Until the recent Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, I had seen only one McMullen and Wing motoryacht in person. That was the 115-foot Surprise, launched from the New Zealand shipyard in 2001. She was everything her reputation had promised—strong construction standards, lovely interior woodwork, and comfortable under way—but I had to fly nearly 24 hours straight from New York to the South Pacific to make that assessment. For most boaters, the only way to see a McMullen and Wing is in photographs.
The 130-foot Mea Culpa, built in New Zealand by McMullen and Wing. Click on the image to see more photos.
That’s also true for the suppliers of the components that go into such a motoryacht. In Fort Lauderdale, those suppliers filed, like ants still on the job, aboard the 138-foot motoryacht Mea Culpa.
Mea Culpa launched from McMullen and Wing in 2003, and she has since cruised nearly 70,000 miles around New Zealand, Australia, Vanuatu, Fiji, Western Samoa, greater French Polynesia, Hawaii, the U.S. West Coast from Panama to Alaska, and the U.S. East Coast as far north as Nova Scotia. Much discussed and serviced, she had yet to make her formal, domestic debut.
Although Mea Culpa has cruised over 70,000 miles, meticulous maintenance has kept everything like new.
“This boat show is the first time many of our suppliers are actually seeing the boat they helped to build years ago,” Capt. Mike Hein told me as we sat in the sky lounge, which, like the rest of Mea Culpa, had been so well maintained that it looked practically brand-new. I specifically looked to the edges and corners of the rich woodwork and plush carpeting, scanning for the kinds of nicks and tears that seem to scar a yacht through the sheer force of ticking time. I found not a one.
Camper & Nicholsons International will manage Mea Culpa for charter, which means anyone willing to pay a weekly base rate of $120,000 for eight guests will have a chance to enjoy this beauty over the winter, in the Caribbean.
Come summertime, though, Mea Culpa will be on the move again. “We plan to go back to the places the owner liked the best,” Hein said. “We will keep traveling the world.”
No doubt Mea Culpa will take a good number of Fort Lauderdale hearts and souls along for the ride.
Editor’s Note: Kim Kavin is an award-winning writer, editor and photographer who specializes in marine travel. She is the author of six books including Dream Cruises: The Insider’s Guide to Private Yacht Vacations, is editor of the online yacht vacation magazine www.CharterWave.com, and writes the blog at www.BrokerageBoss.com.
Both yachts are available individually or as a pair for private charter or corporate days, and come complete with captain and hostess, plus the use of an 8.5-metre RIB. If you get bored cruising under sail at 6 knots plus and want to energise at high speeds, wave jumping the wakes of passing ships or speeding power boats and ferries on their way to Cowes at 45 mph will certainly have the desired effect.
Whichever option you choose there is no need to worry about being too far away from sustenance. The food that we were served (and I was assured this was the norm) would not have been out of place at a Buckingham Palace tea party. From the minute we stepped on board a constant stream of delicious delicacies made their way up from the galley: goat’s cheese stuffed figs wrapped in parma ham, king prawns saturated in chilli, mini Yorkshires piled high with horseradish and rare roast beef. And if that wasn’t enough, steaming cups of fresh carrot soup with vast slabs of homemade sundried tomato bread were handed around.
The Yacht Insider: Green Is the New Gold
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Typically, the biggest, newest yachts get all the attention at the annual, industry-only charter yacht show on Antigua because, well, they’re the biggest, newest yachts. But that’s not what brokers and crew are talking about on the docks. This year, for the first time, I’m hearing a swell of conversations about even the most gold-plated yachts going green.
At the 2009 Antigua Charter show, it's all about going green.
In the span of my first two hours at this year’s show, three charter brokers told me how impressed they had been last month, when the entire Tortola charter fleet banded together to provide filtered water in reusable cups instead of bottled water in plastic containers. Before lunchtime today, owner-operator Dennis Barbeau of the 60-foot sailing catamaran Diamond Girl II told me that he was preparing to install solar panels to cut down on generator use. I then ran into Trish Cronan of Ocean Getaways, who invited me to join the newly formed Environmental Committee within the professional charter broker organization CYBA International. My last yacht tour today was aboard the brand-new, 198-foot CMN Cloud 9, where Chief Engineer Stuart Laidlaw proudly showed me the yacht’s onboard sewage treatment plant—which ensures that solid waste stays out of the world’s waters.
Stuart Laidlaw shows off the onboard sewage treatment plant aboard Cloud 9.
All of this in just the first eight hours of the boat show, and absolutely industry-wide, from the smallest sailboats to one of the largest motoryachts.
“I want every charter broker to educate their clients about plastic water bottles,” Cronan told me as she described the new CYBA committee. “I want them, instead of having their clients suggest bottled water, to request charters aboard yachts with filtration systems—which of course will then encourage more of the yachts to get those systems.
“After that,” she continued, “the next item on my list is carbon offsets.”
These agenda items are not entirely new to charter, but this is the first time I’ve heard them being discussed on an industry-wide scale by so many people. Early leaders included Camper & Nicholsons International, which manages the world’s largest fleet of crewed charter yachts and has been on the carbon-neutral bandwagon for several years. Retail agencies such as BoatBookings offer carbon-offset calculators on their websites. A London-based company called Yacht Carbon Offset is a sponsor of this year’s Antigua show, hoping to get even more companies to do the same.
To my eyes, the wave of charter industry support for environmentalism appears headed for a crest in the next year or two, perhaps worldwide. That’s exciting stuff. I truly cannot wait for tomorrow.
Tags: Antigua Charter Show, charter broker, crewed charter, environment, green
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