STOP AND SMELL THE SEAWEED As our Hargrave fleet was preparing to sail in all direction for the summer season I couldn’t help but stop and recognize how fortunate we are as a builder to have such great crew running our yachts. The summer season in yachting is like the Super Bowl or the World Series for our crews – it’s all on the line, it’s flat out, it’s winners and losers, and there are no makeovers. Whether it is bringing your A game to handle back-to-back charters out of Newport with six hours for the turn around, or driving one family group to the airport in Maine to fly out and waiting for the next group to arrive with a genuine smile on your face, the owner’s fragile dream that hold this entire industry together is safe in your hands. When those demanding charters go down without a hitch, the dream stays alive. When you show that extra patience and deal good-naturedly with children diving off the fly bridge unannounced, or handle with love and kindness a favorite grandchild who is creating a surprise drawing for Grandma on the walls of her master suite, your actions and reactions every summer somehow justifies the staggering amount of money the owners and their wives spend to own and operate these yachts. Sometimes it must feel like you’ve been kidnapped by Ringling Brothers and that this “circus” will be on the road for eternity. When you find your stress level getting high, when you find yourself realizing that you almost lost it a few minutes ago with a guest onboard, or you begin to suspect that one of your “teammates” is not playing with a full deck of cards, then force yourself go outside, walk up to the bow deck, and then lean over the rail and inhale deeply and smell the seaweed. It may not seem like it now, but one day you’ll be stranded on shore with the rest of us. You’ll be trapped by the quicksand of life on land and begin to finally understand how just lucky you really were back then, for you really were that one in a thousand in our industry who actually went to sea and lived the dream. So while you are out on deck getting some fresh air and trying to gather your wits about you, start thinking of a great opening line you can use years from now when you are sitting there with your own grandchildren and you pull out your dusty photo album and start telling them about your yachting adventures in what will begin to seem like another lifetime to you. Come up with some killer line, you know, something memorable like, “I once had a farm in Africa”.
Michael Joyce / CEO mjoyce@hargrave.org 1 8 8 7 W E S T S TAT E R O A D 8 4 . F O R T L A U D E R D A L E , F L 3 3 3 1 5
|
800.551.9590
|
954.463.0555
|
W W W. H A R G R AV E . O R G /