Trident was dubbed the "Queen of the Show" in Fort Lauderdale.
Longtime charter broker Ann Landry of Northrop & Johnson recently spent three days aboard the newly launched, 214-foot Feadship Trident, which is making its Caribbean charter debut this winter. The yacht went straight from the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show—where it was dubbed “Queen of the Show”—to the Bahamas, where Landry was aboard as a guest of management company and builder Feadship.
Here is my exclusive interview with Landry about this head-turning new charter yacht. Special thanks to Feadship for providing the photography.
Ann Landry
I’m curious about how well this trip was organized, because it was done by Feadship’s charter division—which has only existed since January 2008 and was not publicly announced until June 2008, and which was begun by a person without any serious yacht charter experience.
D.J. Kiernan of Feadship Charter was our host, and I felt like he knew what he was doing. He has been doing this for more than a year now, and he has hospitality industry experience, and he’s just the kind of guy who is so personable and pleasant, you can’t help yourself in trying to help him.
A lot of people don’t know this, but he was a moving force behind establishing the Young Professionals in Yachting group to help people learn. He’s a smart guy. He’s a fast learner. And he’s an earnest, pleasant person.
How about Trident? Is she as jaw-dropping as all the media reports indicate?
She’s gorgeous. She has a Donald Starkey interior with warm, neutral colors, and then he’ll throw in a beautiful, bright-red pop in the main saloon that becomes a focus piece. There is interesting art, too. I’d call it contemporary. Not minimalist or modern, but contemporary. And the carpeting is exquisite. It’s custom made in a neutral color with patterns laser-cut into it. The patterns are just gorgeous, and they feel so wonderful under your feet.
There are some exotic woods, which are also nice, and the dining room table runs fore and aft, instead of the usual athwartships. The yacht is just huge, so it can accommodate that. There’s a serving bar in that same space, too, which is nice. The table very comfortably seats 12.
The layout indicates that there are three outdoor dining areas, as well.
That’s right. There is a small seating area for morning coffee or afternoon hors d’oeuvres on the main deck aft, full dining on the upper deck aft, and dining on the top deck. All of the full tables seat 12 guests, which is the number that Trident takes for charter.
Are the cabins as large as the other guest areas?
I shared a twin cabin with another charter broker, and it was very spacious.
The master is palatial. It’s on the main deck. I distinctly remember a mirror in the master bathroom that has a frame studded in Swarovski crystals, maybe one-carat sized crystals. It’s not at all ostentatious, and the quality is incredible.
Was that your favorite detail on the boat?
I also liked the furniture on the top deck. It’s to die for. It has wood frames with chrome steel tubing legs. You lift up the backrest, and it has slim, tubular, chrome-steel supports for the backrest. The chairs at the dining table adjust that way too. It’s just beautiful.
One other thing I want to remark on is the office. It’s on the starboard side of the main deck and abuts to the master suite, and it has two entrances. You can enter the office without going through the master cabin. I used the office, and it’s huge. There is a ton of natural light and really large windows.
On a yacht of Trident’s caliber, I would expect a top-notch chef. How was Simon Jones?
He was excellent. He’s British, and he previously worked aboard the the 50-meter motoryacht Odessa, so he has big-boat experience. Before that, he achieved one Michelin star as head chef at L’Escargo in the SoHo section of London. He’s just phenomenal.
The galley aboard Trident is really big, a full-on, industrial-size, industrial-equipped galley. It’s all the space that he needs to create just about every kind of food. I thought his vegetables were the most gorgeous. He did asparagus and spinach that was to die for. He also did very well with fish. Everything I tasted was delicious and plentiful. We had a lot of choices, and we were able to try as much or as little of everything as we wanted. Nobody had even the hint of a complaint.
When a yacht is more than about 175 feet long, as Trident is, I find that you don’t see the captain all too often. Did you tend to interact more with the crew?
That’s right. It’s a crew of 14 on Trident, so guests will mostly be dealing with the stewards, stewardesses, and deckhands.
Calum Taylor is the steward on Trident, and he was fantastic. He knocked our socks off. He did most of the serving. Everything was perfect all throughout the yacht. The chief stewardess, Maya Patel, has only worked on Feadships, including the 197-foot Paraffin, the 234-foot Utopia, and the 200-foot Secret. She’s a British native who recently lived in Canada, and everything was perfect. The second stewardess, Teresa Dalton, she’s from New Zealand and also was good. She helped Calum with the serving. Everything was just perfect.
I understand that weather kept you tied to the dock at Atlantis Resort and Casino, which means you probably weren’t outdoors enough to meet the deckhands in-depth.
Yes, sadly, we didn’t get a chance to know the deckhands because the boat didn’t move, and we didn’t use the water toys. But in general, I really liked the crew and the boat a lot.
Does the level of elegance aboard Trident make it ideal for adult couples to charter as a group? Or would a family be okay on this boat?
I would say that it could be a family boat, but the twin cabin is plenty big for adults. It’s huge. The only thing that makes it any different than any others is that it has two beds in it instead of one.
Plus, there are seven cabins in this boat as opposed to the usual six, so even though you can take only 12 people because of charter regulations, you can use all seven cabins.
I mentioned how palatial the master is. The VIP is also on the main deck, and it’s really, really nice, too. The windows are bigger than in the cabins on the bottom deck. And even on that deck in our twin cabin, I felt by no means that we were in a cave or anything. There was lots and lots of natural light.
To be honest, I would even recommend Trident for corporate charters, because of the quality of the boat and the service. It couldn’t fail to impress your clients if you were a business owner.
One of the things I heard a lot of talk about at last week’s Antigua charter yacht show was discounts. And not in the way I’ve been hearing about them during the past few months. As you know if you follow my blog, deals and discounted rates have been flooding the crewed charter market for a little more than a year now, as yacht owners try to adapt to the financial pressures of the continuing global recession. Brokers have been pushing for deeper and deeper discounts on behalf of charter clients, and though not all yacht owners have obliged, a good number have. The talk on the docks last week was different because, instead of all the brokers saying they wanted to negotiate the biggest discounts possible, I began to hear some brokers saying that if they saw a yacht offering more than a 15-percent discount, they would think twice before trying to book it for their client at all. One broker from Ocean Independence put it to me this way: “If the discount being offered is more than 15 percent, something is wrong. Either something is wrong with the boat that is making it desperate to charter, or the owner of the boat is desperate for money. Either of those things is bad for my charter client. I don’t want to send my clients onto boats that might be falling apart, or whose owner cannot stand financially behind the charter if something goes wrong.” I thought about this comment in the context of a conversation that I had with Capt. Warren East aboard the 73-foot sailing catamaran Wonderful, which has earned a strong reputation in the charter industry during the past few years (and which looks terrific following a recent makeover). Capt. East told me that his yacht has four weeks of charter booked for the upcoming Caribbean season, plus three inquiries for additional bookings. “That’s obviously not the level of business we have done in years past,” he said, “but we’re hanging on. The bigger problem is that we made so many concessions last year. We were chartering at nearly half price. We need to get the rates back up toward normal so that we can continue to maintain the boat to the expected standard, but now some of the brokers are coming back and wanting those same discounts. We can’t give them and still provide the same level of experience for the client.” This particular broker and this particular captain were discussing two sides of the same coin: quality. The past year in crewed yacht charter has been very much about clients trying to get more than they paid for. The coming year, I think, might turn out to be about ensuring that you actually get quality for your charter dollar or euro.
I snagged an exclusive interview yesterday afternoon with Mark Elliott, a 20-year veteran charter captain who is now a yacht sales and charter broker for 
