It’s Sunday morning and we are back in Antigua, aboard Pandora, having arrived on Tuesday. Somehow the first few days were incredibly hectic but today seems a bit more relaxed.
Perhaps it’s the view from Pandora’s cockpit? Well, if you disregard the fact that it is quite windy.

This morning Brenda and I headed ashore for coffee at this lovely waterside café. I had learned about this place, tucked into the head of the harbor, from a friend and it was the first time that Brenda visited with me. Very charming.

The last week before departure from our “land home” was hectic in the extreme but now we are back in Antigua. Getting the house winterized and a last minute decision to have a heat pump installed with the hope of weaning us off of oil deliveries was probably a good example of us, no I should say me “biting off more than we could chew”. I am pretty good at that. Brenda just loves the way that I keep us busy in the extreme 🙁
Now all of that is behind me, at least the home things, but I seem to be plenty good at filling my days here as well. Cleaning the slime of 7 weeks off of the bottom of Pandora, and doing a number of small upgrades and fixes. Cruisers say that spending time aboard a small boat is “fixing boats in exotic places.” Yup. Others say that “everything on a boat is broken but you just don’t know it yet”. Seems that way to me.
However, some owners don’t have to worry about all that. Sure, their boats are being fixed in exotic places but not by them. They just write checks. Well, actually their “family office” writes checks. A good example is Jeff Bezos’s boat Koru, on the dock here in the harbor, is surely having stuff fixed. She’s the big black sailing yacht on the left with the three masts. At least for now, she is the largest sailing yacht in the world. I say “for now” as just about every year a new biggest one is launched. What’s the fun of being a babillionair if you don’t have the biggest yacht?

Of course, what is a photo of Jeff’s boat without a photo of Lauren, his girlfriend/fiancée and chopper pilot, decorating the bow. I wonder what the next owner, and I suppose that he will build a bigger one soon, will think about having Lauren leading the way…

And, what is a mega, mega yacht without a support boat that houses all his toys. They left the harbor yesterday, passing by Pandora. Perhaps they are heading to get stuff fixed. Probably but don’t worry, as both of his boats are less than a year old, and surely under warrantee.

And speaking of big boats, it is interesting how the yachting business has changed over the years as it relates to what was considered “mega”. To the right, Sir Richard Dyson’s 1930s yacht Nahlin, considered large at the time at nearly 300′. He had her fully restored from a sunken 1930s wreck for a reported $70M.

While she is about the same length as today’s mega-mega yachts, she’s peanuts in weight and cost when compared to the huge one to the left (below), Black Pearl, that cost nearly 3x as much. While Sir Richard’s yacht Nahlin isn’t available for charter, you can “rent” Black Pearl for $1,230,000 a week, plus expenses. Don’t despair if that sounds like a lot of money, you can always find some friends and split the cost ten ways. For five for couples it would only be a quarter mil for you and that special someone. Feel the itch? check out her specs here.

And if you are thinking “how can the charter cost be that much?” The estimated operating cost for a year for Black Pearl is upwards of $50,000,000 so they’d have to charter her full time for 10 months just to break even on the expenses and that doesn’t take into account the coat of the build. I doubt that they even come close but, “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” Of course…
To give you a feel for the differences between these two boats, while they are sort of the same length, Black Pearl is massive at 2,964 gross tons and Nahlin, a puny 1,356 gross tons. Do note that Nahlin is farther away in this photo but she’s much more svelte than Black Pearl in spite of her 300′ length. Of course they are both big compared to Pandora at a micro-puny 14 tons.

One thing that’s worth noting is that in spite of having “more money than God”, sometimes they can’t get a spot at the dock. I was told that all slips in Falmouth and English Harbor, when it comes to mega and mega, mega yachts, have been booked for months. Nahlin moved into a slip a few days ago and Black Pearl still sits out on anchor.
The yachts on the dock are jam packed like so many sardines, no make that whales.

And, in English harbor, which is loaded too, it’s hard to make out where one boat ends and the other begins.

I have written about many of these huge yachts in the past but a good roundup of some is in this recent post if you follow this link.
The upward trend in yacht size is pretty much universal in all size ranges but especially at the top mega-mega end of the spectrum. Even Pandora at 47′ is large compared to the average cruising boat back in the 80s when most were under 40′. Now Pandora is smallish compared to others. However, with the amount it costs to keep a boat in good shape going up every year, I am not sure that I’d want a bigger one. No, I take that back. If I “didn’t have to ask how much” I’d totally have a big one.
With the billionaire gang growing by leaps and bounds and surely headed for new highs in the US in particular over the next few years, the average size boat is bound to continue going up as there is no shortage of megagazillionairs that want to have the biggest and best.
Oh well, no mega or even micro-mega yacht charters in our future but one thing that I can cling to is that their view isn’t any better than from the cockpit of little old Pandora. Yesterday we spent the day opening and closing hatches as rain showers passed overhead. And each time, leaving behind a beautiful rainbow.

And, for those yachts, err boats, that don’t have a pastry chef on board, there is always Jean Marie, who delivers fresh pastries every morning in his dink for Isabella and Eric of La Brasserie.

Oh yeah, sometimes I do feel like it would be nice to have a bit more luxury aboard Pandora like AC perhaps when we are on the hook, but I have to remind myself that there are some hearty souls that, for reasons that elude me, row the entire way across the Atlantic to arrive here in Antigua.
One of the biggest races every winter is aptly called “The worlds toughest row”, leaving from the Canary Islands all the way to Antigua, a distance of 3,000 miles. The first team arrived here yesterday, after something like a month and a half of rowing offshore.
They were greeted by an enthusiastic crowd in Nelson’s Dockyard.

Later that evening another group of rowers, and I am unclear as to where they were from and which race they were a part of, arrived in Falmouth Harbor. Brenda and I happened to be heading back to Pandora when they approached out of the darkness.

And passed us as they reached the dock where a very enthusiastic crowd greeted them. It was a full boat and it was hard to imagine having enough food and water for such a large crew on a small boat. It reminds me of the Brenton Fisherman’s prayer, “O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

I guess that applies to just about everyone that heads out to sea in a small boat, rowing, plain vanilla, mega or mega-mega yachts, but some boats are a lot bigger than others so I expect that they need a bit less of help from the Almighty. Well, at least until things go all to s**t and stuff breaks.
I’ll be thinking about that when I head east from Bermuda in June, bound for the Azores.
Until then, perhaps I will have a rum punch while enjoying the same view that the big guys have. However, I’ll be making the drink myself as Jeeves is nowhere to be found.
I will just have to adapt…