supported by Engineered Yacht Solutions. From Jacksonville Beach to the bridges and shipyards of the superyacht world, Buddy Haack built a life defined by imagination, persistence and the people who recognised his potential. His lasting legacy lies not only in what he achieved, but in the possibilities he continued to see in others.

There is a version of superyacht captaincy that looks effortless from the outside. The yacht moves, the guests arrive, the itinerary unfolds, the crew deliver, and the person on the bridge appears calm, composed and in control. The reality is far more demanding. For Captain Olly Lewis, command is not only about navigation, rank or authority. It is about preparation, judgement, trust, restraint, responsibility and the ability to make decisions when there is no time to wait for certainty. It is also about remaining human in a role that can be lonely, exposed and deeply pressurised. His route into yachting was never the standard dock-walking story. Before he became a superyacht captain, Lewis trained as a ship’s joiner at Pendennis in Falmouth, one of the United Kingdom’s best-known superyacht builders. That apprenticeship gave him something many crew never have at the start of their careers: a physical understanding of how a yacht is put together. By the time his first opportunity at sea arrived, he had helped build the vessel he would later join as deckhand. He knew the yacht from the keel up, understood her structure, had spent years around the build crew, and had already built a practical relationship with the vessel before stepping onboard as crew. That foundation matters. Superyacht command is often discussed in terms of certificates, mileage and rank, but Lewis’ career began with tools in hand, learning the value of detail, patience and workmanship before he ever stood on a bridge. Superyacht Captain Leadership Begins Before Guests Step Onboard Charter captaincy is not simply about what happens once guests arrive. For Lewis, much of the success of a charter is shaped weeks, and sometimes months, before anyone steps onto the passerelle. The strongest charter experiences begin with preparation. That means early communication, understanding guest preferences, building rapport before arrival, introducing key crew members, and removing as many unknowns as possible before the trip begins. By the time guests board, the relationship should not feel cold or transactional. There should already be familiarity, trust and a sense that the crew understand what kind of experience they are expected to deliver. That preparation is not just good service. It is operational leadership. When expectations are clear, the crew can move with more confidence. When communication is already open, the captain can anticipate more accurately. When the relationship has been built before the first day, the charter has a stronger chance of running smoothly from the beginning, rather than spending valuable time finding its rhythm. Lewis was recognised by Burgess as Charter Captain of the Year in 2023, but his view of charter success is not centred on individual praise. He places the credit where experienced captains often do: with the team. The captain may be the person representing the yacht, but the delivery depends on the people working across every department, before, during and after the charter. The Pressure Behind The Title There is pride in the role, and Lewis does not hide that. The best parts of command still matter to him: joining the yacht, leaving port, completing a passage, handling a difficult manoeuvre, or hearing that guests have had an exceptional time. There is still a moment of looking back at the yacht and feeling the scale of the job. That sense of privilege has not disappeared. But captaincy also carries a private cost. For Lewis, the hardest part is being away from home. Rotation can look like the perfect answer from the outside, but it does not remove the emotional weight of absence. Half the year at home still means half the year away. For captains with partners, children and family lives ashore, that balance is not theoretical. It is lived every time they leave. Command can also be lonely. A captain may have a good relationship with crew, but they are still ultimately accountable for the vessel, the programme and the people onboard. There has to be approachability, but there also has to be distance. There has to be warmth, but there also has to be authority. The balance is delicate, and it changes under pressure. Lewis’ approach is rooted in presence rather than ego. He believes in staying grounded, being approachable, using the experience of heads of department, and remembering that the captain is still part of the crew. Leadership, in that sense, is not about sitting behind a closed bridge door. It is about being visible enough that crew know the person in command understands the reality of the job. When Preparation Meets A Real Threat The weight of command becomes clearest when preparation is no longer theoretical. During a passage from Asia to Europe, through the Gulf of Aden and towards the Red Sea, Lewis was faced with a security situation that remains one of the defining moments of his time at sea. The vessel had taken precautions. Armed security personnel were onboard. The crew had drilled extensively. The yacht was prepared for the risks associated with that route. Then, in the early hours of the morning, a skiff approached. The situation moved quickly. The vessel went to full sea speed. The crew were secured below. The security team were in body armour with weapons loaded. Lewis found himself alone on the bridge, also in body armour, sounding the horn and making decisions in real time while the threat continued to develop. That is the point at which training meets reality. Drills matter, but they cannot fully recreate the adrenaline, uncertainty and human pressure of the real moment. The captain must decide whether the approaching vessel is curiosity, confusion or a genuine threat, and the decision cannot wait for perfect clarity. In this case, the skiff eventually turned away. The incident did not escalate further. But the importance of the response was not limited to the moment itself. Afterwards came the debrief, the reflection and the human check-in. What worked? What could have been better? How did people respond? Who was shaken? What could be learned? That response reveals as much about leadership as the decision made on the bridge. A strong captain does not treat crew like machinery. Whether the incident is security-related, medical, operational or environmental, the people onboard carry the experience with them. Good leadership acknowledges that. Crew Morale Is An Operational Issue In high-pressure charter environments, morale is not soft. It is structural. Tired crew make mistakes. Unhappy crew withdraw. Unheard crew stop communicating. Resentment, stress and exhaustion can spread quickly in a closed environment, especially during an intense season where privacy is limited and pressure is constant. Lewis understands that captains cannot solve everything alone, and nor should they pretend to. Large yachts depend on heads of department, senior crew and a shared understanding of what the team needs. A captain who thinks they are the hero of every situation will burn out quickly, and may take the crew with them. His leadership philosophy is practical. Stay approachable. Lose the ego. Use the experience around you. Lead by example. Be present. Treat junior crew with the same basic respect as senior officers. That does not remove hierarchy. Yachts need hierarchy, especially in moments of risk. But hierarchy does not have to mean distance, arrogance or silence. The best leaders know how to hold authority without becoming unreachable. Recruiting For More Than Certificates When recruiting for a busy charter season, Lewis looks beyond the basic paperwork. Certificates matter. STCW, medicals and required training are the starting point. But they do not tell the whole story of whether someone can cope with pressure, long hours, shared living, demanding guests and the intensity of a serious programme. Life experience matters. Resilience matters. The ability to contribute to a crew community matters. Lewis also values crew who bring something extra. A barber, surfer, lifeguard, runner, tennis player or strong water sports person may add something that benefits both the guests and the crew. Onboard, those additional skills can help shape the atmosphere of the yacht, support guest itineraries and strengthen the sense of community among crew who are living and working together in close quarters. That point is important because superyacht crew are not simply employees clocking in and out. They are part of a contained, high-pressure, high-expectation environment where attitude and adaptability can be just as important as experience. The Captain’s Final Line There are moments in charter where the answer has to be no. Lewis gives a familiar example: guests wanting to travel at sea with more than the permitted number of people onboard. Events at anchor or in port may be managed under different permissions, but travelling underway is not the same thing. When safety, flag requirements and insurance limitations are involved, the captain’s responsibility is clear. The same applies to weather calls, overnight passages and requests that push against good judgement. A captain’s job is not to agree to everything. It is to protect the vessel, the guests, the crew and the integrity of the operation, even when that answer is inconvenient. That is where command becomes visible. Not in volume, not in performance, and not in the title itself, but in the ability to hold a boundary calmly when the pressure is on. Captain Olly Lewis represents a version of modern superyacht command shaped by practical beginnings, strong mentorship, professional discipline and a clear respect for the people around him. His career has taken him from shipyard floors to charter leadership, from family sacrifice to security incidents at sea, and from hands-on apprenticeship to the responsibility of the bridge. The job still excites him, but he does not romanticise it. That may be the point. The best captains are not those who only love the view from the bridge. They are the ones who understand the weight of standing there. Superyacht Captain Olly Lewis reflects on the reality of command, from charter pressure, crew leadership and family life on rotation to safety decisions, guest boundaries and the responsibility of standing on the bridge when everything depends on calm judgement.

A vessel does not have to be dead in the water for its crew to have been abandoned. Across global shipping, seafarers are continuing to work aboard operational ships while wages disappear, contracts expire, repatriation is delayed and the basic conditions of life at sea begin to break down. For Mohamed Arrachedi, who deals with these cases across the Arab World and Iran for the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the problem is no longer identifying what abandonment looks like. The regulations already exist. The far harder question is why they are still not being enforced. International Transport Workers’ Federation There is a persistent image attached to the word abandonment in maritime, one of a silent vessel sitting at anchor with an owner who has vanished, a crew left onboard without money or any obvious route home, but the reality Mohamed Arrachedi encounters through his work with the International Transport Workers’ Federation is often far less dramatic at the beginning and, perhaps because of that, far easier for the industry to overlook. The ship may still be sailing, cargo may still be moving and the crew may still be working, yet wages have stopped arriving, somebody's contract ended weeks ago, repatriation has been pushed to another port because it will be cheaper from there, or provisions, fuel and basic services have started to deteriorate while the people onboard continue being told that everything will be resolved soon. Arrachedi, the ITF FOC Network Coordinator for the Arab World and Iran, works across an area stretching from North Africa through the Middle East and Iran, dealing directly with Maritime Labour Convention complaints, unpaid wages, repatriation problems and abandonment. His perspective comes not from examining the problem at a distance, but from the cases arriving on his desk and phone from seafarers who may already have spent months waiting for somebody to honour obligations that should never have been negotiable in the first place. Seafarer Abandonment Can Begin While the Vessel Is Still Operating Under the Maritime Labour Convention, the threshold for abandonment is much clearer than many seafarers may realise. Arrachedi explains that a seafarer can be considered abandoned when wages have remained unpaid for two months, when an owner fails or refuses to arrange repatriation once the contractual obligation to do so has arisen, or when essential needs such as food, water and fuel are no longer being provided. Importantly, those conditions do not all need to exist at the same time. One can be enough. The International Labour Organization maintains the Maritime Labour Convention as the central international framework setting minimum working and living standards for seafarers. Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 That matters because abandonment can exist long before a vessel visually resembles a ship in crisis. A crew member can still be standing watch, maintaining machinery or handling cargo while already meeting the international definition of an abandoned seafarer, which helps explain why some cases deteriorate for months before outside assistance is requested. The delay can be costly in every sense, because the longer wages remain unpaid and contracts remain unresolved, the more likely it becomes that an apparently straightforward employment dispute begins accumulating additional problems involving immigration status, documentation, insurance, vessel movements and the practical ability to get somebody home. When two months without wages becomes twelve One of the cases Arrachedi describes involves two Ethiopian seafarers who had gone 12 months without receiving their wages. The vessel was associated with a maritime registry that had ratified the Maritime Labour Convention, meaning the requirement to pay seafarers monthly was neither obscure nor uncertain. Arrachedi's assessment is particularly uncomfortable because he rejects the idea that such a prolonged failure can simply be dismissed as somebody forgetting to pay. The employer knew the obligation existed, knew the crew should have been paid and nevertheless allowed the situation to continue. Even the sums involved expose something deeply troubling about the economics behind some of these cases. Arrachedi says the two men were earning around US$200 a month, while other cases he has encountered have involved wages as low as US$75 a month, figures that place abandonment within the much broader question of systemic exploitation and the value assigned to maritime labour depending upon where the worker comes from. By the time the Ethiopian seafarers finally sought assistance, their contracts had already expired, immigration complications were emerging and repatriation itself had become a separate problem that now needed to be negotiated alongside the recovery of twelve months of outstanding wages. The delay had transformed what should have been a simple monthly obligation into a structural problem involving several jurisdictions and several different sets of responsibilities. Their vessel was also in the Hormuz region, where the wider conflict was making the process of resolving their case and arranging repatriation more difficult. When abandonment meets a conflict zone Iran and the Strait of Hormuz are not the cause of the global abandonment crisis, nor should they become a convenient headline through which every abandonment case is viewed, but Arrachedi's experience in the region demonstrates how much more vulnerable a seafarer becomes when an existing labour failure collides with geopolitical instability. In another case received from a vessel in Iran, seafarers reported sleeping on deck in extreme heat because there was no fuel and therefore no air conditioning. The vessel was experiencing a blackout, refrigeration was failing and provisions were beginning to deteriorate, while the absence of lighting was creating an additional safety problem because the ship itself was becoming difficult to see. These are precisely the circumstances in which the distinction between an employment problem and a humanitarian one begins to disappear, because the seafarer who has not been paid is also the person who cannot simply leave the workplace, go home, buy food somewhere else or arrange their own transport out of the situation. The wider environment around Hormuz makes that vulnerability particularly acute today. The International Maritime Organization continues to report heightened risk and uncertainty for seafarers in and around the Strait, with shipping affected by the ongoing Middle East conflict and thousands of seafarers exposed to disruption in the region. IMO information on the Strait of Hormuz and Middle East maritime situation For a seafarer who is already over contract, unpaid or waiting for repatriation, those conditions introduce another level of uncertainty that has nothing to do with the employment agreement they originally signed. Vessel movements become more difficult, insurance and sanctions may complicate the route forward, ports may be harder to access and the simple act of getting somebody home becomes entangled with a crisis far larger than the individual crew member. The labour failure has not been caused by the conflict, but the conflict can make escaping its consequences considerably harder. Record numbers are becoming dangerously familiar The individual stories are disturbing enough, but they sit within a wider trend that should make the entire maritime sector uncomfortable. The ITF Seafarers' Bulletin 2026 records 409 vessels and 4,595 seafarers abandoned during 2025, compared with 312 vessels and 3,133 seafarers the previous year. Indian seafarers were again the nationality most affected, with 1,125 crew recorded, while the Arab World and Iran accounted for 152 abandonments, the largest regional figure in the ITF's published breakdown. ITF Seafarers’ Bulletin 2026 The financial scale is equally significant, with the ITF recording more than US$25.8 million in owed wages and more than US$16.5 million recovered at the time its figures were compiled. Arrachedi recalled approximately 412 abandonment cases while speaking from memory during the conversation, while the ITF's published 2025 figure records 409 vessels. The precise final count matters for accuracy, but neither number changes the underlying reality that abandonment reached another record level and that thousands of people were caught inside it. What the statistics cannot show nearly as effectively is how far the consequences extend beyond those 4,595 seafarers. An unpaid seafarer rarely suffers alone For Arrachedi, the human cost is central to understanding why abandonment cannot simply be categorised as a commercial disagreement over unpaid invoices. Many of the seafarers he deals with come from the Global South and from communities where one salary earned at sea may support several people at home. Months without wages therefore do not remain confined to a vessel thousands of miles away, because mortgages or rent, food, education costs, medical bills and the everyday needs of a family continue regardless of whether the employer has honoured the contract. A seafarer who has gone six or twelve months without pay may be dealing simultaneously with the stress of being trapped onboard and the knowledge that the people who depend upon that income are struggling ashore, which turns the official number of abandoned seafarers into only a partial measure of the real number of people affected. Behind a single entry in an abandonment database there may be a spouse trying to keep a household functioning, children waiting for a parent to come home and an extended family that has lost the income upon which it relied, making the eventual financial recovery only one part of repairing what may have been months of uncertainty and distress. The warning signs appear before the legal threshold One of Arrachedi's most important messages to seafarers is that they should not wait for a situation to become catastrophic before seeking assistance, because the warning signs often appear well before the formal two-month threshold for abandonment has been reached. He uses provisions as a simple example. If a vessel normally receives food for a month and the month ends without new provisions arriving, the crew should begin asking why, because a company that cannot fund basic food supplies should not automatically be trusted when it promises that several months of wages will suddenly be paid the following week. The same questions should be asked when repatriation is repeatedly postponed, when medical treatment is delayed because of cost, when maintenance starts deteriorating or when an employer is unable to meet relatively small immediate obligations while simultaneously promising that much larger financial problems are about to be resolved. The ITF's own guidance reinforces that message, reminding seafarers that the Maritime Labour Convention requires wages to be paid at least monthly and stating that going more than a month without receiving full pay is already a breach, even before the two-month abandonment threshold has been reached. Its advice to anyone who believes a situation is deteriorating is explicit: act quickly rather than waiting until recovery becomes more difficult. Seafarers can also check current and historical cases through the ITF's abandonment list and the joint ILO/IMO abandonment database, both of which can provide useful information before joining a vessel or when concerns begin to emerge. ITF Seafarer Abandonment List ILO/IMO Joint Database on Abandonment of Seafarers At sea, working conditions are living conditions Arrachedi also makes an important distinction that can easily be missed by people whose understanding of employment is shaped by shore-based work, because a seafarer cannot separate the workplace from the place in which they live. When a shore employee finishes work, they generally leave the office, factory or site and return to a separate home environment. A seafarer remains onboard, often for many months, which means that failures involving food, water, sanitation, internet access, medical treatment, accommodation or power do not end when the working day finishes. For the seafarer, they become the conditions of life itself. That is why Arrachedi argues that maritime cannot separate working conditions from living conditions, particularly when an injured or unwell crew member is told to wait until another port for medical attention or when an owner delays repatriation because moving the seafarer later will be cheaper. The question in those moments is no longer simply whether a contract has been administered correctly, but whether the basic obligations owed to the person living and working onboard are being respected at all. Fear and intimidation allow problems to grow If early reporting is so important, the obvious question is why some seafarers wait months before asking for help, and Arrachedi's answer acknowledges a reality that cannot be solved merely by publishing another set of regulations. Some seafarers are frightened. They may face intimidation or threats onboard, worry that complaining will destroy future employment opportunities, or believe that challenging an owner will leave them stranded somewhere without wages and without a job. Those fears can be particularly powerful when there is a significant imbalance between the seafarer and the people controlling their employment, documentation and route home. This is where the network surrounding maritime workers becomes essential. The ITF, affiliated unions, Stella Maris, seafarers' centres, charities and welfare organisations regularly pass cases between countries and regions, ensuring that somebody asking for help in one part of the world can be connected with people capable of intervening when the vessel reaches another. Arrachedi's message is not that every seafarer must somehow solve their own abandonment case, but rather that the organisations capable of helping need enough time to work, because contacting owners, insurers, flag states and port authorities, tracking vessel movements and navigating different jurisdictions becomes considerably harder after months have already passed. For seafarers who believe they may already be facing abandonment, the ITF provides confidential assistance at abandonment@itf.org.uk. The regulations exist, yet abandonment continues to rise This is where Arrachedi's argument moves beyond individual cases and towards a much larger question for the maritime industry, because abandonment is not growing in the absence of international standards. The Maritime Labour Convention exists. Requirements relating to wages exist. Repatriation rights exist. Financial security requirements exist. Responsibilities have been assigned to owners, flags, insurers and administrations. The difficulty, in Arrachedi's view, is implementation. When enforcement is rigorous, operators understand that breaches are likely to have consequences, but when authorities are passive or systems are slow, unscrupulous owners can make a commercial assessment about where they are more likely to operate without serious intervention. Arrachedi describes that difference openly, arguing that some operators avoid jurisdictions where they know port-state control will be proactive and instead gravitate towards areas where enforcement is perceived to be weaker. That failure has consequences not only for seafarers but also for owners who are trying to operate responsibly. A company that pays appropriate wages, maintains its vessel, provides adequate provisions, invests in safety and funds repatriation carries costs that another operator may attempt to avoid, meaning weak enforcement can effectively allow a bad operator to gain a commercial advantage over a company meeting the minimum standards required of it. Arrachedi therefore frames proper implementation of the Maritime Labour Convention not only as protection for crew but as protection for legitimate shipping businesses that should not have to compete with operators whose lower costs are being achieved at the expense of seafarers. Zero tolerance must become an operating principle Arrachedi ultimately describes abandonment as something maritime should approach with zero tolerance, arguing that responsibility for ending it cannot continue to fall primarily on unions, charities and welfare organisations once the damage has already been done. Those organisations will continue rescuing seafarers, recovering wages, providing supplies and helping people get home because somebody has to be there when the system fails, but they cannot be expected to compensate indefinitely for failures by parties that possess considerably greater regulatory, financial and institutional power. For Arrachedi, many abandonment cases are avoidable, which makes impunity one of the most important parts of the problem. If an operator repeatedly discovers that withholding wages, delaying repatriation or neglecting basic crew needs produces few meaningful consequences, the system has created very little incentive for that behaviour to change. That is what makes the continuing rise in abandonment so difficult to accept. Maritime does not need another decade to discover what happens when wages stop arriving, contracts are ignored and owners fail to provide the basics required by the people living aboard their vessels, because the evidence already exists in thousands of cases and in the experiences of people such as Mohamed Arrachedi who deal with the consequences every day. The regulations are already written, the warning signs are already understood and the organisations attempting to help seafarers already know what happens when intervention comes too late. What remains unresolved is whether the wider industry is prepared to treat abandonment as something genuinely unacceptable rather than something regrettable that happens to a certain number of seafarers every year. For the men and women who go to sea expecting to work, be paid and eventually return home, that distinction matters enormously, because none of them signed a contract agreeing to surrender those rights simply because enforcing them became inconvenient. ──────────────────────────── SUPPORTED BY CHIRP Maritime & The Seafarers’ Charity ──────────────────────────── CHIRP Maritime and The Seafarers’ Charity support Sea Views and its commitment to meaningful maritime conversations that place safety, seafarer wellbeing, and industry responsibility at the centre of the discussion. CHIRP Maritime: www.chirp.co.uk The Seafarers’ Charity: www.theseafarerscharity.org A ship can still be sailing, cargo can still be moving and a crew can still be working while the seafarers onboard have already been abandoned. Mohamed Arrachedi examines the human reality behind unpaid wages, failed repatriation and an international system in which the regulations exist, yet enforcement continues to fall short.

Discrimination in yachting rarely needs a written rule to alter the course of a career. In an Antibes recruitment office, Ghada “Lili” Soliman recalls being advised not to imagine a senior future because she was Egyptian, English was not her first language, and the interviewer had never seen an Arab in such a position. She had gone there to build on the experience she had already gained aboard yachts. She left wondering whether the industry had room for the person she might become. Discrimination in Yachting Begins Before a Promotion Is Discussed Soliman did not enter maritime work through the usual crew route. Having studied architecture and engineering, she first worked on AutoCAD drawings for a fishing vessel being converted into a private yacht. The project brought her into contact with the captain and engineers and introduced her to an industry she had barely known. She later joined an operational luxury yacht, worked in Egypt, and travelled to Europe to widen her prospects. The interview in Antibes made her ambition feel like a liability. She remembers a British applicant being received differently, while her own nationality and developing English became grounds for questioning how far she could go. The message she took away was blunt: there were no Arabs in senior positions, so she should not expect to be the first. The absence of visible leaders had been turned into a reason to discourage the next one. She carried that judgment into her work. Soliman says she remained a stewardess for seven years, working hard while believing a senior role was beyond her reach. She is now a Chief Stewardess aboard a 74-metre yacht and the founder of The Inner Harbour. Her promotion demonstrates what that interviewer failed to see; it cannot restore the years in which she doubted her own prospects. When a Reference Becomes a Threat The agency interview was not the only early experience that taught Soliman to keep her ambitions small. In another position, she says a captain linked help with visa paperwork and a discharge-book signature to her coming to his cabin. She recalls him warning that refusal or speaking about it would bring a bad reference and end her chances of finding another job in yachting. Soliman refused. Frightened and unsure how to leave without creating more trouble, she went to the chief engineer, who helped her write a resignation letter and accompanied her as a witness. She left the yacht believing the captain might still be able to ruin her career. The details matter because a reference, a signature and practical help with paperwork can carry enormous weight for someone at the beginning of a career. In Soliman’s account, the chief engineer’s quiet intervention gave her a way to leave a situation in which she felt trapped. Her ability to say no should never have depended on finding that one person. The Silence That Can Look Like Safety Other forms of exclusion were less dramatic and harder to name. Soliman recalls assumptions that people from what colleagues called a “third world country” were less capable or less willing to work. When her English was less fluent, impatience from other crew made conversation difficult. She withdrew, and that withdrawal was then treated as evidence that she did not fit in. She also describes mean remarks dressed up as jokes. When she objected, the response was that she had misunderstood because of her English. After enough of these exchanges, even deciding whether a comment was harmless became exhausting. She chose, in her words, to “stay small” and concentrate on the work. Discrimination in yachting can persist through that sequence: an assumption, a reaction to the assumption, and a judgment about the reaction. The crew member who speaks less because she is repeatedly dismissed becomes the person others describe as distant. The label appears to confirm the very treatment that produced it. Soliman eventually began to express her ideas and concerns calmly. She says colleagues started to ask what she thought, and her first Chief Stewardess role followed. She encourages crew to develop their communication skills and speak up when something is wrong. Her experience also places a responsibility on the people listening. A junior colleague cannot create psychological safety alone, especially when a senior person controls the reference she may need for her next job. What Belonging Looks Like on a Working Yacht Today, Soliman leads an interior team that includes British, South African, Turkish and Filipino crew. She holds a morning meeting and checks in with people individually during the day, asking how they feel and whether they need help. She invites ideas as readily as she gives instructions. Others have called her approach too soft. For a crew member accustomed to being overlooked, the invitation to contribute can be the difference between merely completing a task and developing into a leader. She is candid about the habits she had to unlearn. When she first became Chief Stewardess, she believed a strong leader had to be certain and resist suggestions. Her team grew distant despite her concern for them. She took a break from yachting, studied leadership, and returned more willing to ask a simple question: “What do you think?” One small exercise captures the shift. Rather than dictate a single method for making a bed, she asked her stews to show one another their techniques and compare what worked best. The task was ordinary; the change in who was allowed to teach was not. Experience could travel across the team instead of only down the hierarchy. When Soliman considers who might be ready to lead, she looks for curiosity, openness to feedback and a willingness to grow. She asks captains and department heads to notice quieter crew as well as confident ones. Confidence is often built by being given opportunities. Waiting for it to appear before offering those opportunities can leave capable people unseen. Soliman believes yachting has become more attentive to crew wellbeing during her 16 years in the industry, and that assumptions about Arab and Filipino crew in senior positions have begun to change. Her own career is evidence of possibility, but it also shows how much depends on the decisions made long before a promotion. An agency can assess ability without treating a passport as a forecast. A captain can ensure a refusal does not threaten a crew member’s future. A department head can ask the quieter person for an idea and take the answer seriously. That is how belonging becomes something a crew member can experience, rather than a promise the industry makes about itself. At an agency interview in Antibes, Ghada “Lili” Soliman was told she should not expect to reach a senior position in yachting. Her journey to Chief Stewardess reveals the lasting cost of that judgment and the kind of leadership that gives other crew a fairer chance.

Master mariner Ann Pletschke has built a career across offshore operations, command, vessel inspection and autonomous shipping. That breadth of experience now informs a mission grounded in safety, professional equality and the voices of seafarers themselves. At four years old, Ann Pletschke had already decided that she would one day command a ship. By sixteen, she was at sea, beginning a career that would cross deep-sea cargo, North Sea offshore operations, passenger ferries, polar waters, vessel inspection, marine consultancy and autonomous shipping. More than twenty-five years later, women’s safety at sea sits at the centre of a mission shaped not by slogans, but by command, difficult ships, honest failure and what she has witnessed when people are isolated from the systems intended to protect them. Ann’s authority does not rest upon one title. She is a master mariner, Master SDPO, OVID and eCMID AVI inspector, Chartered Master Mariner and Chartered Marine Technologist, with an MEng and MSc behind her. Yet the thread connecting those qualifications is less about collecting letters than refusing to believe that experience ever makes further learning unnecessary. The Captain She Had Always Intended to Become The sea ran through Ann’s family, although its history had been written almost entirely by men. Her father had gone to sea, as had his father and the generations before him. As an only child, Ann inherited that maritime instinct without inheriting an obvious female path to follow. At fourteen, she was told that her eyesight might prevent her from pursuing the only career she had ever wanted. She considered oceanography, ship agency and other work connected to the water, but none of it answered the same need. When the medical position changed and the route reopened, she left school at sixteen and began her cadetship with the determination of someone who had already experienced how quickly a future could be taken away. Her qualifications came in stages, but learning soon became both an ambition and an insurance policy. Conscious that changing medical standards might one day bring her seagoing career to an end, she completed an early distance-learning diploma in port management and continued building knowledge alongside sea time. During the pandemic, uncertainty about autonomous shipping prompted an unusually practical response: she took a job in the field because she wanted to understand whether the technology was safe, how it worked and what it would mean for mariners. That decision eventually led to a Master of Engineering in Autonomous Maritime Operations. The pattern is characteristic of Ann’s career. When confronted by something unfamiliar, she moves closer to it. She began on traditional deep-sea vessels, carrying general cargo out and palletised bananas back, convinced that offshore work in the North Sea held little appeal. When she eventually entered the offshore sector, the physicality, deck operations and demanding ship handling suited her far better than expected. Passenger ferries brought another form of intensity, navigating the Dover Strait repeatedly through dense traffic, while time among the ice off Greenland gave her one of the defining experiences of her cadetship. Those contrasts taught her that a master mariner’s licence may be broad, but maritime careers can narrow quickly. Dynamic positioning, tanker endorsements, polar certification and vessel-specific experience can open one sector while quietly closing another. For women who may plan to leave the sea temporarily, raise children and later return, the consequences of early specialisation can be particularly significant. That understanding informs Ann’s work as a trustee of the Maritime London Officer Cadet Scholarship, helping young people access training, meaningful sea time and an understanding of the wider maritime profession. She wants cadets to see possibilities early, before one decision restricts the shape of an entire career. A Wider View from Every Gangway Since establishing her own business in 2013, Ann has conducted offshore vetting inspections, navigation assessments, sailing audits and marine consultancy across very different vessels and working environments. Inspection offers a rare view of the industry because it reveals exceptional practice and serious weakness with equal clarity. It also places her aboard ships she might never otherwise encounter, speaking directly with the people who live and work within them. On some vessels in Kuwait, crew members may remain onboard for two years or longer with little or no shore leave. Ann can be the only woman they see during an entire year, arriving to inspect a working environment almost entirely separated from the professional networks, conferences and online conversations through which the industry often imagines change is being communicated. That experience has widened her understanding of inequality. Gender has shaped her career and exposed her to serious harm, but it is not the only source of vulnerability at sea. Nationality, rank, race, culture, contractual conditions, connectivity and access to information can all determine whose voice is heard and whose welfare remains invisible. For Ann, improving women’s safety at sea therefore belongs within a larger obligation to make life better for seafarers. Progress cannot be designed solely for the people already connected to professional bodies, social media and shore-based support. It must reach the crew member working six hours on and six hours off, prioritising a short conversation with family and a few hours of sleep over searching the internet for industry guidance. Women’s Safety at Sea Depends on Culture, Not Numbers Ann speaks about sexual assault, harassment and gender discrimination without collapsing them into a single experience. Physical or sexual violence may occur privately and leave the person targeted profoundly isolated, while persistent misogyny and lower-level harassment can spread through a vessel, weakening authority, crew cohesion and the atmosphere in which everyone is expected to work safely. When a crew member refuses to respect a senior officer or master because she is a woman, the consequences do not remain confined to that relationship. The behaviour reaches into decision-making, communication and trust. It can affect the operational culture of the entire ship. That is why Ann challenges the widely repeated idea that women will automatically be safer when more women are placed onboard. Through her volunteering with Safer Waves, she has seen people seek support from sectors where women already serve in significant numbers. Cruise ships and yachts may carry mixed-gender crews, yet cases of sexual violence, harassment and discrimination still occur. Representation matters, particularly in an industry where women were invisible for generations, but representation cannot serve as a substitute for evidence, accountability or leadership. A vessel can improve its demographic balance and still fail to create a safe working environment. Numbers may show who was recruited; they do not reveal who feels able to report misconduct, challenge a senior colleague or ask for help without fearing professional consequences. “Safety. Always comes back to safety for me.” Ann is equally clear that men cannot be treated as peripheral to this work. Most of her colleagues, mentors and strongest professional allies have been men because most of the people with whom she has sailed have been men. Change becomes harder when the language surrounding equality alienates those capable of challenging poor behaviour and setting better standards onboard. The ISWAN Safe at Sea campaign reflects that practical approach by placing allyship within the creation of safer and more inclusive working cultures. The message is not that men must speak for women, but that every crew member has a role when inappropriate behaviour is normalised, dismissed or allowed to escalate. The greater challenge is ensuring that useful guidance reaches the people who need it. Maritime welfare information is dispersed across charities, flag states, companies, professional bodies and industry campaigns. Much of it is thoughtful and potentially transformative, but even excellent guidance has little value if it remains within the same familiar professional circles. Connectivity has improved the possibilities. Messaging platforms, eSIMs and peer-support groups allow seafarers to communicate in ways that were impossible when contact with home depended upon an expensive calling card and a cold telephone on the quay. Yet connectivity remains uneven, and seafarers on demanding rotations are understandably more interested in family, rest and escaping work than reading another industry document. Ann’s mission is therefore as concerned with delivery as it is with policy. Safer Waves provides confidential emotional support and signposting for seafarers and former seafarers affected by sexual violence, harassment or gender discrimination. ISWAN operates SeafarerHelp and YachtCrewHelp, while Sailors’ Society provides peer networks and trauma therapy grants designed to reduce the barriers between seafarers and professional support. Her work as Project Manager for The Nautical Institute’s STEER Project, delivered in collaboration with Lloyd’s Register Foundation, carries the same insistence that the people using new systems must remain central to decisions about technology. Innovation cannot be assessed only by what a system is capable of doing. Its effect on human performance, workload, safety and wellbeing must be understood through the experiences of seafarers themselves. Authority Without Pretence Ann remembers the first time she heard someone refer to her as “the captain.” The words were not spoken to her. They came from elsewhere in the ship, an ordinary reference to where the captain could be found, but they marked the arrival of something she had wanted since childhood. Command, however, did not bring an end to uncertainty. One of the most revealing episodes of her career occurred while taking a vessel out of Grimsby. Tired and dealing with the effects of interaction from a nearby tug, she felt the ship being drawn towards the quay and describes the manoeuvre as though she had bounced through the lock. There was no damage, but the lack of elegance shook her confidence badly enough that she considered finishing the trip and abandoning command. Instead, she booked an azimuth propulsion ship-handling course, learned from the experience and returned better equipped. The value of the story lies not in turning failure into a polished motivational anecdote, but in Ann’s refusal to conceal how devastating professional doubt can feel when responsibility ultimately rests with you. That honesty is also central to her understanding of leadership. The traditional image of the captain as an unchallengeable source of knowledge may project authority, but it can create the conditions in which warning signs are missed. Maritime casualty investigations repeatedly demonstrate what can happen when someone on the bridge or in the engine room notices that something is wrong but does not feel safe enough to say it. “None of us have a monopoly on knowledge.” A captain may have decades of experience and still be entering a port for the first time. A newly delivered vessel may be unfamiliar to every person onboard. Junior crew may understand a new piece of technology better than the senior officer responsible for the operation. Effective command depends upon recognising those realities and creating sufficient psychological safety for the team to question, correct and contribute. Authenticity carries risk. Ann acknowledges that openness can be exploited by difficult people and that vulnerability does not always receive a generous response. Even so, she believes the wider result is worth the personal cost if it creates a culture in which somebody will speak before a mistake becomes an accident. A Professional Before a Category Women in maritime have fought for visibility because, for much of the industry’s history, they were expected to adapt quietly to systems, equipment and cultures designed around men. Female-cut personal protective equipment remains inconsistent, and even basic facilities such as sanitary bins are still absent from many vessels. Visibility has been necessary because invisibility allowed practical failures to remain unchallenged. Ann also recognises the paradox created when gender becomes the first and most persistent fact noticed about a professional. Many women do not walk up a gangway thinking of themselves as women entering maritime. They arrive as masters, engineers, cadets, cooks and seafarers reporting for work. Equality does not mean pretending gender never affects life onboard. It means understanding the specific risks a person may face without allowing those risks to eclipse their competence, rank or professional identity. Ann wants a woman joining a ship to be seen first for the job she has come to do, while remaining confident that the systems around her will respond properly if she needs protection or support. Women’s safety at sea and professional equality are inseparable. A person cannot be equal within a workplace where reporting harm risks isolation, retaliation or the loss of a career. Nor can safety be established through policy alone if everyday conduct continues to undermine the authority and belonging of the people those policies claim to protect. Ann still describes maritime as a remarkable career. The difficult voyages, destructive personalities and moments of profound doubt have not erased the satisfaction of completing a challenging manoeuvre, bringing a vessel safely alongside or watching a cadet encounter opportunities once beyond her own imagination. Her argument is not that the industry is irredeemably hostile, but that its value makes the work of improving it worth continuing. The four-year-old who wanted to drive ships eventually heard herself called captain. The mission that followed is larger than the achievement of command. It is to ensure that the next generation does not enter a lion’s den disguised as an opportunity, and that every seafarer can be recognised for their professionalism, heard when they speak and supported when something goes wrong. That is not special treatment. It is the minimum standard of a safe and credible maritime industry. SUPPORT FOR SEAFARERS This article includes discussion of sexual violence, harassment and discrimination at sea. Confidential support and information are available through: Safer Waves ISWAN SeafarerHelp ISWAN YachtCrewHelp Sailors’ Society Trauma Therapy Grants Master Mariner and marine consultant Ann Pletschke examines women’s safety at sea, command culture and the practical changes needed to build safer, more accountable maritime workplaces.

In an industry where celebration, pressure and social life are often tied to alcohol, choosing not to drink can still attract more questions than drinking itself. There is something revealing about a culture in which declining a drink requires an explanation, while accepting one does not. The growing conversation around yacht crew sobriety is not being driven by a belief that alcohol is inherently wrong, but by crew beginning to question why it has become so deeply connected to belonging, celebration and life at sea. Laura Kilbey entered yachting at 20 and progressed to Chief Stewardess, building a successful career while privately trying to manage an increasingly difficult relationship with alcohol. She took breaks, cut back, moderated and created rules around what she would drink and when. Eventually, the effort required to control alcohol became almost as exhausting as the consequences of drinking it. Her decision to stop was not born from one dramatic collapse. It came from the quieter recognition that alcohol was no longer adding enough to justify what it was taking away. That decision led her to establish Sober Crew Social Club, connecting sober and sober-curious crew who still wanted friendship, laughter and a social life without alcohol at its centre. “It was taking away more than it was giving me.” Why Yacht Crew Sobriety Still Requires an Explanation Alcohol occupies an unusually visible place in yachting. A successful charter may end with champagne, a broker may arrive carrying bottles, and guest drop-off can flow almost automatically into a crew celebration. In port, the bar is often the easiest gathering place, while long hours, confined living and time away from home can make drinking feel like both reward and release. None of those moments is necessarily a problem. Many people drink comfortably, enjoy the occasion and move on. The difficulty arises when participation is treated as part of being a good crewmate, while the person ordering sparkling water is assumed to be struggling, antisocial or making a judgment about everybody else. Captain James Battey, Founder of the Yacht Workers Council, has been sober for almost four years. Stopping did not mean believing nobody should drink. It meant recognising that alcohol was taking energy away from his family, work and sense of purpose. Sobriety, in this context, is not a moral achievement. It is a personal decision. When Moderation Becomes a Full-Time Job For Laura, the clearest warning was not how often she drank, but how much mental space was occupied by trying to manage it. The rules were familiar: alternate alcohol with water, stop after three drinks, avoid spirits, drink only wine with dinner or promise that the next evening would be different. Sometimes those rules worked, creating a misleading sense of control even when another occasion ended in anxiety, regret or damaged confidence. Something terrible did not happen every time Laura drank, but many of the experiences she regretted most had alcohol behind them. When drinking requires constant negotiation, calculation and recovery, the issue is no longer confined to the hours spent with a glass in hand. It occupies the days around them as well. Stopping gave Laura back the energy previously spent bargaining with herself. It also allowed her to discover that sobriety did not make her life smaller. It made more of her life available. Change Does Not Require Catastrophe Society often tells stories about alcohol through the language of rock bottom, making change appear legitimate only after somebody has lost a relationship, a career or their health. For yacht crew, that narrative can be dangerous because professional competence may hide a considerable private struggle. Laura had continued working and had not lost everything, which made stopping feel almost premature. She even questioned whether the situation needed to become serious enough for rehabilitation before she could justify walking away completely. The more useful question was why she should wait for greater damage. Nobody needs a label or a suitably dramatic history before deciding that something is no longer working. That distinction matters for sober-curious crew who may not identify with alcoholism or recovery language. They may simply recognise that alcohol worsens their anxiety, undermines their confidence or consumes more energy than they are willing to give it. When the Escape Changes Shape Removing alcohol does not automatically resolve the reason somebody was using it. Within the isolated environment of a yacht, gambling, food, shopping, drugs, sex or compulsive exercise may provide a different route towards the same temporary escape. Laura is careful not to claim expertise beyond her own experience, but the wider point is important. Support cannot end with telling somebody to stop. Crew need confidential access to professional services, practical resources and communities that understand the pressures of working at sea. Visibility matters. Knowing that sober crew socialise and remain fully part of yachting life challenges the belief that alcohol is the only route to connection. Belonging Without the Bottle The fear beneath many decisions about sobriety is not the loss of alcohol, but the possible loss of belonging. Crew live, work and socialise with the same small group, often far from established support networks. Stepping away from the activity around which life is organised can feel like stepping away from the team. Yet sobriety does not require social disappearance. Laura and James still go out, laugh and spend time with people who drink. They have learned when it is time to leave and where their boundaries sit. Neither expects everybody else to make the same decision. There are signs that younger crew may already be drinking less, although a healthier culture should not replace one form of pressure with another. Wellness can become performative when every meal, workout and social choice is treated as a test of discipline. Crew should be free to live imperfectly, have fun and make their own decisions without being measured against somebody else's version of health. Yachting's relationship with alcohol will not change because every crew member chooses sobriety. It will change when drinking and not drinking are treated as equally ordinary adult decisions, and when nobody is expected to defend the choice that is right for them. Sobriety does not need to become an identity, a judgment or evidence of crisis. Sometimes it is simply the recognition that life feels better without alcohol in it. That choice should not require a rock bottom, and it should not require anybody else's permission. Choosing not to drink at sea can still attract more scrutiny than drinking itself. As yacht crew reconsider alcohol, identity and belonging, sobriety is becoming less about labels and more about the freedom to decide what no longer works.

As a new generation reshapes how yachts are designed, used and managed, the Isle of Man is making a compelling case for something luxury cannot manufacture overnight: trusted people, responsive institutions and an ecosystem built to solve problems. Luxury at sea is easy to see. It is expressed through architecture, craftsmanship, technology and the extraordinary freedom to move through the world on one’s own terms. Yet experienced owners understand that the quality of yacht ownership is often decided far from the sundeck. It is decided in the ownership structure. In the choice of flag. In the clarity of the advice received before a contract is signed. It is decided when a captain needs a definitive answer, when regulations change, when a crewing matter becomes urgent or when an owner’s plans no longer fit neatly within conventional boundaries. This is the largely invisible infrastructure behind a significant yacht, and it is where trusted maritime jurisdictions distinguish themselves. Capt. Lee Clarke of Isle of Man Maritime has viewed this world from both sides. His career began at sea, progressing through commercial vessels, cruise ships, training roles and cadet development before bringing him back to the island connected to generations of his own family’s maritime history. Today, his focus extends beyond any single vessel or maritime sector. It is about building a professional environment capable of supporting owners, captains, seafarers and advisers as yachting becomes more complex. A Flag Is a Relationship, Not a Badge The flag carried by a yacht may occupy only a small space on the stern, but the jurisdiction behind it can influence almost every stage of ownership. Registration, regulatory oversight, safety standards, crew documentation and operational compliance all sit within that relationship. Around them is a wider network of legal, corporate, financial, insurance and management expertise. When these elements work together, ownership feels controlled and considered. When they do not, even a relatively simple issue can become expensive and disruptive. There is no single jurisdiction that is right for every yacht or every owner. The vessel’s intended use, cruising programme, financing, ownership profile and commercial ambitions must all be considered. Reputation alone is not enough. What matters is how that reputation performs when an owner, captain or adviser requires help. “If I were an owner, I would want a flag I could call and ask, ‘What can we do to fix this?’” For Clarke, accessibility is one of the Isle of Man’s most valuable qualities. A respected jurisdiction should not feel remote when the stakes are high. Its professionals must be able to listen, understand the commercial and operational reality, and work towards a solution without compromising standards. Trust, in this context, is not a marketing claim. It is the accumulated result of sound regulation, professional judgement and consistent human response. The Connected Ecosystem Behind Yacht Ownership Yacht owners rarely experience a jurisdiction as an organisational chart. They experience whether the people involved communicate with one another. A registry may be highly regarded, but ownership also depends on corporate service providers, accountants, banks, lawyers, payroll specialists, surveyors, managers and crew professionals. If those services exist in isolation, the owner or family office is left to connect them. If they operate as an ecosystem, decisions can be made with greater speed, context and confidence. Isle of Man Maritime has sought to strengthen those connections through four areas: superyachts, business, skills and seafarers, and digital innovation and artificial intelligence. The intention is not simply to assemble a list of maritime companies. It is to encourage expertise from different disciplines to work as a more coherent whole. That distinction matters. An ownership structure should make sense alongside the yacht’s registration. Crew arrangements should support the intended operation. Legal, financial and technical advice should not contradict one another. When circumstances change, the relevant specialists should be able to reach the same table quickly. The Isle of Man Ship Registry’s Yachts Engaged in Trade framework is one example of a jurisdiction responding to changing patterns of yacht use. Subject to defined conditions and compliance requirements, it allows eligible Isle of Man registered pleasure yachts over 24 metres to undertake limited commercial activity without permanently abandoning their underlying pleasure registration. It is not a universal solution, nor a substitute for tailored legal and tax advice. Its significance lies in what it recognises: modern ownership does not always fit into a single, static category. New Owners, New Yachts, New Expectations The profile of yacht ownership is evolving. Many owners are entering the market at a younger age, bringing different expectations of how a yacht should function and what it should make possible. The traditional image of a yacht designed primarily for Mediterranean entertaining is no longer the only aspiration. Expedition vessels and highly capable explorer yachts continue to attract owners who want to travel further, remain aboard for longer and access places beyond established cruising routes. These yachts are increasingly expected to support several dimensions of life at once. They may serve as a private residence, a remote office, a platform for family exploration or a base for scientific and philanthropic work. Interiors are becoming more personal, reflecting the interests of an owner rather than a predetermined idea of what a superyacht should look like. Luxury is moving away from conformity. A yacht may incorporate specialist diving equipment, research facilities, advanced communications, extensive wellness spaces or immersive entertainment environments. Support vessels have evolved into sophisticated operations in their own right, carrying equipment, tenders and personnel that allow the principal yacht to deliver a far wider programme. This new freedom also creates new demands. More ambitious itineraries require different technical capabilities, experienced crew and stronger shoreside support. Working from the yacht raises questions of connectivity, security and confidentiality. Scientific activity, specialist equipment and remote cruising introduce further operational considerations. The yacht may be unique, but its success still depends on a disciplined structure behind it. Crew Welfare Is an Ownership Issue For all the attention given to design and technology, a yacht remains entirely dependent on its people. Clarke’s own career at sea informs his conviction that seafarers cannot be treated as a secondary part of the maritime discussion. A yacht cannot move safely without its captain and engineers. It cannot deliver exceptional hospitality without its chefs, interior teams and deck crew. Nor can it maintain the standards expected of a high-value asset without people who are properly trained, supported and respected. “Whatever we do within this space, it all relies on our incredible seafarers.” Crew welfare is sometimes discussed as though it were separate from the owner’s experience. In reality, the two are closely connected. Fatigue, poor leadership, weak communication and inadequate support affect retention, safety and service. A stable, motivated team protects the atmosphere on board as well as the yacht itself. The industry has made progress, but expectations continue to rise. Mental health, fair working conditions, professional development and responsible leadership are becoming central to the way quality operations are assessed. Owners and family offices are also paying closer attention to the culture created on board and to the reputational consequences of getting it wrong. The same principle applies to inclusion. A maritime sector seeking the best possible talent must be able to welcome people from different backgrounds, including more women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. An industry cannot credibly call itself world-class while placing unnecessary barriers in front of capable people. The finest yachts may be built from steel, aluminium and carbon fibre, but their true character is created by the people who operate them. Innovation Must Earn Its Place Artificial intelligence is entering the maritime world, but its value will not be measured by novelty. It will be measured by the problems it solves. Clarke points to AI-supported man-overboard detection as an example of technology with an immediate human purpose. Camera systems capable of identifying and tracking someone in the water could provide critical assistance in darkness or difficult conditions, when human vision alone may not be enough. Applied intelligently, similar systems could support navigation, safety, maintenance and administrative efficiency. Yet technology must complement professional judgement rather than attempt to replace it. The strongest maritime ecosystems will be those able to connect digital expertise with the practical knowledge of captains, engineers, regulators and seafarers. Sustainability carries the same requirement for substance. Owners are looking beyond superficial claims and considering how a yacht is designed, powered, provisioned and operated. Expedition programmes and scientific partnerships are also allowing private vessels to contribute to research in areas that would otherwise be difficult or costly to access. Environmental responsibility has particular resonance for the Isle of Man. Designated in 2016, its UNESCO Biosphere encompasses the entire island and its territorial waters. It reflects the principle that environmental protection, community and economic activity must be considered together. For yachting, that balance is essential. Progress will not be achieved through a single propulsion system or headline technology. It will come from hundreds of informed decisions made throughout the yacht’s design, ownership and operational life. The People Behind the Reputation Yacht ownership is becoming more adventurous, more individual and more technologically sophisticated. It is also becoming more demanding. Owners want flexibility without uncertainty. They want innovation without avoidable risk. They expect discretion, but they also need access to people capable of giving clear answers. These expectations are placing greater importance on the professional ecosystem surrounding the yacht. The Isle of Man’s advantage is not simply that it offers a recognised flag or a concentration of maritime services. Its deeper proposition is connection: between public and private expertise, between regulation and commercial reality, and between the ambitions of an owner and the people responsible for making them achievable. “We cannot operate without our incredible people.” An owner can commission exceptional design, advanced engineering and almost limitless personalisation. Trust is different. It must be earned through competence, judgement and response, often long before it is ever tested. That is the quiet luxury behind successful yacht ownership. Not only the freedom to go anywhere, but the confidence that the right people are standing behind every decision when you do. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ PRESENTED BY International Yacht Register ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ International Yacht Register provides luxury yacht charter, ownership and advisory services for clients seeking trusted guidance, exceptional yachts, discreet support, market knowledge and access to the global yachting lifestyle. iyr.net Yacht ownership is changing as a new generation looks beyond the flag to trusted jurisdictions, responsive regulation and connected maritime expertise. Capt. Lee Clarke reveals why the Isle of Man’s quiet advantage lies in the people and infrastructure behind the world’s most significant yachts.

Most people see the polished side of running a superyacht business: awards, technology, loyal clients and a capable team. What they do not see is the phone that has not been switched off in 18 years, the legal meetings taking place at one o’clock in the morning, or the business owner lying awake worrying not only about her own mortgage, but those of 25 employees. Alicia Store, Chief Operating Officer of dsnm Ltd, and David Store, its Chief Executive Officer, have built the company together while also building a marriage and raising a family. On paper, their responsibilities divide neatly. Alicia oversees the daily operation of the business, while David manages yachts and drives the development of Compass software. In practice, the company occupies almost every corner of their lives. Running a superyacht business at this level is not simply a job with longer hours. The work may leave the office, but the responsibility follows them home. The Job Titles Only Tell Half the Story Alicia’s remit stretches across nearly every department, from cash flow, budgeting and client retention to staff management, training, marketing and brand. Her purpose is to make sure everyone at dsnm Ltd can do their job to the best of their ability. David remains a yacht manager with his own fleet while leading the development of Compass. He jokes that he does not appear to do as much as Alicia, a line she is only too happy to agree with. They are not trying to perform the same role. David creates movement, ideas and, by his own admission, a certain amount of chaos. Alicia creates the structure that makes it workable. He credits her with the company’s scale; she credits his belief in her when her own confidence has faltered. Their differences are part of the reason it works. Running a Superyacht Business Means Carrying Other People’s Risk Both describe their team as the best part of the company. They hire selectively, looking for people who understand what they are building and care about delivering the same standard of service. That culture brings enormous satisfaction, but it also creates a weight rarely visible from outside a business. “There have been times when I have come home, got into bed and, rather than worrying about my mortgage and feeding my child, I have worried about 25 other people’s mortgages, their children and their bills.” It is easy to speak about employment in numbers: headcount, payroll and growth. Alicia speaks about it in homes, children and security. In those terms, a commercial decision is no longer confined to a spreadsheet. It reaches into the lives of everyone who depends on the company remaining stable. Caring less might make the burden easier, but it would also remove something fundamental. The people who make the work enjoyable are the same people whose futures Alicia feels responsible for protecting. The Phone Has Not Been Off in 18 Years The most revealing measure of Alicia’s commitment is not a revenue figure or an award. It is the fact that she has not switched off her phone in 18 years. She does not offer that detail as a complaint. She loves the work and believes in what the company is building, but she is honest about the obsession involved. It reaches from hiring the right person and examining figures late at night to making sure a logo is exactly right before it goes out. “To run a company successfully, you sometimes have to be obsessed with what you are doing on an unhealthy level.” David once imagined that running a company would be similar to having a job. Experience taught him otherwise. The last time he turned off his phone and stopped checking email was on their honeymoon, 14 years ago. Alicia kept hers on. Business stories are often polished after the fact. The finished company appears inevitable, while the exhaustion and constant availability disappear from view. Crisis Arrives Without an Instruction Manual The pressure intensified when events beyond the company’s control arrived one after another. COVID brought unprecedented disruption, while the conflict in Ukraine created legal and commercial questions about who the business could work with and under what conditions. Momentum built over years was interrupted overnight. Meetings with lawyers ran into the early hours, paperwork covered the family table and decisions had to be made without a tested roadmap. “We were having meetings with lawyers at one o’clock in the morning, working out who we could work with and who we couldn’t. I wasn’t trained to do that.” David focused on the foundation beneath the company. No leader can predict the next global crisis, but a business can be built to react without losing its footing. In an industry that crosses borders, stability is not the absence of change. It is the capacity to absorb it. The Sacrifice Success Cannot Give Back The most difficult cost arrived during the COVID lockdown, when Alicia had a baby while the company was in a precarious position. She worked on the day she gave birth and was back online the next day. There was no maternity leave, baby shower or ordinary time away with her child. “I worked that day, gave birth and the next day I was back online. I took no maternity leave whatsoever.” She does not regret the decision itself. Given the number of people relying on the company, she understood why it had to be made. She regrets the experience she lost and can never repeat. That distinction cuts through the mythology surrounding entrepreneurship. Success accumulates through clients, teams, technology and recognition. Sacrifice works differently. Time disappears once, and no later achievement can buy it back. The choice helped keep the company moving, but necessity does not erase its personal cost. Alicia can be proud of what the decision protected and still grieve what it took away. Why Marriage Became an Advantage Running a company can be isolating, even when the office is full. The most serious decisions often remain with the people at the top long after everyone else has gone home. Working together means Alicia and David do not carry that isolation alone. They share the celebrations and the pressure, often working through problems at the dinner table with someone who understands their full weight. Their partnership is not frictionless. Alicia occasionally wants to throw a stapler across the office, while David has learned that accepting she is right can be the simplest route to peace. The humour works because it sits beside genuine respect. “There is no way dsnm Ltd would be as big as it is now if it wasn’t for Alicia.” Alicia calls David the most supportive person imaginable. He pushes her when her confidence falters; she gives order to his ideas and energy. Their marriage does not remove the strain of leadership, but it gives them somewhere to share it honestly. The Courage to Build Before Everything Is Ready If David could change one professional decision, he would have created Compass sooner. The idea existed for years before the company had the money to build it. Ambition still has to meet commercial reality. Seeing the first clients use Compass remains one of David’s proudest moments. It proved that an internal idea could become a working tool for the people it was designed to support. dsnm Ltd has received two Queen’s Awards, one connected to the company and another to Compass. The first took Alicia and David to Buckingham Palace, where being in the same room as the Queen felt almost unreal. The recognition made visible years of deciding that standing still was not an option. David’s view is uncomplicated: if a company is not moving forward, it is falling behind. Innovation adds pressure, but failing to build for the future creates a greater risk. The Luxury of Being Unreachable When asked to choose any yacht and any destination, Alicia chose Antarctica aboard Octopus. David chose Indonesia on a sailing yacht, anchored somewhere with no other boats and nobody else around. There is something revealing in both answers. After years of being permanently available, their imagined luxury is not a busier harbour or another room full of recognition. It is distance, stillness and a place beyond the reach of ordinary demands. Running a superyacht business has given Alicia and David a team they love, technology they are proud of and recognition that once placed them inside Buckingham Palace. It has also taken nights, holidays, maternity leave and the ability to stop thinking about what happens next. Their success does not prove that sacrifice is painless. It proves that the polished result carries a private cost. The work can be divided, the problems can be shared and the occasional stapler can remain safely on the desk, but the responsibility never fully disappears. Perhaps that is why, after 18 years of being available, the rarest luxury they can imagine is finally being unreachable. For Alicia and David Store, building dsnm Ltd has meant balancing marriage, family and the weight of 25 livelihoods in one of yachting’s most demanding sectors.

In yachting, the people who understand how a vessel must function are not always present when the decisions shaping that function are made. Designers design. Shipyards build. Contractors install. Crew arrive later and learn to operate what has already been decided. Meeli Lepik believes that sequence needs to change. The founder of Holistic Yacht Interiors has built her business around bringing operational experience into yacht design from the beginning, before inefficiencies, compromises and frustrations become part of the finished vessel. For Meeli, operational experience in yacht design is not an optional final check. It is the knowledge that allows beautiful spaces to function properly once owners, guests and crew begin using them. Her position is grounded in years of senior onboard experience, major new-build projects and the network she developed inside shipyards. It is also connected to Monaco, where an early piece of advice first made her consider creating something of her own. Her reflections were recorded at the Monaco Yacht Show in 2025 and carry particular weight as she prepares to return in 2026. She is going back to the place where the idea first began to take shape, but with considerably more behind her this time. The Advice That Planted a Seed The possibility of building an independent business entered Meeli’s mind around eight years ago. She was already working alongside experienced businesspeople, but one moment at a Lürssen party during the Monaco Yacht Show stayed with her. Several people had approached her to thank her for the work she had done. A financial adviser connected to one of the yacht owners noticed what was happening and told her not to dismiss it. “Meli, pay attention. The people come to say hello and thank you. Don’t let that slide. Create something on your own.” It was powerful advice, but recognition does not automatically make the timing right. Meeli understood that being encouraged to start a business and being ready to build one were not the same thing. Rather than rushing towards the title of entrepreneur, she chose to deepen her experience. Two more major new builds followed, expanding her understanding of how decisions travel between stakeholders and how much operational reality can be lost between a drawing and a vessel in use. The seed had been planted in Monaco, but it still needed time. Knowing When Experience Is Enough Yachting celebrates movement. The next project, destination, launch and show are always approaching. That relentless forward focus can make it difficult to recognise what has already been achieved. Meeli admits that this tendency is part of her own personality. During a build, attention naturally falls on what remains unfinished. The same mindset can follow someone throughout a career, creating the impression that readiness is always one more project away. At some point, however, looking forward must be balanced by looking back. “You sometimes have to look behind as well to see what’s already been achieved.” That is not ego. It is an acknowledgement that competence deserves to be recognised, including by the person who earned it. For Meeli, Monaco itself became a measure of that change. Ten years earlier, the scale of the show felt overwhelming and intimidating. Over time, it became familiar. The people around her were no longer a distant industry establishment. They were colleagues, collaborators and friends. The Missing Route From Yacht Crew to Shoreside Expert The route from onboard operations into an independent shoreside career is far less defined than the industry often admits. Experienced interior professionals may move into recruitment, yacht management, agencies or supply businesses. Yet a top operational professional may understand workflow, service, maintenance, storage and human behaviour at an exceptional level while finding no obvious route into the decisions that determine those realities. The industry frequently discusses glass ceilings and the need for greater inclusion. Meeli identifies another barrier: the glass walls separating operational expertise from the shoreside disciplines that would benefit from it. “If you are only working on board and you are a top, top professional operationally, there is no path for you to become an independent yachting professional on the shoreside.” The word “only” is revealing. Working onboard is sometimes treated as a narrow form of experience when it is anything but. Crew understand the finished yacht as a living environment. They know where elegant concepts support real use and where they create daily obstacles. They see how guests move, how service unfolds, where equipment must be accessed and what happens when spaces designed in isolation collide with operational demands. As wider YIR reporting has explored, even excellent crew cannot compensate indefinitely for a badly functioning yacht. That knowledge affects efficiency, maintenance, guest experience and the long-term success of the yacht. Without a recognised bridge into shoreside work, much of it remains locked onboard. Why the Shipyard Became the Bridge For younger crew, a new build in Northern Europe may not resemble the yachting lifestyle they imagined. Shipyards can mean cold weather, industrial surroundings and long days far removed from palm trees and glamorous destinations. They can also provide one of the most valuable educations available in the industry. Meeli’s time in shipyards connected her with project managers, designers, suppliers, contractors and builders. It allowed her to see not only how individual departments work, but how the wider construction ecosystem fits together. Those relationships eventually became the framework supporting her move ashore. New-build experience gives operational professionals a working vocabulary beyond the vessel. It shows them how decisions are made and where their knowledge can prevent problems before they reach the water. A Genuine Network Is More Than a Contact List Networking is one of the industry’s most repeated pieces of advice, but the word has been diluted by transactions. Collecting names, scanning badges and exchanging digital details is not the same as building a professional community. Meeli is clear that the network that matters is genuine. It grows through competence, visibility, consistency and a real interest in the work. “It is key, and a genuine network... figuring out what you want to do, and then just be passionate. Be seen, be passionate.” That distinction matters for anyone planning a shoreside transition. Opportunities develop when people ashore understand the value someone brings because they have seen it demonstrated over time. Meeli’s network did more than open doors. It helped her understand the industry as a whole and gave her the confidence to position herself within it. What began as relationships formed through shipyard work became a community capable of supporting an independent business. Holistic Is Not a Trend. It Is the Point The name Holistic Yacht Interiors initially prompted some hesitation from others. Would “holistic” sound too esoteric? Would people assume the business was concerned with chakra alignment and deep breathing rather than yacht projects? Meeli’s response carries the humour of someone comfortable with her own positioning. She could organise those things if required, she joked, but they were not the core business. The intended meaning is practical. Holistic means whole. Spatial design, construction, operations and the people responsible for each cannot function as separate worlds. Meeli’s approach takes a 360-degree view of the yacht and connects stakeholders before decisions harden into expensive realities. If the business arrived slightly ahead of the industry’s appetite for that thinking, the gap is closing quickly. Across yacht design and construction, there is growing recognition that technical achievement and visual beauty are not sufficient on their own. A yacht must also work for the people living, serving and operating within it. Operational Experience in Yacht Design: The Missing Link The disconnect between build and operation is not a new problem. As Meeli observes, it may be closer to a white elephant: widely recognised, rarely confronted directly and expensive to ignore. Her goal is not to displace designers, project managers or builders. It is to connect their expertise with the operational knowledge too often absent from the room. The most valuable contribution may be precisely that missing link, someone able to translate what happens onboard into useful input before a space is built or refitted. “The ambition is that in the near future, nothing gets built or refitted without operational know-how and input. That’s the mission.” That mission reaches beyond interiors. It proposes a more intelligent model for yacht development, one in which lived experience is treated as design intelligence rather than feedback collected after delivery. As Meeli returns to the Monaco Yacht Show in 2026, she does so with more than the idea first planted there years ago. She returns with the experience she insisted on gaining, the network she built authentically and a business created to solve a problem the industry can no longer afford to overlook. Monaco may be where the vision began. Full circle does not mean returning to the same place unchanged. It means coming back ready to move the industry forward. Operational knowledge is too often invited into a yacht project after the most important decisions have already been made. Meeli Lepik explains why experience gained onboard belongs at the heart of yacht design, construction and refit from the very beginning.

Wealth is easy to display and harder to define. A large house, bright sports car or five-star itinerary can prove that someone has money, but none reveals whether that person controls their own time. For real estate investor and private money lender Jon Schoeller, that distinction changes the meaning of financial freedom. In his twenties, Schoeller believed success meant earning more, buying more and proving his doubters wrong. By his early thirties, he and his wife, Rhianna, had built businesses, invested in real estate and become financially free. Adopting their daughter then brought the purpose behind all that work into sharper focus. Money remained important, but no longer as a scorecard. Its value lay in the time, choice and security it could create. “Financial freedom is not actually the ability to say yes to everything. It is the ability to say no to the things you don’t want to do.” Financial Freedom Begins With Knowing What Is Enough Freedom cannot be built around a target that never stops moving. A person reaches one income goal, expands their lifestyle and soon needs a larger income to maintain it. What looked like progress becomes a more expensive version of the same dependency. Schoeller is not arguing against beautiful homes, travel or expensive possessions. The important question is whether a purchase supports a life someone genuinely values or simply advertises success to other people. Enjoyment and performance can look identical from the outside while producing entirely different lives. That question carries particular weight in yachting. Crew can earn strong incomes while working inside one of the world’s most visible expressions of wealth. Constant exposure to larger yachts, luxury destinations and apparently limitless spending can distort what a normal life should cost. Unless crew define enough for themselves, years of valuable earnings can disappear into a lifestyle that becomes increasingly difficult to leave. “You don’t want money to have everything. You want money to have options.” The Hedonic Treadmill Makes More Feel Normal Lifestyle inflation rarely arrives through one reckless decision. It grows through upgrades that each appear reasonable. A higher income justifies a better car, which changes expectations around the house and holidays. What once felt exceptional becomes normal, and normal eventually feels insufficient. Schoeller explains the pattern through an ordinary television. After using a 45-inch model for roughly 15 years, he could afford almost any replacement and initially wanted the largest screen his living room could hold. Instead, he chose a 65-inch television. The decision was not really about screen size. Moving immediately to the maximum would have created one dramatic improvement before establishing a new baseline. This is the hedonic treadmill: people adapt quickly to better circumstances, then begin searching for the next upgrade. Buying the most someone can afford today can quietly reduce the choices available tomorrow. The BMW That Changed the Meaning of Success Schoeller learned that lesson much earlier through a more expensive purchase. At 21, his first business was doing well and he traded a 1992 Honda Civic hatchback for a white BMW 335i with a red interior. After spending nearly an entire day securing the financing, he drove away with tears in his eyes. The car appeared to confirm that the young man from a trailer park, whom others had underestimated, had become successful. The emotion faded quickly. Schoeller owned a moving company and spent most days working from a box truck. During the five or six months he owned the BMW, he drove it only about 3,000 miles. The car and insurance cost more than $1,000 each month, while much of his limited time around it was spent cleaning it or worrying about damage. The BMW looked like freedom but behaved like another obligation. Schoeller realised that every month or two he was spending the equivalent of an international trip on something that mostly sat outside losing value and creating stress. He sold it and lost roughly $8,000, yet still considers it one of his best investments because the loss clarified what he wanted. He and Rhianna redirected the money towards their first trip abroad, beginning a pattern of travel that later became central to their family life. The lesson was not that cars are bad or travel is inherently better. The BMW communicated success to strangers. The journeys created memories for the people who mattered. Raising a Child Who Understands Value Financial security creates a different challenge when raising a child. Parents who struggled often want to remove every difficulty from their children’s lives. Schoeller and Rhianna do not believe their daughter should struggle simply because they did, but they also know that money can remove consequences she needs in order to grow. When their daughter wanted to buy something but had lost her wallet, Schoeller could easily have paid for it. He chose not to. If losing money never changed the outcome, responsibility would remain an abstract idea rather than a lived lesson. Confidence and self-discipline develop through manageable problems, not by having every frustration cleared away. “I am not raising a daughter. I am raising a woman.” Their daughter can enjoy opportunities her parents never had while still learning that choices carry consequences. Comfort without personal capability is not freedom. It is dependency with better surroundings. Private Money Lending Requires More Than Capital Schoeller supports this philosophy with a practical investment strategy. Through hundreds of property transactions, he has operated as both a real estate borrower and private money lender. Lending can provide exposure to real estate without requiring him to manage tenants, repairs, utilities or contractors. In a typical transaction, a private lender provides capital for an operator to purchase and renovate a property. The borrower repays the principal with interest when the property is sold or refinanced. The arrangement may sound passive, but passive should never be confused with automatic or risk-free. Schoeller begins by assessing the borrower. He looks for experience, a credible track record, resources beyond the individual project and evidence that previous lenders were repaid. He wants to know how someone behaves when a deal goes badly, not only how they present the deals that succeeded. Only then does he examine the property, including its purchase price, renovation budget, comparable sales and likely value after the work. He also describes using a closing attorney, promissory note, deed of trust, clear title, insurance and first-lien positioning where appropriate. Precise requirements vary by transaction and jurisdiction, making independent professional advice essential. Collateral can reduce risk, but it cannot eliminate it. Values can fall, costs can rise and borrowers can default. The possibility of an attractive return should therefore be the end of the analysis, not the beginning. Sustainable Wealth Is Built in the Middle Schoeller helped create the More Than Money community after years of completing his own real estate deals. The name reflects a deliberate rejection of the luxury cars and rapid results often used to sell financial education. That marketing resembles a fitness advertisement showing only the before-and-after photographs. The hidden middle contains the research, patience, mistakes and repeated work that produced the result. It is also where judgement develops and sustainable wealth is built. A first deal does not need to be spectacular. It needs to be understood. A repeatable skill that can be used for decades is more valuable than one exceptional result that encourages carelessness. Entrepreneurship Is Not Automatically Freedom Schoeller also rejects the idea that owning a business is always better than having a job. If someone earns enough, enjoys their work, has manageable stress and still has time for family, leaving simply to pursue the image of entrepreneurship may reduce their freedom. Rhianna continues working as a nurse anaesthetist because she spent years qualifying and genuinely enjoys the profession. When her shift ends, she is not responsible for operating the hospital. A business owner may control their calendar in theory while remaining responsible for staff, bills, customers and problems at every hour. Schoeller has walked away from profitable projects when they began competing with his family. He left a successful real estate YouTube channel because he could not sustain it alongside the family channel he and Rhianna were building. He has also stepped away from Instagram when social media began controlling too much of his attention. Those decisions do not reflect diminished ambition. They show that the ambition achieved its purpose. Financial freedom gave Schoeller the power to protect his time rather than monetise every available opportunity. The real measure of wealth is not whether someone can buy the house, car or yacht. It is whether they can decline work that no longer fits, leave when their family needs them and enjoy what they have built without becoming trapped by the cost of maintaining it. The strongest financial position is not being able to afford everything. It is no longer being owned by anything. This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal or tax advice. Real estate investor and private money lender Jon Schoeller explains why financial freedom is measured not by what you can buy, but by the time, choice and security your money creates.