I most recently wrote about the 63-foot sailing yacht Dulcinea back in October, when the yacht was Caribbean-bound following a summer’s worth of upgrades at a New England shipyard. I hadn’t been aboard her in about a year, which made me pleased to see her looking so shined up and spiffy at last month’s Antigua charter yacht show.
There was also a new crew member: Tracey Bamforth, who came aboard December 5 to serve as chef. She made quite an entrance at the show, taking first place in the entire field of yachts (including the big megayachts) in the competition for “best use of coffee.”
Bamforth told me that she previously worked as the sole stewardess aboard a 125-foot Perini Navi sailing yacht that was not offered for charter. She has been friends with Dulcinea’s captain for quite some time, and thus was thrilled with the idea of filling the opening he had this winter. “I wanted a more hands-on role on a smaller boat,” she told me.
As to her cooking skills, Bamforth told me that she’s not a trained chef in high cuisine—but that she has long learned from those who are. “I lived with the sous chef of the 269-foot Oceanco motoryacht Alfa Nero for two years,” she said, “and before that, in London, I lived with a chef for two years who was Italian trained. For me, cooking is a passion.”
She calls her style fusion, which she defines as finding the freshest ingredients and combining them creatively. Some of her favorite dishes to serve include fish tartare, fresh scallops, mussel soup, low-fat salads, and fresh fillets.
“We did bacon paella today,” she told me, “and the only fat was from the bacon itself. There’s just no need to add any more.”
Dulcinea is available this winter in the Caribbean through management company Nicholson Yachts (which is one of my sponsors). Any reputable charter broker can tell you more about the crew or help you book a week onboard.
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