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Broking the Mould
Involved in yachting for over 20 years, Captain Steve White moved ashore this year to take on a new challenge with fellow captains in his brokerage company International Yacht Register. TCR spoke with Captain White about how he perceives the superyacht industry today, brown paper bags and tricking pirates with cardboard cut-outs.
 Captain Steve White (Caroline Hillier/Superyachtart.com)
TheCrewReport: Tell me about how you became a captain, Steve.
Captain Steve White: It was a bit of a “jump in at the deep end and float” scenario; the captain [of Rosenkavalier] left me the key to the safe on the desk and decided to leave for six months on holiday. This was before the days of mobile phones and so on, so he left a number to call on the satcom if we needed him. We spent six months anchored in Phuket and decided that if we were going to be there for a while we might as well use the time constructively, so we decided paint the boat. We built rafts, hired locals and painted the boat at anchor in Phuket. I think he was a bit shocked when he came back that we had painted the hull and the superstructure. It taught me a lot – it was my first role in charge of a big yacht of 70m; there was a crew of 30 (which was large at the time) and I was the only European, everyone else was Filipino or Asian, it was a great learning curve.
How long had you been the chief officer?
Two years, and I was already running all the staff. The captain, John Wisden, moved to become her manager, starting a company called Pacific and Worldwide, and I took over as acting captain until Andreas Liveras bought the boat in 1993, who I had worked for before on a couple of yachts, so knew fairly well. He turned up in Phuket and we then had a mad trip back to the Med through the Indian Ocean with Andreas and his family and friends onboard, who were great fun, stopping in Sri Lanka and so on.
Has it changed in Phuket now?
The last time I was in Phuket was on Chamar in ’99; it was completely different to the days when I was there on Rosenkavalier. The water in the bay used to be totally clear and you could see the bottom, nearly all the way out the drop off. Unfortunately it has changed a lot now and the bay was not as clean as I would have hoped when I was last there.
And more people are aware of the wealth that is represented by a superyacht now.
We never once had a problem with piracy when I was in Asia, both on Chamar and Rosenkavalier. It was at the time when the piracy command base in Singapore was being constructed, which is a combined anti-piracy force that operates throughout the world. We were owned by a very influential Japanese businessman and were involved helping the Singaporean police by telling them what the yachts were doing there and how we operated as it is so different from commercial fleets: we spent a lot of time on the dock, they spend most of their time at sea. One example was an interview we had with a Malaysian colonel, who tutored us that in his opinion the pirates are not really looking for yachts, they are looking for big boats with not many crew, thus less chance of resistance thus easier to get onboard. So if you have a 260-foot yacht with 30 crew on it, the chances of them being caught once they board are a lot higher than if you have a 600-foot ship with 20 crew. We took this information in hand and as we frequently transited the Malacca Straits we started to make cardboard cut-outs of men, one on the boat deck with two broom handles to look like a gun, we also started excessive deck walks to show a presence. There are so many fishing boats moving around, so you don’t know which ones are the ones to look out for.
I have always been a great believer in being vigilant to your surroundings. In my opinion, I think at times there may be too much emphasis put on piracy when a boat is at sea, especially lately with the Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa; but that to me is not where the main threat to yachts may lie. I am sure insurers may disagree with me after the recent case of piracy with a French yacht, but to me it’s at anchor that we should be most vigilant as we can be very exposed and vulnerable. Take this example: you could be on one of the lesser tropical islands worldwide, on this large multimillion-dollar yacht sitting there with all the lights on enjoying a nice, leisurely night at anchor. But take into account that some of the poorest peoples in the world may live in these areas and there may be elements ashore sitting looking out there, wondering about opportunism. They may think, Well maybe if I could get onboard, I could get a little something. You are in a situation where you are in their environment, you feel very safe and comfortable on this multimillion-dollar yacht but you are sitting a couple of hundred yards away from shore and it may be very easy to get onboard a yacht especially as you are stationary. This is where I think yachts may have to be more careful.
 Onboard Chamar
How did you first get into yachting?
I think my first glimpse of yachting was walking the docks with my parents when we had a small villa South of France; we would see the boats anchored in the bay. As a teenager, I knew yachting existed from that, and my father had a small sail boat so we used to sail in Greece and so on. My father gave me a one-way ticket and £150 and told me to go off and find my fortune, and so I bought my ticket on Danair and at the second boat that I knocked on the gangway I was given a job, and I have not really looked back.
It’s amazing how quickly time has passed – I started when I was 18 in ’86 and finished in March of this year, it feels like only a couple of years. It has flown by and I count myself very fortunate that I have had the opportunity to work on the yachts I have worked on, met the characters I have met and cruised the areas I have cruised. I also count myself further fortunate that I have had the opportunity over the years to work for and with both the good and bad so that I gained an appreciation of all aspects of yachting.
It feels short, but you still experienced a lot within that time.
I think a lot of crew don’t experience the full variety of what yachting has to offer. Yachting is one of the world’s most amazing professions and we are working on these boats which owners spend millions on and we are the ones who really get to enjoy it at the end of the day because the majority of the time you have no guests or owners onboard. A lot of crew, rightly or wrongly, tend to spend too much time tied to the dock in Antigua or Antibes and they aren’t looking to get out there.
I was always very young and ambitious, so I would take whatever came along and that was why when I was offered the Second Officer’s job on Rosenkavalier I took it. I remember sitting on the jumbo jet flying out there and not even knowing where Singapore was. I think a lot of crew almost bemoan the fact that their boats cruise but the only way you learn yachting is by yachting. Modern yachting may have evolved a mentality that you are tied to the dock for the majority of the time. Compare this to the yachting of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, which was dying out as I came into it, [when] crew wanted to be out there cruising, it was almost escapism.
 Chamar with Tower Bridge in London for a backdrop
In many senses, the communication with the internet onboard allows you to keep in touch a lot better now but it is reminding you of home more, rather than enjoying where you are.
The internet is a wonderful tool, but it can be a real pain onboard. I used to have one rule on crossings: don’t ever ask me when we are going to get internet connection. I used to remind the crew that [when you are] working on a boat, you know you are going to be [in this situation] when you walk onboard at the dock.
Although the internet is great, the idea of working on a yacht is that you travel and you do things that other people aren’t privileged enough to do – and you are very lucky that you get paid to do it as well. The internet has made it boring for some people who are more worried about what is going on outside the yacht, they are not experiencing the opportunities they have to the full. I am not saying don’t use the internet, just in moderation. I remember vividly many times entering the crew mess on a Saturday or Sunday morning off and the whole crew would be sat like it was an internet cafe; this would infuriate me as we were more often than not in fabulous places that offered so much, so on Chamar I would turn the internet off and tell everyone to go outside and enjoy.
I understand that you have a history of longevity on the boats for which you worked?
I worked on the same boat for 16 years, with the first owner for 13 years and the second owner for three years.
 Chamar out of the water
What was the key to staying on the same boat?
The right owner. It is a two-way street and a good captain and crew have to have a good owner who respects the crew as well. The original owner who designed and built Chamar is a gentleman who respected his crew and wanted longevity. The boat was not corporate or for business, it was a family holiday home and he wanted the same crew every time he went onboard. So once he had a crew he wanted he would look after them to keep them onboard; however, if you keep all the crew there is no advancement, which can be hard for those wanting to progress. But over the whole time I was the captain I only had four first mates and all of them now run large yachts.
And you had time to mentor them this way.
I have always believed in making sure that crew have the opportunity to
do training if they want to; we used to pay for all of the officers’
training. Obviously there is a requirement that you have to give
onboard training, but we would offer more than the basic requirement.
For example, one of my chief officers, Christoffer Santon (pictured below), who now
drives a 60+m yacht, had not done much training but the owner and I
really liked him and saw potential, so he was encouraged to go off to
do a lot of training. And now he is one of the best crew I have seen
out there. He is so well based in all aspects of the job that whoever
he works for is going to have a good experience.
 Captain White's former Chief Officer, Christoffer Santon
When you are on a private boat there is more time to give to training than a charter yacht.
Obviously private yachts tend to be a little more structured and the majority of the years that I worked on Chamar she was private. We went commercial for a couple of years at the end of the original owner’s ownership, with a view to show what an amazing yacht she was to potential buyers. But we still maintained a training programme for crew wanting to advance
How did you find the change moving from private to charter?
It was an eye-opener. It was probably a direct reason why I am sitting here today, no longer as a captain but looking at a new business concept. I came into the position on Chamar with no brokers involved – it was directly between the owner, myself and his PA, moving down the crew hierarchy from there; a very simple system. Then we went into the charter market and a good friend of mine Rupert Nelson from Burgess arranged a central agency listing for Chamar, doing a fabulous job. But it opened my eyes to how the charter market and the sales market have not evolved along with the operational and construction sectors; it opened the owner’s eyes to it as well. And that is really where I found the idea for IYR, to try and evolve that side of the business.
How does the IYR concept differ to the way brokerage has worked in the past?
It is an alternative to the mainstream brokerage/management that is designed to be all-encompassing, which can lead to a situation where one may not have control of one’s yacht to the extent desired. The IYR system allows the owner to take as much control as he or she wants, at the same time allowing the captain to manage the boat if he or she wants to. A lot of people look at the IYR concept and say we are simply easyJet, by following a lower price structure. easyJet is a great company, but this is not the model we have followed; the ethos or mandate behind the company is that if you keep your yacht to a high standard then you are entitled to lower commissions for us to charter and sell it.
So having been captains yourselves now running the business, you have knowledge and understanding of what the customer wants?
Sure, that is the most important part – we are coalface engineers who have been working with the world’s rich and elite. We know what [owners or charter guests] want and we have been there and done it – and we have seen both sides of the coin when it has gone wrong and when it has gone well. Steve Warren has to be one of the top two or three captains in the world; he is one of the most highly respected yachtsmen in the industry and I think I have learned a thing or two as well!
We are trying to be completely open and honest in all that we are doing. There has been a cloud of suspicion surrounding both captains and crews and conversely brokers. Unfortunately I think a lot of the time that suspicion has been very unfairly weighted at yacht crew and captains. I had a telephone call from a managing agent who we are hoping to do some work with and she said: “It could be a hard sell to do the IYR system because there are some very unsavoury captains out there who put their hands in the pot.” I would agree that there is probably a very small percentage but there are some unsavoury people in all areas of all walks of life but the vast majority of all sectors of yachting, be it crew brokers or managers, are good and honest. That what our system is all about; it’s about trying to be as honest as one can, total transparency. Steve’s and my reputations speak for themselves.
There is a lot of discussion about backhanders because of the lack of transparency in many parts of the process; there is a lot of finger pointing.
I can honestly say that my time as a captain of a first class yacht I was never offered a “brown paper envelope”. I don’t know where this rumour comes from. I also think that once something is said, it is said and if someone is trying to take control of a situation they might suggest that another person is not trustworthy; this can easily balloon into something nasty. There are commissions out there and if an owner is happy for the captain to have a commission, fine. But the whole “brown paper bag” situation, I have never seen it happen. Maybe it was just people not offering them to me!
What are your thoughts on the crew needing to move on when a yacht is sold?
It depends very much on how long that crew has been on the yacht. For example, I was on Chamar, which became Bad Girl, for 16 years and it was sold twice, and both times we made sure that all the crew were kept on. But that was usually because the crew had been onboard a long time so they were assets. I think owners have to be advised; if someone has been onboard for a couple of seasons they have a relationship with the boat. If they have only been onboard a couple of months, fair enough.
 Captain White with his crew at Christmas 2004
But you could be potentially saving yourself quite a large sum of money if it is someone like an engineer who understands how the yacht works.
Yes definitely, even if one only takes the commission perspective for getting a new engineer onboard into account. It would appear that at various times you may have management agents and brokerage who would prefer to change the crew of the captain and chief engineer and put their own people onboard straight away, for whatever reason. This is a part of the industry that we feel very strongly has to change; you must get that direct link back to the owner and the captain. Once you get this relationship back in sync it’s all pretty simple.
So with IYR one of the elements you emphasise is the standards of the boat maintained by the captain and crew. How are you going about looking at the standards and reporting them?
We are already doing onboard inspections, with a team of four people in total – with one in the US – who do these for the procedural sides and we also have Peter Vogel of Triple S Consultancy doing the interiors, Michael Lamb of Superyacht Safety, Leonard Bilton from Bilton Marine, and the whole thing is overseen by Mike Worthington-Leese from John Winterbotham & Partners.
The process of the multipoint inspection takes two days with the yacht in full owner mode, so we can see exactly what standard the boat is run to, not in terms of ISM or ISPS – that will have already been done and the yacht will have all the correct paperwork for that already onboard and prechecked. It is the procedural side of the yacht’s operations we are interested in. We go through all the standards of how all procedures and operational standards are implemented and run within the yacht’s systems, this includes the hygiene and cleanliness of the yacht, the engine room planned maintenance and conditioning etc. And then every six months the yacht has to be reinspected, which takes about half a day to go through to check.
And if the boat doesn’t reach the standards is that it, or does it have a chance to improve?
We will write out a full report to say that the yacht and crew have not met the standards but if they do certain things then we can help them reach the required standard to enter the system.
Which areas do you feel from the boats you have seen so far are falling down more than others? The deck and engineer routes are mostly prescribed and so it is easier to see how the career path progresses; for the interior side – apart from the chef, perhaps – it is a lot harder to learn what is needed formally.
I would say the area of the boat I am most concerned about as a whole is not so much the engineering, the deck or the interior per se, but the actual overall management of the three departments. The skill of managing a yacht is starting to wane. If you don’t have a good onboard manager – a captain – then nobody is getting the right direction. With the interior staff the standards are more a reflection of experience levels; I believe the average now is about two years for a stewardess to stay in the industry.
My partner was a chief stewardess who came through hotel management schools and was the youngest manager of a five-star hotel in Europe and so she came that way into the industry, which is very rare. The majority of interior staff are from other walks of life who happen to walk into yachting and they don’t have the background or training, which is why I think although Peter [Vogels]’s system – although comprehensive – is very, very good.
 Marlene Andersen, White's partner and Chief Stewardess
Peter is the best there is; there is another man who was very good as well called Peter Edinger, who was fabulous and who now runs a private estate in Las Vegas, but Peter Vogel is as good as you can get. The owners of Chamar had standards that were unbelievably high; the owner’s wife was quite famous in the industry for being particular, and it really was white gloves at dawn [onboard]. Peter was the only steward who ever reached and exceeded her expectations; he now has an opportunity to make a big impact in yachting. I wish him all the best for the future and that is why we are involved with him.
In general training is not inexpensive for crew though.
We used to run a system on the boat whereby we would pay for the training and if you left within six months you would have to pay it back but if you left after six months the boat would pay half and after a year the boat would pay the whole thing. We must have put ten people through the master’s licence on the same basis.
It is good for the crew because they have the training but they aren’t rushing to take control of a boat as soon as they are qualified.
I am a little hypocritical if I agree, as I was so young when I became a captain and in those days there was no requirement for qualifications – you just became a captain. I think I was one of the youngest captains of a superyacht, about 25 years old, but on the flip side it gave me an appreciation of how to do it properly and how to do it badly.
 Captain White with Chamar in London
It’s a different industry now, with much more regulation.
Standards appear to have plummeted in many areas. Everybody focuses so much on the regulation of things that the actual standards of service and how owners are taken care off has fallen. The crew spend a lot of their time getting the paperwork they need to advance as per regulation but they haven’t actually learned their job. It’s a broad spectrum of work in the job and you have to learn your basics and then get your qualifications. The only place to really learn these skills like varnishing is on a yacht, handed down; I was taught by an old bosun who handed down his knowledge to me and I have passed that onto many crews over the years.
My perception is that many of the modern yacht crews – though not all of them – use the yacht they work on to justify how good they are. You could have a green or first-year deckhand or stewardess on a brand new large yacht in Antibes and they will class themselves as a good crew because they are on a new boat; the person across on the other side of the marina in a 20-m vessel in the “Old Graveyard” may a better crew because he or she has done all aspects of the craft and has a lot of experience. By justifying how good you are by the vessel you work on isn’t going to get anybody anywhere or benefit the end user, the owner.
What’s the solution for the future?
Training is a big part of it but you also need to have the commitment and input from firstly the owners then the senior staff – including the managers and the brokers – towards the junior crew. Nowadays, from my experience, the vast majority of the brokers and the management do not want to be involved with the crew; there used to be a big crossover of information but now there is very little communication or trust between the groups. We have to get the culture of trust back into yachting. The brokers, managers and owners need to stay with their crews and treat them properly and obviously vice versa the crew need to look after the owners as without them we have no industry; from what I have seen a lot of owners want to treat their crew well because they want to be able to walk on their yacht and see the same people each time, the old adage of “a happy yacht is a good yacht” is still relevant today. Breeding a culture of trust between the crew and the managers and brokers, in fact all sectors of yachting, will breed a culture of longevity in the crew, which will benefit all areas of the industry, but most of all the end user the owner.
Captain Steve White is Managing Partner of International Yacht Register. iyr.net
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