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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.
A window into Sanderson's world is the Georgia, which is currently cruising somewhere in the Mediterranean. Her requirements were simple (if impossible) enough: to be the world's largest sloop and first super yacht of the new millennium. She boasts museum-quality art in the main salon, the tallest-ever mast (200 feet, made from carbon fiber), and a sound-proofed state room whose entryway floor features an elaborate inlay pattern of quarter-cut cherry, rosewood and ebony. In the full-colored, 175-page book that describes her four-year gestation, Sanderson wrote with characteristic frankness that the owner "really did not need another yacht... however if it could be fun and exciting then he was all for it."
Like a general manager in baseball, Sanderson's role is to put a winning team together and hope they are good enough and lucky enough to win it all. In the case of Georgia, "winning it all" meant a fully functioning, expertly crewed, ultra-luxurious vessel finished in time for display at the 2000 America's Cup in New Zealand. There were a thousand battles to hash out between owner, designers, and contractors—the disputatious process author Tracy Kidder described in House isn't a bad comparison, only multiplied times a million. Sanderson said that he thought they would never get it all resolved, but when the Cup racing began the Georgia was there. Sanderson, notably, was not, having already moved onto a potential next great project. In the small and finite world of avid super yacht buyers, there's nothing like a great, history-making boat to fire up the imagination for an even better one that they themselves own.
It's a fact of life in the yachting world, says Sanderson, that "better" is often defined as bigger. It's fairly well known, for example, that the sheikh of Dubai has the biggest private yacht (524 feet, 10 inches) and that the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich has the most (four, and constructing a fifth called Eclipse, which when built will overtake the sheikh's in length by two inches). To put it in Durham terms, if either of these mega yachts were placed on Main Street, the stern would be at T-Hall and the bow sprit somewhere approaching Young's Restaurant. From the 100-foot high captain's deck, you might peer upon the Isle of Shoals lighthouse.
In the mine is bigger than yours race, the Russian billionaires rule over sheiks and Microsoft stockholders alike, Sanderson says, ordering boats so gaudily oversized they don't fit in some of the world's most picturesque harbors. A 500-foot monster typically employs crews of more than 60 and requires an annual operating budgets of $6 to $7 million. "That what it costs just to own them," reminds Sanderson. "Not to buy them." While the recession has taken its toll on demand—"the boating business was the first to fall off and it will be the last to come back," he notes, among the super-wealthy, the desire for the biggest with the most bling really never goes away.
At first glance it's hard to figure how a guy like Sanderson works with (much less builds dreams for) the world's most privileged. It isn't unusual for him to say regular-guy things like "crap," or, "answer it!" when my cell phone rings. When I first reached his office in Palm Beach, he sent me back out onto the street again because I didn't park where he told me to. It's just Bill being Bill: honest, forthright and frugal. On the street I'd have to feed the meter, but the company lot is free. It's hard to imagine him being any different with an Arab sheik, a Russian oligarch, or a South Palm Beach rental car magnate.
He gets into it with his clients over everything from the paint color on the hull (he wanted white, not blue, on the Georgia) to the size of the mainsail. As a plain-spoken Yankee, he is renowned for not only building dreams but building them cheaper, better and faster than almost anyone else. There was a big smile, for example, when Sanderson assured his aforementioned Boston client recently that "the only thing he had to worry about was whether he wanted to keep the yacht when we finished it—or double his money and sell it to one of the crazy Russians."
Born in Westbrook, Conn., Sanderson was sailing Blue Jays by the time he was 8. His assimilation into the sailing world was only briefly interrupted during his tour de UNH, where he followed in the footsteps of his late mother, Anne '42, and father William '40. A zoology major, the younger Sanderson briefly entertained the idea of a graduate degree before he took a right turn to the ocean and never looked back.
In a single year, he sailed across the Atlantic four times. He also raced in almost every famous sailing event, including the Admiral's Cup, Sydney to Hobart, Fastnet, the Bermuda Race, and the Southern Cross series. In the '70s, he did 75,000 miles worth of global sailing and match racing. "The saying is that ocean racing is a bit of hardship," he notes with a laugh, "between two great cocktail parties." Of course, there were more hiccups than he lets on. Once he went overboard near the Azores during a transatlantic yacht delivery. "I was in the water a long time—maybe an hour—before they finally found me," he says. "I was pretty lucky because it's a big ocean."
At some point, he decided he was tempting fate and that he needed to start thinking about a real occupation. He began his brokering career at a Ft. Lauderdale firm in 1976. Selling yachts, especially large state-of-the-art sailboats, came easy. Sanderson's experience and expertise in sailing gave him special credibility, he says. "I was a sailor," says Sanderson plainly. "Most of my competitors were not."
Over the years, his association with beautiful boats has led to opportunities. He has regularly crewed sleek racing yachts, including a replica of the 1937 America's Cup winner Ranger, a boat he built in 2000. A few years ago he was invited to cruise aboard the legendary 325-foot yacht Christina O, the onetime plaything of Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
Sanderson says he was spoiled with so much adventurous racing early in his life. Like many ex-competitors, there is a big difference being on a boat and racing one. On a recent vacation with his wife, Melaina, a restless Sanderson nearly went out of his mind as the cruise ship put-putted with placid equatorial laziness amid the San Blas islands near Panama.
On the other hand, he isn't torn up these days when he can't answer every invite to sail with friends. Instead, he rides a racing bike long and hard as a hedge against complacency and gamely stewards the new four-legged family members, Sauvignon and Bordeaux, two rambunctious toy-breed dogs. One of his two daughters from a previous marriage was recently in town to introduce her fiance. That resulted in an epic, hotly paced bike ride that the family is still talking about. And while the sea is never far away—from the second story of his townhouse, a deck off the couple's bedroom offers a sweeping blue water vista—Sanderson says that a storm the previous week produced gusts of 40 or 50 knots. "I really didn't mind being here and not out there."
Sanderson's townhouse is at the quiet southern end of the island. He escorts a visitor around like they are on a passage and will be spending the next month aboard. Seeing the trinkets he has brought from his worldwide travels is reminiscent of a ship captain's house—more than homes, they are repositories for exotic collectibles and rich memories. There are rugs from all over the world, including a Persian rug that purportedly was once housed in Saddam Hussein's Bagdad palace. The vintage navigational charts on many of his walls were handed down to him from his seafaring grandfather. On a shelf in the high-ceilinged living room is a teeming collection of ceramic sea turtles from dozens of international seaports.
I wonder aloud to Sanderson if buying a big yacht is all that different from upgrading to a really nice carbon fiber bike. The same emotions are involved: there's no need, per se, but the desire—once you touch and ride such a machine—is almost impossible to ignore. Bill says it's a pretty decent analogy up until the point where it's, you know, a bike. "I can buy a bike," he says. The point is clear: Buying a mega yacht, or for that matter, building one, is in a different league. Last December, he was in northern Denmark enduring sea trials with "friggin ice on the deck." On a different sea trial, this time with Melaina, they cruised between the French and Italian rivieras. "It was good, we had pasta, nice cheeses...but the boat wasn't quite right. I said, 'What are we doing? Why don't we just build a new one?'" The client agreed.
I checked in with Sanderson after his meeting with the Boston client. He and the yacht's interior designer had flown up to New York in the late fall to meet with the buyer and the buyer's wife. The yacht seemed a lock—many manhours had gone into the specs and details. In the end, however, the 62-meter yacht wasn't right. "It's not an easy business," said Sanderson, not explaining whether his client had lost his ardor for the boat or whether the client's spouse had.
Sanderson didn't seem surprised things hadn't worked out—and he certainly wasn't daunted. He had spent the last few months accumulating a good chunk of his 200,000 hours of annual flight time, visiting boat yards and various vendors and traveling to boat shows. The good thing, at least in mega yachts, is that one man's discarded dream is another's opportunity. A Turk has come calling on the 62-meter in Viareggio, he added. The Boston client, meanwhile, was thinking of building a 151-footer in Anacortes in Washington. As Sanderson says--and you'd have to take him at his word on this—the yachting world isn't easy, but it isn't dull either.
"You really have to get into the mind of a client," says Sanderson. In a real sense he is still the 20-something UNH graduate exploring strange uncharted territory. The difference is he doesn't have to get wet or use a sextant. "What I do can be frustrating sometimes," he says, "but I'd never want to anything different." ~
Todd Balf '83, a former senior editor for Outside magazine, writes for national publications and is the author of The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la, The Darkest Jungle, The True Story of the Darien Expedition and America's Ill-Fated Race to Connect the Seas, and Major, A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World's Fastest Human Being.