Charters Drop off Drastically

One of the few superyachts still in the British Virgin Islands is the 155-foot motor yacht Loon, which is anchored in North Sound bay.

The crew of 10 has the usual array of water toys, plenty of fuel and several months’ worth of expensive food and wine. The only thing missing? Guests, because the local lockdown means nobody can reach the vessel.

Worried About Home

“The next charter on our books that hasn’t canceled is May 11 in the Bahamas, but right now I’m not sure that we are going to be able to get there,” said Paul Clarke, the skipper.

The last guests aboard were a three-generation family of 10 from Chicago, who spent a week aboard until March 21.

“They were supposed to fly down commercial, but for the safety of the crew I requested that they don’t expose themselves to commercial travel so they ended up chartering a jet down to the vessel,” Clarke said. “Being at anchor on a superyacht anywhere in the world right now is one of the safest places you can be, but you have to get here first.”

Clarke said the Chicago family concentrated on letting their grandchildren enjoy the water but the adults were glued to news reports of the coronavirus. The tension rose, he said, as the week went on.

“We tried to make sure they had as much fun as possible, but they were obviously worried about what was going on back home, just like everyone in the crew,” he said. “We are not concerned about our own safety because we have been so good with self-isolating but we are all a little worried about friends and family.”

Dirk Uffenkamp, a 53-year-old engineer from Bielefeld, Germany, was also focused on what was happening back home when he and six friends chartered a 48-foot Leopard catamaran in the Seychelles until early March.

Uffenkamp said his friends seriously considered extending the charter to stay safely isolated.

“But we all have families with partners and children, and the idea was thrown overboard pretty quickly,” he said. “We knew we wanted to fly home.”

That catamaran is still available for charter through Sailogy.com, but the firm’s founder, Manlio Accardo, said the problem is there are no flights to the Seychelles.

The yacht used by Uffenkamp’s group costs about $16,000 a week, but Accardo said weekly charters range from $1,500 to $27,000, with an average of about $5,500. In the crewed and luxury market Sailogy.com’s weekly prices stretch from $33,000 to $220,000, with an average of about $80,000.

Isolation Charters

Sailogy.com and many other charter companies now have more flexibility options and cancellation protection to encourage customers to make new bookings.

Jonathan Beckett, the chief executive of Burgess Yachts, said that apart from helping some luxury boat owners take their families to sea “to weather the storm” of the virus, his firm has also organized three or four “isolation charters” for customers looking to lock down by anchoring in a pleasant spot.

“One was for four weeks but is likely to extend, I think,” he said. “One was for eight weeks and I think will also extend if the crisis continues.”

One Burgess client, a family, is dealing with their son’s schooling by having him get up at 4 a.m. for an online lesson with a teacher back in his home time zone, dressed in his school uniform to encourage routine.

Another family, renting “quite a sizable yacht,” is supplementing its home schooling with cooking lessons from the chef and time in the engine room with the engineer

Beckett said his firm has the Olivia, a 226-foot explorer yacht, available in Monaco for sale or charter with a 15,000-mile range and four or five months of supplies onboard.

“Someone could step on there and go off for three or four months into the Indian Ocean or into the Pacific and just sort of chill out and isolate and wait until the pandemic passes,” he said.

Irresponsibly Opportunistic

But Beckett said Burgess Yachts was not actively marketing immediate charters, and several other brokers and tour operators told New York Times they thought it was irresponsible to offer charters at this time.

Daniel Ziriakus, the president of Northrop & Johnson, said some brokers were offering “escape right now” charters but he believed that was merely “a marketing ploy” because curbs on flights and ports made it almost impossible to do trips at the moment.

“And you are probably endangering your clients and the crew,” he said. “Right now people should stay home and hunker down.”

One 90-year-old owner of a superyacht managed by Northrop & Johnson retreated to his boat some weeks ago because he thought it was the safest place for a vulnerable person, but it has since become harder even to travel to a marina, Ziriakus said.

Julia Simpson, a broker with SuperYachtsMonaco, said that a few weeks ago her firm was open to charters “but it is not something we would be encouraging people to do now” because people should be staying in their homes.

Henry Cookson, the founder of Cookson Adventures, said he would not want to launch any tours right now that involved people passing through airports and marinas.

“How do you ensure the safety of your crew unless you can physically ensure that the guests have been under full quarantine and had the right tests?” he said. “Even getting tests I think is slightly unethical because there is a huge demand for them for front-line health workers.”

Locking Down

Not every broker thinks people should stay ashore. Bob Denison, the founder of Denison Yachting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., defended “locking down on water” as a safe way for people to maintain their morale. He also said that although San Diego and some other parts of the United States had curbed boating, many coastlines were still busy.

“There are a great number of people who own yachts who are using them as a second place to responsibly do the social distancing thing,” he said.

His firm has sold several boats in recent days to people frustrated by the lockdown, he said, and had a strong response to two “virtual” boat shows aimed at locked-down armchair sailors.

Britta Fjelstrom, a high school physical education teacher who lives on her 38-foot Nantucket Island sailboat in a marina on San Francisco Bay, said her own answer to that frustration was to sail out recently and anchor in the bay for five nights as a way of “taking control” of the lockdown.

“It was self-isolation on steroids, but it felt like I had chosen it rather than being trapped,” she said.

Fjelstrom, 46, described it as “like an island holiday”: She spent much of her time reading in a hammock and playing a ukulele in the sea air.

But she was not exactly in remote Tahiti. Anchored near the base of the Bay Bridge, she was within earshot of traffic the whole time.