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Sea Castles Bill Sanderson Jr. '70 know how to navigate the world of mega yachts By Todd Balf '83 Photos by Todd Anderson

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At the mid-afternoon siesta hour in Palm Beach, Fla., Bill Sanderson Jr. '70 is motoring around his Camper & Nicholsons yacht brokerage office in his customary short-sleeved polo and beige slacks, taut with the kind of bundled energy that might remind you of Jack LaLanne just before he rips off a one-arm pushup. "Here, I've got something to show you," he says.

On his large conference room table, Sanderson directs my attention to a stack of glossy brochures and lavish picture books that illustrate the most spectacularly opulent high-tech yachts in the world. A few minutes later, he's gone again to get more glossies. In the space of our initial 20-minute sit-down he's up and out a half dozen times, each time reappearing with more brochures, more books, and finally the blueprints to his latest super-yacht building project. It's almost like each boat reminds him of another that he has built. You get the impression that Sanderson has rarely stopped long enough to reflect upon the entirety of the small multi-billion dollar fleet he has helped put out on the world's oceans.

The memory lane stuff ends as abruptly as it began. Sanderson has to excuse himself. On this early summer day last year, he is expecting a call any moment from the Boston-based client for whom he is potentially constructing the aforementioned $60 million, 62-meter yacht. It's an upgrade on his 55-meter yacht with, among many, many other things, "bigger state rooms and a large masseuse area." He and the boat's interior designer have been hard at work for weeks. Sanderson believes the match between boat and buyer is good but there are no guarantees. A fine yacht is the purchase of all purchases, transcending need and want and rationality. It is about dreams as much as anything. And as one of the world's top yacht brokers, Bill Sanderson can tell you that being a dream maker is a very tricky business.

Sanderson brokers yachts for Camper & Nicholsons International, a company whose gilded lineage dates back to 18th-century London, when Francis Amos built and sold small trading ships. The business's first commissioned yacht, the cutter Breeze, was launched in 1836. One hundred and seventy five years later, Camper & Nicholsons projects some 30 yachts worth $1.5 billion due for delivery in 2010. Because he handles more than his fair share of sales—at any given time he'll be working on a dozen projects—Sanderson is regarded with a fair bit of awe in the industry. "I consider him to be among the top brokers in the world," real estate titan Andrew Farkas told Yachting magazine.

The yachts Sanderson builds aren't, as one might naively suppose, outside his office's front door on the Intra-coastal Waterway. They are spread far and wide across the waters of the world. They're also not just "yachts," but mega yachts that are, according to one of his catalogues, "akin to residing in your own world-class resort." They have noble names Lady Lauren and Sovereign and have helidecks, sea-customized Steinway pianos, and, of late, personal Orca submarines. They take two-and-half years and 400,000 man hours to build and are assembled in various places around the world, from New Zealand to Norway.

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