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So many luxury yachts cruise off Florida 's Gold Coast each winter, it can be hard to keep track. Some have distinct features such as dark blue hulls or large oval windows that help to set them apart from the rest, but in general, even the most spectacular of sleek white hulls can be tough to tell apart for all but the most expert naval architects.
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Once in a while, though, we leering laymen get lucky: One of the glamour girls pulls into a local dock and gives us her name. Whether we read it off her transom or her side's lighted letters, we gain an important clue to unearthing her secrets—especially if we know how to make the most of every devoted yacht-spotter's favorite sites on the World Wide Web.
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Want to get a little gossip, learn a bit about a boat in your harbor, or figure out who the heck has been cruising up and down your stretch of coastline the past few weeks? The best place to start is these Web sites, which offer stories, forums, and more.
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- www.Megayacht.com . This site is built for industry insiders, but it offers lots of news coming out of yards all over the world—including bits about boats that are so new, the reviewers haven't gotten to them yet. You have to be a hard-core yacht-spotter to weed through some of the press releases you'll find here (such as announcements of new refit yard services and promotions at brokerage houses), but if you invest the time, you can often come away with interesting tidbits about top-notch yards and their latest projects that you simply will not find anywhere else.
- www.PowerAndMotoryacht.com . America 's leading consumer marine magazine has a “megayacht forum” on its Web site where you can post questions and dish dirt on every big boat in the world. It gets dozens, sometimes hundreds of posts a day. Yacht-spotters are frequent forum users, as are megayacht crew, designers, and builders from around the world. Even better, once you chat on the forums about whichever yacht is gracing the docks in your area, you can use the site's search engine to learn where the boat ranks in Power & Motoryacht 's annual list of the World's 100 Largest Yachts. You might even find a full-length review that you can read for free in the site's database of previously printed articles.
- www.SevenSeasCharters.com . Not all luxury yachts are available for charter, but virtually every one that is can be found in the listings at this charter company's impressive Web site. It's a terrific source of information that you won't always find at other sites, including interior photography, crew-to-guest ratios, and the base rates that these fantastic boats are raking in for a week's worth of charter time. In some cases, you can even learn the names and backgrounds of the captains and crew members—with photos so that you can pick them out of the crowds while they're walking down your dock. Want to know whether that yacht in your harbor is getting $30,000 or $300,000 a week from the world's wealthiest vacationers? This is the place to look.
- www.YachtSpotter.com. This is a Web forum run by a European man who grew up looking at the grandest boats in the Mediterranean Sea . He decided, as a side gig, that he'd like to host an online discussion for other people around the world about which megayachts are where at any given time. People who use the forum sometimes post photos of top yachts in various locations, as well as exchange gossip that they hear about the boat owners on the docks. The site was gearing up for a re-launch as of presstime, with new-and-improved features designed to enhance the yacht-spotting experience.
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Of course, you can also type a yacht's name into Google or another World Wide Web search engine, and you just may come up with some surprising information. A handful of owners, for instance, create Web sites devoted to showcasing their megayachts. Other times, you may come across articles from non-marine sources about yachts used by superstars—say, a Sports Illustrated article about Tiger Woods's latest purchase or an E! Entertainment report about which yacht a teen sensation recently chartered in the Med.
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Taking this route is more of a shotgun approach than simply researching the name of a classy yacht that catches your eye off the Gold Coast, but hey, if you want to keep up with the world's other yacht-spotters, you'll need all the dish you can find. |
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Kim Kavin, editor of www.CharterWave.com
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